I love paint. i love my kids getting to paint me. This was a normal day for me. Basically my summer was epic all the way through and it isn't done yet.

Before-the-sun-comes-up thoughts from Ella: "Hey, Dad, when you live under a rock, the dirt gets in your eyes." that two year old is already dropping the truth.

pretty normal day for me. breakfast with my RUF minister, brother is asleep on a cot in the kitchen, driving to PA to work at a survival camp in a few hours. Yeah. it is better than average. it is pretty epic, however strangely normal. Jesus must really love me, since i am really seeing His gifts everywhere.

So, something jesus has really been working on in my heart is the love for His church, which i am in any christian is supposed to be in. There are so many books coming out, at kind of a disturbing rate, calling a person to pursue an individual jesus and stop living in the church. I have a lot of weight set into the saints of old, because they suffered more and from their writings have such a deeper understanding than i do of who God is and their relationship with Him is one i long to have. I want the deepness they have. I am not a revolutionary, i don't really know if we really have any revolutionaries among us in the realest sense. A revolutionary is a person who completely overthrows something and puts something else in its place. I don't know if we can be revolutionaries, since everything, according to solomon, has been done already. regardless, i am not really in an overthrowing mood. Reform, probably, but overthrowing is really complicated and i am lazy.

The Church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord,
She is His new creation
By water and the Word.
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy bride;
With His own blood He bought her
And for her life He died.

She is from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth;
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy Name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.
- the church is on foundation

i hear over and over again, " the church has issues." yes, it does. so do you, so do i, along with your mother. We all screwed up sinners and the church is a whole bunch of screwed up sinners coming together to live in community. so, you have a whole lot of screwed up people coming together. Should we really expect anything else? all my work places, school, job, and boy scout troops have issues and are extremely difficult to work with and cause strain and hurt. more importantly though, i am realizing just how important the church is. paul talks about how the church is the body and jesus is the head and how we are to have unity in the church, but i really don't see much emphasis on a lone ranger mentaility of me and God. actually, i don't see it at all. jesus went to gathers that were organized, worked in communities, paul set up organized churches with leadership authority inside the churches he was founding, but he never set out to make a one person church. I am finding more and more just how much God commands us to live inside community and work inside a community he has established and died for. It's kind of a big deal.

the church is jesus's bride, it really is, and we are in it. Jesus was willing to die for his bride, the church, and we are hesitant to live inside it because of, in comparison, petty concerns. Staying in the church is rough, i have my issues with the church ( actually a lot)however, that doesn't really matter, since jesus did die for the church. The end in my mind is i cannot rationalize away that jesus died for his bride and the form that the church is in now is the institutional congregations we have around. I cannot save the world from any ill, i cannot save the world from any great social concern, but i do know community changes from the inside and starts with my heart. I do know that i can complain until i die, as can you, and not change a thing. the more convicting thing is to serve to the best of your ability and actually give a damn about people and convince them through your testimony and actions that there is merit to what you say, since my changed heart is more of a testimony that my theology. We rarely argue about the love that lives in us, but we sure will argue over when we let someone go through baptism or confirmation.

I am pretty sure there are bigger issues than when, where, and how people gather to worship, since we are meant to be in a community of believers, loving each other as jesus has loved us ( john 13) so people see our love for each other and knows that love is a sign that jesus lives in us and we are following him. I cannot worship with a community alone in the woods, i cannot worship with a community and sing praises at a starbucks, everything is worship, but not everything is worship in a community of believers. this summer has been huge in my life, since i have learned just how much the holy spirit flows and works through Jesus's church. I guess it really makes sense, since if you're existing inside the body you are going to find the head, jesus. Everything in our body eventually, in someway, is controlled or connected to our head. If you want to find jesus in a new and stronger way, exist in the body and pray, pray hard, that god will put you in a place in the body and show you himself in the body. the scary thing is he listened when i prayed this and answered it. i used to be the biggest opponent of the church, but am learning everyday how much i NEED the church and can't actually exist in a healthy spiritual state without the church. the church's primary purpose is to proclaim, grow, and exist in the eternal gospel of Jesus. that there is an eternal consequence to our choice to live in this gift of grace offered to us, there is a war going on right now over our friends, family, and our children and the world they will be in.

basically, go hard. It is a war and jesus is God who died and rose. He lives, and that is reason enough to go hard to the point of insanity. i am not a revolutionary in the sense where people say they are revolutionizing christianity and making it an individual pursuit, but i am a revolutionary in the sense that I live in daily defiance of what satan's kingdom demands. We really are in an all out war fighting against the harshest and most evil of all slaveries, an eternal slavery. The purpose of God's kingdom is to take people out of this slavery and move them into freedom. This might be why stories like william wallace ring so true in our soul, because we were designed for freedom that Jesus gives us.

pardon the choppy writing. i am going 48 hours with no sleep at this point and have another day to go before sleep can greet me.