jasonackerman.com

it’s been a few days (weeks?) since my last post. is anyone listening? throw down a quick comment, if you don’t mind. thanks.

i spent a couple days chilling (literally!) at the foot of the rocky mountains. what a time to reflect. not that there was a slow moment to really soak anything in, running from a cousin’s house to coffee with a friend, to grandma’s house to aunt’s house, to beer with another friend, and next thing you know it’s back on the frontier airbus hurtling home at 500 mph over miles and miles of endless snowfields.

my big fear before leaving was that i would show up and everything would be wrong. the vibe wouldn’t feel right, the relationships wouldn’t be as strong as i remembered, the air would smell, the details would be unwilling to work themselves into place. then, where would i be left? with the giant snowball (ha) of change begun and ready to shove down the mountain facing the realization that we’re on the wrong mountain. did i get too close to the edge to stop this avalanche? to use a poker analogy, am i pot-committed?

the answer is yes. however–

it wasn’t wrong. the vibe was right, the relationships were right, the air didn’t smell (hard to breathe, yes, but not stinky), and slowly but surely details continue to show me their commitment to falling into place. and i knew it would be this way. which makes me ask the question:

when God speaks, and it is clear and you are aware, do you trust His voice? i know, i know, you’ll say of course and show me 10 examples of ways you’ve followed His leading, but honestly. how much in that process did you doubt? how much did you let things happen around you while you cowered in fear of making the wrong choice? how many times have you stopped the process just because it didn’t “feel right”? i knew before i left that things were fine, but my anxiety ate me up. i wasn’t nervous to fly, i was nervous to land. and when it all came down to it, i would up feeling silly.

when God speaks, and it is clear, and you are aware, trust His voice. seriously. be willing to look at the options, and exercise your responsibilty to be a good steward of resources, but ultimately, when He tells you to do something, letting fear stop you from moving wholeheartedly in the commanded direction is nothing short of sinful. i haven’t passed the point of no return. i can shut the whole process down today and let things happen in a much easier way. 48 hours from now, i will not have that option. i almost called it a luxury– now i call it a curse. the option to back out is not a luxury, it is a thorn that will live under your saddle. and yes, i just compared you to a horse.

the monsters took a little time to play out in the snow. here is evidence of the ridiculous amounts of cute that followed:

rebecca is looking so grown up and pretty.

this is a perfectly zoe picture.

no one has fun like samuel. not to mention cheesy smiles.

from whence all this cuteness came.

this is in fact the pacific northwest. it is in fact snowing like crazy. i know, it’s being measured in inches not feet, but seriously. since when is there a cold, sub-freezing, snowy winter in good ol’ vancouver, usa?

thing is, i don’t mind it so much. when i was a kid living in colorado (speaking of places that have been destroyed by winter this year), we’d get these crazy snow storms all winter long, and one would snow before the last one’s snow would melt, but then the sun would come out, melt it all away, and then it would snow again. i actually got tired of it. imagine a 10 year old, tired of the snow.

we moved to vancouver, and it never snowed, we got lots of amazing warm rain (well, warm to me), and the one time it would rain/snow mix for 20 minutes the city would freak out and shut down, and it made me laugh. it was probably my first real experience with differences in regional perspective. and it was fun. and so i decided that i didn’t like snow, and every time we got it i complained.

in reality, i always liked the first glimpse of snow. it was pretty, it was different, and it reminded me of ‘home’. of course, it wasn’t many years before vancouver became ‘home’, and the snow just reminded me of another time and place.

fast forward to this year. it’s been cold. we got a decent snow, with some ice, then the temperature dropped into the 20s, where it’s been for almost a week. the air got dry, and it feels JUST like i remember the colorado winter. then, we wake up this morning to a crazy, constant snow. it’s the strangest winter i can ever remember.

and today, if i get ambitious, maybe we’ll just indulge zoe’s request to make a snowman.

two posts in one day? yeah, yeah i know. but i had two separate thoughts and didn’t want to mesh them into one post. i’m probably hard enough to follow as it is, without mixing unrelated ideas.

i’ve been thinking about community. more importantly, what is it about compass that i’ll miss the most? i mean, community is one of the big buzzwords of the postmodern church movement, right? the thing about ‘postmodern’, is that the word means nothing. those that really ARE, don’t use the word, and those that use the word really are no different than before they just want to appear ‘edgy’. hey, edgy, there’s another word that means absolutely nothing. what fun.

community, as it is defined and strived for here at compass, is sharing life together. it’s understanding that living out a vital and active faith doesn’t happen alone, that we were created to be together. now i believe that our deepest fulfillment happens when experiencing God in that particular, singular, individual way that can only happen in a personal encounter with the living God. community – sharing life together – is not meant to stand in stead of that. community is meant to supplement, to provide a depth of relationship that comes with being connected to another of God’s creations.

so what is required for community? see this question is the one that makes me question the entirety of church structure, because church – particularly the ‘community church’ – has become so enamored with the thought of community that it has overstepped the bounds of facilitating community, gone beyond simply being community, and has tried to legislate community. not legally, of course, but within the subculture of each church body there is a way that community is expected to happen. while i am firmly sold on what happens at compass, on the vision at compass, and on the existence of an organically occuring community, in some ways we have the same issue. join a life group. come to our events. do these things, and you too will experience community. but who do i really know? ummm… the people in my life group, and the people i work with. they are the ones i know. that’s pretty much it. oh, i have some pretty intense acquaintances, but that’s it.

here’s the point this has come to for me. why have church, and community, and relationship, when those things should all be the same? why shouldn’t sharing life go beyond a 120 minute small group effort, combined with the occasional social outing? those things are good– our life group has become a place we cherish, a group of relationships that are probably the closest thing we have to true community. but it takes effort to go beyond tuesday nights from 6:30-8:30. what if church/small group/sharing life/worship/teaching were all one thing? what if you de-emphasized the mass component of momentum and emphasized the velocity? what if you decided that if you couldn’t fit your church in your home then it was too big and needed to become 2 (or more!) smaller groups? what if those groups were so missionally minded and outwardly focused that they kept growing and kept having to multiply? what if all these small groups stayed connected and were able to pool resources to handle larger issues, and were able to gather to worship corporately on occasion?

hey wait a minute. i’m talking about cell church, or house church, right? i’ve always been turned off by housechurch simply because the housechurch proponents i’ve always talked to were pretty self-righteous about it – you know, the ONLY new testament biblical church is a housechurch crowd. well i think that’s a rather silly thing to say, but what if for some people, the best kind of community throws out the buzzword and just concentrates on COMMUNING. sharing life, and sharing it deeper than “how can i pray for you this week”. sharing life so deeply that you can hardly tell the difference between your life and the lives of those in your community.

i guess the bigger question is ‘what does church look like?’ i’ve seen most styles of church. i’ve been involved in several, and the institutional church requires so many filters to digest. maybe it’s time to try something new. to try something that goes back to the beginning. not to reinvent anything, or to insist that i have a new revelation of the best way, but to try to organically recapture what it means to share life together. to worship together. to put faith into action together.

i don’t think i was fully prepared for the process of unplugging. plugging in, getting connected, integrating, becoming a part of something, is a long process, like building a bridge. there are phases, steps, gradual movement toward completion, a completion which gracefully never comes.

unplugging is not so. it’s violent. it’s messy. even in the best of circumstances, the pressure of separation is painful. so now we begin this process, to determine the ‘exit strategy’ (that’s such a military term that attempts to clean up the process into something strategic and logical), to figure out the best way to methodically disconnect from everything we’ve wrapped ourselves up in over the past 3 years.

the reality and the speed with which the whole journey is taking place, has become frightening. it’s overwhelming. i don’t have any doubt that what we are doing is right, it’s just that without any sort of negative feelings, it makes the actual process difficult, because there’s nothing bad to escape. there’s nothing that will bring relief when we arrive in our new home, nothing that will make us feel like we’ve finally arrived. everything we’re leaving behind are positive things. they’re comfortable things. they are the things that currently define who we are and what we’re about. now we’re going to have to find new things.

and it won’t be like here. for a while, it won’t even feel like home. i won’t be working at compass. i won’t be leading worship weekly. i won’t be walking to paradise cafe for a cappuccino. i won’t be sharing life with our closest friends. i know that all those things will eventually be replaced, and we’ll make our home and our hearts as well as our bodies will reside in that new place. but until then, we’re going to feel like fish out of water.

but i guess that’s what a journey is, right? leaving one place in hopes of arriving at the next. where will we go from here? for that matter, where will we go from there?

so, once we got over the week long plague, things settled down pretty nicely at the monster house. things that happened, in no particular order:

- hosted a poker game, in which i got thoroughly trashed. it sucks to start the year in the hole, even if it is only $20.
- watched boise state pull off the win in one of the best college football games i’ve ever seen. the trick plays were the oldest in the book and were executed to perfection. big win for the little guy.
- ‘celebrated’ new year by watching great performances with garrison keillor on pbs. seriously. it made me feel old and mellow, but it was awesome. so much better than the rowdy noisy seacrest/philbin/clark garbage on the other channels.
- made some progress on a super-secret mission. if i tell you any more, i’ll have to kill you. you know how it is. sorry about that.
- took a sunday off from compass. this was nice… i missed being at church, but when church is work you need a break every now and then, and it was a refreshing one.
- drove to bandon to spend a couple days relaxing. it was entirely uneventful, and that was perfect.

so as you can see, nothing too crazy, just settling back into routine. the week long flu thingy was brutal… i haven’t been sick enough to be in bed for multiple days in a long time. so now, it’s going back to work, getting back into that swing, and some early spring cleaning to try to rid our house of extraneous junk.

visit my wife’s blog – scillymonster.livejournal.com – for pictures from our trip to the beach.