Please forgive our selfishness for hiding in our pews while the world bleeds; while the world needs us to be what we should be.

There are these moments in my life when two weeks of living carry the weight of many months experience. I haven't been on Exposing Thorns since October 17 in large part because the last few weeks have been jam packed with adventures and lessons learned. This blog is an (admittedly ADD) attempt to recap some of these lessons. I am sure there will be more posts to follow that recount these days, but here is the first chapter. I hope you find something for yourself in my tale.

The title today comes from a fantastic song called Letter To My Family by the Michael Gungor Band, a praise band trying to make a secular run of it while singing songs about restoration and grace. I got to hear them lead worship about ten days ago and I was impressed with them. Check them out on their myspace page (especially listen to Grace For Me) by clicking the title.

I had been doing a lot of teaching and preaching from 1 Corinthians 12 and 13. I don't desire to make this a Bible Study, but here's my crib note. 1 Corinthians 13 is the great passage Paul writes about love. We often hear it at weddings, but it is a much broader call from the Apostle for God's people to be living lives that reflect love in its most vivid form. He says that to be living rightly, even to be answering God's call in real ways, without love, is a waste. An empty existence. A clanging cymbal he calls it.

Just before that in 1 Corinthians 12 he talks about the Body of Christ, not Jesus Christ's physical body, but the collection of believers who each have a part to play. He tries to explain to the earliest Christians how they might work together to do good in the world.

That's what leads him then to talking about love-the glue that holds us together.

I thought I was about to join those similarly cast within the body of Christ; I was headed to San Diego October 18 for the National Youth Workers Convention. 3,000 plus pleople who do the same kind of work as me, and to my annoyance look a hell of a lot like me, were gathering in San Diego to meet one another, learn, worship, and take a break from our kids! I was excited to be going; less for the seminars, speakers, and training and more for the fellowship, weather, vacation, and good eating that awaited me there. There were about ten or so people coming that I already knew; colleagues from other parts of Texas. A couple of the notable friends headed to San Diego with me were "Baby Brother" James and "Middle Brother" Chris. You can guess who "Big Brother" is!

Chris has joined me at church. He leads worship and I teach on Wednesday nights and it has changed EVERYTHING about my ministry. We are focused in a new way and slowly turning around the Titanic in this puddle of previous detachment.

James reminds me of me. He is a big, funny, loud, intelligent 22 year old building a youth group from scratch in an otherwise dying church.

The first afternoon we went to Balboa Park. It is a beautiful park and we walked through a few gardens and visited a nice little art museum (I saw my first Rembrandt in person). Mostly we came to see the Dead Sea Scrolls which were on display in another of the park's museums.


The Dead Sea Scrolls comprise roughly 900 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the Wadi Qumran (near the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea) in the West Bank.


Discovered in jars, rolled and stored within, the texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they include practically the only known surviving copies of Biblical documents made before 100 AD, and preserve evidence of considerable diversity of belief and practice within late Second Temple Judaism.


To see the dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest surviving copies of Hebrew religous texts, admission was $24. So we left and had dinner instead.

Come on, it was a group of Youth Workers! $24 is dinner and three beers or more.

The next day I attended my first General Session. This is worship on steroids ON STEROIDS. I have never seen AV used in a more holy and powerful way. David Crowder Band led worship which was pretty boss. This guy who sounded like James Earl Jones on steroids ON STEROIDS recited Scripture and was so cool it made me want to memorize Scripture for the first time ever! There was this amazing artist named Joe Castillo (check him out at http://joecastillo.com) who used sand lit from below to create images and tell the Biblical account of creation in a very cool way. And there was the best speaker I have ever heard, Brenda Salter McNeil who connected forever in my brain Jeremiah Chapter 1 with The Lion King! Amazing, amazing sermon that I will share somehow somewhere!

After the first session I was so full I knew I wouldn't be going to any seminars. At this point, nine years and counting in full-time youth ministry, I feel I have evolved beyond most of the information passed on in conversations had in hotel conference rooms for an hour.

Instead, a small band of brothers had our first beers of the weekend in a hotel bar while the rest of the convention learned how to make a four year pan for middle school small groups.

Now, what was started in that hotel bar I cannot fully explain and take no resonsibility for initiating. See, I am a retired professional drinker. I have played at the highest level, hall of fame numbers and all for multiple seasons, and there is a retired jersey hanging in some bar some where that used to belong to me. I don't think I could have ever been convinced I was a drunk, but I have been drunk enough to have been accused of being one several times. We decided, four full-time youth ministers and anyone who would join us at this convention, in San Diego, California, on this weekend...to get our drink on.

I saw many more speakers, none all that impactful. I heard several more bands; a couple of good ones and a couple of ridiculous ones. I attended no seminars, which I anticipated long before any decisions were made to imbibe. I had some interesting conversations with other youth workers from other places. But mostly, honestly, what I did in San Diego for the three days that followed could only be described as, drink.

Now when a Hall of Famer drinks, and I maintain I am retired, there is this thing I need to explain, I tried teaching this to a young friend this summer the same night my Uncle showed us what happens when you're not only a Hall of Famer, but an old timer too; A Hall of Famer, provided he's in reltively good shape (for drinking) can hang for one day or night with almost any pro. I can drink with anybody for one sitting, I believe. The second night is dicey and the third night impossible, but one night more than within the realm of possibility. I supposed from drinking just a bit with Baby Brother that he was a pro. So I got my game face on. Turns out I didn't need it, I was with it the whole weekend.

We called our Saturday afternoon party Seminar 3636 (our room number) Coping With the Stresses of Youth Ministry...12 ounces at a time! We held it on the patio in front of our room. The seminar was open dialogue that 5 people began and 12 participated in at various points and to various degrees. We drank several beers a piece, I'd say Baby Brother, another buddy, and me had double digits; Red Stripe, Budweiser Select, Dos Equis Amber. Our friend from Fort Worth opened our bottle of Southern Comfort and we each had shots and multiple SoCo and Cokes or Dr. Peppers, depending on preference. We talked to everyone who walked past, met some super cool people, mostly other youth workers from all over the country. We sang songs, I played some Kanye West and new Foo, and we started the weekend long tradition of singing The Circle of Life in honor of the great sermon we heard the day before.

There are some, even some of you reading right now I'd bet, who saw this group of church workers/youth ministers drinking and judged us harshly. I would submit a few things; if anyone needs to blow steam off fifteen hundred miles from home it is this assembly, if telling stories and singing is somehow forbidden by God then I need to edit my Bible a bit removing whole chunks that were stories and songs to begin with, and if opening your home (alright hotel patio) to any passersby to share in fellowship is against the call to serve I have been greatly mistaken in who Jesus was. What is troubling to some beyond that can only be the alcohol which is not in and of itself a bad thing, just like caffiene and nicotine and Twizzlers aren't-it's a quantity issue that I think makes most things good or evil. Too much of anything is not advisable, and certainly not too much of some things. I cannot say that all attendees of our seminar stayed under control. I can say I did. Then again, I was once a pro and haven't always controlled myself. I can say the same thing I said to a high school friend when we got to college, probably the sentence that ended our friendship; God can be present, I think in fact is easier to discuss, in a conversation had over drinks amid the most joyful merriment.

Seminar 3636, and the subsequent partying that followed over two more days, produced some of the deepest discussion I have been able to have on some gigantic issues of faith and theology, life and living, my future and the future of some people I care about. We hashed a lot out. We asked some questions of each other that were paramount. Surely I thought, this was what the Body of Christ was; people lifting each other up through their experiences shared and stories told.

But on the news, and less than fifteen miles away from our Seminar, there was another thing happening in San Diego...



"I'm just standing here watching my life go up in flames. This is just too unbelievable," said Kathie Browning, who fled before dawn Monday with her husband, their two grown children and their cats. "This can't be happening to me."

Browning's home was one of about 500 destroyed in northern San Diego County. More than a dozen wildfires driven by gale-force winds charred the equivalent of at least 374 square miles in seven Southern California counties.

As winds gusting to 70 mph pushed the flames, California officials pleaded for help from fire departments in other states. The federal government planned to send six water-dropping aircraft Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told The Associated Press.

"It was nuclear winter. It was like Armageddon. It looked like the end of the world," Mitch Mendler, a San Diego firefighter, said as he and his crew stopped at a shopping center parking lot to refill their water truck from a hydrant near a restaurant.



When I showed these pictures to my kids one of them said it looked like the bad stuff in the Bible, another said it looked like hell.

At last count 300,000 acres were burned in San Diego and another 100,000 plus in the LA area.

In San Diego...
500,000 people were evacuated. Nearly 1,500 homes and 300 businesses have been lost to the fires. 7 people have been killed. 140 people (nearly 100 of which are firefighters) have been injured.

There were accidents that caused fires, arsonists too; at least one teenager who lit a fire with matches and one firestarter shot and killed at the site.

The days I was in San Diego were filled with two of the eeriest experiences of my life. We went to the beach one afternoon and swam in the ocean while the sky was solid gray and the sun shone red and angry through the smoke. The next day, my last in San Diego, it rained ash.

I hailed a cab to take me to the bus stop. I was going to Los Angeles, if I could get there, to visit my friends Teresa and Ryan. I climbed into the cab, in one motion ending my convention adventure and the party it had become and also starting the next adventure with my dear old friend in LA.

The cab driver was the friendliest I had had the whole time I was in San Diego. He chatted me up and we quickly we got to talking about the fires. I asked where they were and if they were contained and he was very informative. I couldn't help but notice the radio was tuned to a station we had listened to earlier in the week that played classic rock, but now just seemed to feature people calling in and talking. I asked him what it was.

"Oh, this is what all the stations are doing right now. People call in from different places in the fires and ask for help with stuff. Then other people call and say how they can help."

'Turn it up' I requested.

Sure enough, a woman called in and told of how they were safe from the fire, but had been cut off from their water supply and she had small kids with her and couldn't get far because of the fires around her. Within minutes a man called with a tanker truck full of water making deliveries and requested an address. Another woman called in to say that they had stable space for up to twelve horses in a safe location and within another minute or so, someone was calling in wanting directions. The DJ said he was proud of the city. The cabbie said this had been going on all day; people calling in needing a little something and other people calling to offer it.

My bus stop was across from the stadium where evacuees were being diverted to, 10,000 of them. I saw them lugging their bags and boxes as I stood with my luggage, fresh full of the radio ministry I had just heard.

At the convention, the last day we had prayed for the staff of a church lost in the fire. It felt good to pray for them, but didn't seem like we really helped them in the most tangible way. When I returned here I made my group pray too and I think that's not without merit. It does make a difference I have seen. And I inquired about how to send money and that will help too. But this classic rock station was doing the real work of the church.

And the citizens of San Diego, not the youth workers convention or a gathering of smiling singing drinking friends, were in the most vivid way expressing their love for one another. They were in a way so subtle and so sincere, what Paul talked about, the Body of Christ.



For those of us not so religous, and for those of us who are, here's the last thing I'll say on what I saw from San Diegans.

If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth. Mitsugi Saotome

I think it matters little how it is you find to connect to people; with a Bible in your hand, a drink, a jug of water, whatever. We were created, by some force, to be creatures that live for one another purposefully and conciously. In small ways, our community of 12 drinking singing youth leaders and 3,000 learning worshipping youth workers and in big ways like when a city takes care of one another or the assembly of churches finally gets that they're supposed to be helping the world cope regardless of which way it turns or where it tithes.

In laughter, in fire, in friendship I have found a life worth living; and that life is increasingly and almost excluseively (where it's fulfilling), not about me, but about how I may show someone love.

Imagine a world that functioned as one community hearing what others needed and heeding such a call. Imagine a world where we looked out for each other and created safe places to worship, sing, drink, live, and learn for all. Imagine a world where we saw each person as part of the whole. Imagine your life if you started to work toward this in your own way.

I believe the time is coming for us to insist that we take care of one another. I believe the time is coming for the experiences people have in their daily lives to be experiences driven and infused with hope produced by an overwhelming sense that none of us are alone here. I believe I have some specific things to do. I believe we all have a part to play.

I believe that if we could each strive individually to make others our first priority in all things that it wouldn't take long for this to become a time on earth worth writing about on scrolls and storing for hundreds of years. And we can start NOW!