Camped Out at The Rock

Well, today we did something we had talked about for a while: we camped at the Rock. Joseph had the idea; we would take sleeping bags and sleep on the floor. So we brought them in and napped a bit today. Joe is still asleep. But John came over to me with a book. It is a book I like quite a bit, one I heartily recommend: Six Centuries of Great Poetry. He says, “Read me a poem from this book.”

“How do you know these are poems?” I asked.

“Because Steffi read us some today.” Steffi is Stephanie McKinney, long-time family friend, long-suffering babysitter of the boys on Sunday mornings during the early-service. So, good job Steffi! John happened to open it to… Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” I love that poem, and it had a poignant sense when Melissa got sick, especially when she lost her hair. “If we had but world enough and time…” Indeed.

Now there is a fierce sense to the poem, the fierceness that I knew was brewing in me, and would emerge from this journey with Melissa: that there is not world enough and time, and worse than that, meaningless things crowd out what time and world you do have!

The thing I have not resolved is how to be relentless and graceful at the same time. How to pursue the things that matter and trash the things that don’t. In ministry—how not to get bogged down in details, or doing anything that keeps you from the real point: saving souls, making disciples. Anything else is pointless. And if you have to spend time justifying how a task that is not evangelism and discipling supports the work of evangelism and discipling, you have already lost.

And then in the personal life: what builds a relationship? How to break out of the mindlessness that is so easy? How do I reject what is urgent to do what is not just important, but right. Or simple.

In ministry, a thing’s urgency is almost always in inverse proportion to its evangelistic or discipleship potential. Usually, it grabs us unawares, and we subconsciously realize: my faith is about me, and my exercise in ministry is still about me, but here someone is reaching out and I have to do something now… hurry hurry hurry.

In personal life you wake up one day to find you have not wrestled with the boys since you don’t know when and you plan this or that and then something gets in the way and it doesn’t happen and you hurry hurry hurry to a miserably good time. There is a reason God created the Sabbath. Stop everything.

We read some poems by John Donne—when (if) you studied him in school, how much was made of his faith? Very little I bet. And yet he was nothing if not a Christian. Then we read some John Milton. Some John Keats. “So many named John!” John said. “John Mansfield?” he asked. “One day, maybe so,” I responded.

p/g