Thoughts Along The Journey

Last Friday night for the first session of the Alpha Course sponsored by our local church, we were introducing ourselves around the table.  L–, a guest and friend of Jean-Claude, looked at me several times saying, “I feel like I’ve seen this man before.”  “Are you local?” he asked.  Jean Claude jokingly said that he might have seen me running around Cergy.  “David runs several times a week.  He runs marathons.”

Yes, I do run.  Or at least I try to run three times a week.  However, I haven’t run a marathon in over 10 years.  I didn’t correct Jean Claude’s statement, I let it ride (read, I let it ‘run’).  The challenge is gone. I’ve been running for my own stress relief and health, which is a very good objective according to my doctor.  The challenge, the vision of something greater is not part of what gets me up in the morning anymore to go out running. It’s become a routine.

In our family, we do what is called ‘Secret Santas’.  Each member of the family is given the name of another family member through an online program.  My oldest daughter drew my name this year and her gift to me was: the entry fee for the Florence marathon on November 25^th of this year.  Another marathon?! The challenge is certainly not the same as it was a number of years ago – to run three marathons before I turned 50 years old.  However, it’s a challenge nonetheless; a challenge to run a marathon with two of my children.

The people we are most concerned about; the people for whom we work are the lost.  Our desire, our central ministry focus is to see all our work contribute to raising up disciples and communities of believers and praying for exponential growth (read, multiplication) of those disciples and communities across a people group.  Whether you are ‘on the ground’ in ministry or processing support gifts or mobilising new workers or keeping our finances healthy or fixing our IT issues, all of it has the same ultimate objective in mind.

Today, I am ‘gifting’ you a challenge. 

Run with me.  Run together with me.  Not just to do your work better, not just to see a number come to Christ through our work and efforts, but to concretely see, observe and identify the impact of our efforts among two people groups.  Our tendency will be to want to ‘go it alone’ – just as I told my kids that I would run on my own and they could run ahead of me.  However, the joint chant should become: “I, we want to run with you.”

How will we know?  How will we know what that concrete impact upon two people groups will look like?  We will discover it together as we talk, pray, dialogue, plan and pray again together. All of us.

I’m sending you a ‘save the date’ note by this post.

Save Tuesday, November 27^th as the date when we will stand back to see what God has done as we ‘run together’ this year (#givethanksTuesday).

Filed under: Challenge, Unreached people groups |