Tall Monastic Guy: Is 5 too much to ask?

September 14, 2009

Is 5 too much to ask?

For the past three years I've been regularly hanging with a crew of 4-8 guys at a pub for some simple relational time in which we share our lives and some scriptures. The outcome of this past thursday led us into some good territory as we arrived at the simple determination that everyone (ourselves included!) is hungry to be valued and to know that they matter. That was Jesus' vocation wasn't it? Simply stated if you can sincerely convey that “You matter to me.” You can make a significant difference and sometimes even change the entire course of someone's day, week, or world.

So the challenge coming out of last week's pub time is to look 5 people in the eye and in some meaningful way communicate the message that you matter, you're worth it, you're valuable because...

A cliché impersonal "Jesus loves you" is most lamo, because Jesus loves everyone, right? The real challenge is to put skin on Jesus, BE the incarnation, and in a most customized way speak some life through a creative variation of “you really matter and I value you because...”

The barista, the mechanic, the co-worker, the spouse, child, the parent, roommate, grocery store clerk, school crossing guard, the homeless guy pushing the shopping cart full of belongings, the cop, the bank teller, the janitor, etc. etc.

Just like you, they are all dying to know that they matter.

Want to join us in this challenge? 5 people this week starting today. Go!

Posted at 11:51 AM in missional/incarnational | Permalink

Comments

2 down and 3 to go THANK YOU for the suggestion...challenge...

Posted by: becky | September 16, 2009 at 11:00 AM

Great challenge sir! I opted out of going to Colorado this fall so that I could do just this!

Enjoying your blog. . . we will meet face to face this side of heaven I promise.

Posted by: Doug Nolte | September 21, 2009 at 10:52 AM

Can I have a week from today since I just read this?

Posted by: Trevor Lee | September 30, 2009 at 03:53 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

Words make Worlds...

"It becomes so clear to me as I grow older that people who change, and keep changing, are the only people who grow up." -Richard Rohr
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." -John Wooden
"Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody. Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody." - Henri Nouwen
"Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of spirituality begins where we are now in the mess of our lives." -Mike Yaconelli
"But that doesn’t mean community is easy. For everything in this world tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together." -Shane Claiborne
"Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." Albert Einstein
"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Howard Thurman
"A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Dr. Martin Luther King
"Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful--- Christian community is the final apologetic." -Francis Schaefer
"It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools." Wendell Berry
"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than the particular country in which he was born." -Francois Fenelon
"Ministry cannot be about maintenance, but it is about gathering, about embrace, about welcoming home all sorts of and conditions of people; home is a place for mother tongue, of basic soul food, of old stories told and treasured, of being at ease, known by name, belonging without qualifying for membership." -Walter Brueggemann
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to being the particular poet or particular monk that they are intended to be by God." "In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be." -Thomas Merton
"God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God's been speaking through them ever since. So, if God chooses to speak through you don't think to highly of yourself." -Rich Mullins
"We must become holy not because we want to feel holy but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us." Mother Teresa
"I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self." Henri Nouwen