Did you mean what I heard?

Did you mean what I heard? Category: Religion and Philosophy Communication has never been a strong point for me, and I have been lived most of my life within a very limited worldview. Therefore, I wonder how often I misunderstand people (okay... stop laughing. Some who know me well are thinking, "dugh-hello!"). So I get this email from a friend, someone I thought to be one of my closest friends, and they tell me that they were a fool to invest so much time into our friendship (ouch!). Where did that come from? I understand that I'm a clueless guy when it comes to maintaining a friendship, and I've heard about making deposits and withdraws from a "love bank," but I have trouble keeping up with my checking account deposits and with draws, and I can look at those online at anytime. I've tried to talk to my friend about it, but it seems that everything I say to salvage the friendship gets misunderstood and/or used against me. One might say, it must have been a shallow friendship to crumble so easily, but it makes me wonder how many friendships, or potentially deep friendships, I have thrown away before they started because I misunderstood or prejudged the person. I've been thinking a lot about prejudging and skepticism lately. This came to a head recently when I attended a conference for Wesleyan Pastors (appropriately for me named, "Summit to Soar") As most people, I used to assume things about pastors and the church. Even though I grew up in the church, I didn't trust the "system." God has been melting my negativity for sometime now. I didn't set out to be a church leader nor did I earn it through some righteous life or remarkable wisdom, but there I was stuck at a hotel for a couple days with a bunch of pastors to talk about church stuff. I expected to see a lot of suits, politics and number crunching. What I saw was a bunch of blue jeans, broken hearts and vision casting. These were simply men that wanted to help the Kingdom grow. Many of them (probably all of them) had been hurt and misunderstood by the very people they so desperately love and wanted to serve. I have for some time now tried to figure out what God wants the church to look like and how it should operate and function, and in turn, how I should live and function in the church and the world. It's so easy to point out the flaws in the church, as an organization and individual people. I'm finding that the church, under God, is managed by a lot of flawed people with good intentions that are struggling to communicate to a world with hundreds of cultures, divided into hundreds of languages, subcultures and forms of communication, and we want it to fit into our comfortable little building and feed us and/or strategically turn the world upside-down. So the question that remains is� if we, the church, can't even communicate clearly, understand and trust each other, how can we build trust with nonbelievers and be the fishers of men we are all called to be? God help us all. I don't know if this will make sense to any potential readers, but... I feel a little better. 6:58 PM - 8 Comments - 6 Kudos

Growing pains

Growing pains Current mood: content Category: Life I went up stairs the other day, and found a dtr on the computer. "Whach' ya doin?" I figured she was playing games or taking care of her online pet. No, she was emailing the president! Just telling Bush how much we love him. The other two have been playing basketball on Saturdays. I can take no credit, but the boy is one of their star players. The coach came out to the middle of the court the other day, and I heard him tell my son, "We're far enough ahead; you can stop shooting for a while." The youngest dtr has had an unusual week. We're in a small school, and she was the topic of the grade school gossip this week. Evidently, a young man (we'll call him "Bobby") asked her to be his Valentine, and she accepted. I asked her about it later, and she claims that she meant nothing by it. She was just being nice, but it wasn't long before she was in tears over all the teasing from the other kids, 3rd - 6th grades. It got so bad that her teacher took class time to scold all four grades. Although, the next day when I saw her between classes, she was glowing. Bobby had given her a rose. (I'm fighting the instinct to hang Bobby out an upstairs window by an ankle.) 10:45 AM - 5 Comments - 2 Kudos