Turkey Tracks

Checking My Tags

I can't stand seeing guys wear "chick pants".  You know... those low-waisted, skin tight, peg-legged, trousers usually accompanied by a white belt and a strained stride.  Fashion may be screaming, "You go girl.", but I think guys need to stick to what brought them to the dance...men's jeans.

I like buying used clothes.  I often pick up shirts and stuff at thrift stores and such.  I've ordered Carhartt and Mossy Oak clothes off Ebay and felt very secure in my manly attire.  My sister-in-law sent me some Tommy Hilfiger jeans that she had purchased for .50 cents.  They looked okay so I wore them to work and around feeling like they were worth the bargain.  Here I come in my "Tommy Boys".  (I usually stick to Levi's, Carhartt, and sometimes Chaps for blue jeans.  What was I thinking.)

I wore the jeans a few times and finally set them aside admitting to myself that they just were not comfortable.  I had a hard time keeping the legs down over my work boots, and needless to say, my circulation while sitting down was noteably struggling.  They would make most plumbers proud in the fact that they were hard to keep up in the back.  (Surely Tommy knew what he was doing.)

Last week I came home and Angie had on a differnt pair of jeans.  She said she picked them up out of my old clothes pile and then began laughing as she showed me the tag that said, "Tommy Hilfiger for Women".  They were way too big for her, but she couldn't resist modeling my former feminin fashion.  I had worn "chick pants" and didn't even know it.  No!  Correction! They were "women's" pants...not "chick pants". 

Moral:  When buying clothes at second-hand stores, check the tags.  If you discover you have been wearing cross-gender clothing, don't tell anyone.  (I think I'm going to check my underwear drawer just in case.) 

Can you handle the truth?

I read some devotional thoughts from Ray Comfort this morning I am passing them along to you.  He is the author of Hell's Best Kept Secret and The Way of the Master.  (Something like that.)  You may have seen him on t.v. with Kirk Cameron.  (shrimp?)  Ray cuts to the chase and knocks out the dominant view of most men's approach to dealing with lust and pornography.  See what you think.

A Sobering Thought on Porn
Every red-blooded Christian male has a battle with lust. He is incessantly bombarded from every side with explicit imagery. But when a man surrenders to the sin, we often hear a phrase like "He has an addiction to pornography." However, his addiction isn't to pornography. It's to "adultery." That's what we do every time we look with lust (see Matthew 5:27-28), and the root cause of someone who keeps going back to adultery is "idolatry." There is a concept of God in his mind that doesn't produce the fear of the Lord. So, make sure you flee from idolatry, and you will fortify yourself against sexual infidelity. Make the God who revealed Himself in Scripture your "accountability Partner." Do that, and you won't have an addiction to adultery.

Measuring the Missional Mindset

I'm trying to stay focused at Harvestfield on bringing out the importance of missional living in the most insignificant opportunities.  I believe that many Christians feel so "out of the loop" with Christ's mission because the traditional church has led them to believe that if they don't prescribe to traditional measurements of following Christ, they don't measure up.  God has laid it on my heart to try and change that. 

In doing so, I am trying to cultivate a new mindset in my own life.  I have been pouring over the gospels each week and asking the Holy Spirit to stir my imagination to see what was important to Jesus and what wasn't.  How did he reveal the kingdom of God to those whom His life touched? 

I have experienced the guilt of feeling ineffective for the kingdom because I was handed a faulty measuring rod.  Programs and check marks can be useful at times, but the majority of what we do for the sake of Christ is done without notice, measurement, or acclaim.  We have a handful of stories about what Jesus said and did, and as important and sufficient as those events are, he did more much more interacting with people that we don't know about than what we know about.  (That is not to say that the New Testament is lacking in any way to reveal the record of God's mission.)  Even the disciple John speculated that all the whole world would not have enough room to hold the books containing all of the details of Christ's ministry. 

So, how I interact on a daily basis with the activity of God around me, is huge in the kingdom-revealing mission to which each Christ-follower is called.  This mission is seized the same way Christ moved in and out among people.  From the most insignificant extensions of kindness, to the most profound displays of gospel, the fluidity of following Christ takes on many forms that are outside of traditional systematic Christianity. 

Life with Christ is too supernatural to describe only with human categories of piety.  Although useful to certain degrees, each Christ-follower must come to grips with the fact that walking just as Jesus walked cannot always be categorized in columns, but must experienced through cognitive obedience to His Word.  Then the community of Christ can focus on missional experiences that trust the sovereign orchestration of God, over the linear measure of typical religious indicators.  Stories of God prevail over statistical measurements.  (I'm retraining my thinking!)

What things are you doing as Jesus did that know one will ever know about or record?  Sometimes your name might get mentioned as a tool of God's activity, but more often than not, we impact other people's lives in ways that they personally experience, but that they may not notice. Hmm. 

Missional Steps

What if we could change our thinking to see that the 110 waking hours we have away from "church services" is our personal harvest field  (168 - 56 - 2 = 110)?  What if what we did during the 110 hours away from sitting in worship chairs was more important than what we did during the 2 hours of "church" gathered in large groups?  We think about church so strangely.

What if we could stop measuring the success of "church" by attendance, budgets, and buildings and start evaluating community on how effective we are outside of our own interests?  (I know that is statistically impossible in Etowah County, Alabama but I'm just thinking out loud.)  I guess attendance, budgets, and buildings have their place, but what if they were not the primary indicators that a group of believers were walking just as Jesus walked? 

I was talking with someone who is trying to start a "new" church and their primary measure for their success was: attendance, budgets, and the obsession with buildings.  (I know that I pastor a church who has just built a new facility and its easy for me to say you don't need one, but I can see how a "new" church might go in a different direction.) 

Keep thinking missionally.  You'll be surprised at how much you can change.