sacred journeys

A blog that I enjoy reading is the Jesus Creed blog

The author / blogger / professor — writes on a wide-range of topics.

In one of his posts — he wrote this:
“For me, the most important thing about a happy marriage is that husbands and wives be best friends — with no serious rival to that friendship. Kris and I have been married for 32 years; we were grade school sweethearts and we started “officiallyâ€? dating when we were sophomores in high school, and we are best friends and have been our entire marriage. This is the most important reason why we love one another… Because she is my best friend and I am hers.”

I can so relate to that. Now my wife, Michelle and I were not grade school sweethearts by any means. We did meet while we were fairily young however (when we both were 20-year-olds at the University of Minnesota). I can honestly say that she is my best friend. I enjoy being with her more than any other, I enjoy conversations with her, talking theology together, praying together, laughing together, just simply Being with her.

Now that we are in Los Angeles, and at a new church / ministry — ‘Kairos’, we have so much more time and opportunity to do ministry ‘together’, and we both absolutely love that, and we have so needed that as a family.

A couple of weeks ago, Michelle volunteered to have a meeting for church over here, and so we crammed 30 people in our living room and dining room, and she made supper for all of us. We go to our staff meetings together, we meet people together, we go to small group together (we call them canvas groups out here - which I will explain sometime).

Anyway, last night we had canvas group at Eugene & Eun Chu Kim’s house. They are a great couple. Here is somone who has Ph.D., has a great job at a pretty prestigious local university (Pepperdine), but has chosen to live in one of the rougher areas of Hollywood to start up an educational resource center for the poor. (I asked him a while back about his neighborhood, and he said, ‘well at night, we have prostitues walk past our street to the north and drug dealers hang out at the street corner two blocks south of us.)

I don’t know if we have met a couple who has more of a heart for the poor, and yet at the same time is as passionate as they are about the gospel, and ministering to people’s spiritual needs.

Someone asked me last night at this group of about 15-20 adults / kids / neighbors, what is the one thing that I am enjoying about being out in LA more than anything so far, and without hesitating I said — just the opportunity for my family and I to be in ministry together. I absolutely love it!

As I looked around the room, and saw Michelle to my right praying with 3 other gals, and thought about how just 2 hours earlier she hustled all of us out of our house a 1/2 hour early so she could join Eun Chu, and a few others in prayer, to pray for our group last night — before it got started.

I looked to my left and saw Caleb who was talking on the couch with Eric (one of our main worship leaders out here) and Dee (a local muscian and song-writer). They were talking theology, music, life etc.

I looked straight ahead and saw Elisabeth talking with Audrey (Eric’s wife who is on staff with Kairos) and Kristie (who was involved in the same church (The Rock) back in Minnesota.

It blessed me simply to be there last night. The singing was a blessing, the scripture passage we went over (Acts 5:17-42) really ministered to my soul for various reasons, but best of all it was simply seeing my family in the mix — seeing them talk, laugh, pray, share from their heart — simply being WITH THEM in this crazy adventure out here!

That made for an amazing night.