Well I asked God to guide me into what he called me to. So I threw my resume out there and got a thousand hits. Phone of the hook. God is amazing.

Then the discerning started. It's so beautiful how God guides. Pretty much 80% of what has been offered follows: you are skilled, please come save us. Ugh, no. God saves.

But now I have something interesting on the board - a possible invitation to work with an "organic" church practitioner. And no, it's not just the slick methodology guys. It's the "Jesus is Lord and we are his servants" type. Love it.

More soon. I'm just so excited and humbled.

Hmm, not a lot has changed since I last posted. Basically I had a job in case work that sucked out every piece and parcel of my time. I quit. Didn't have time for God, time for my wife, time to read or time to go out where people are. Man, what slavery! No wonder people can only give an hour every week on Sunday!

This whole experience has brought me to wonder how the everyday man is supposed to be a little missionary of sorts. I understand that you can talk to your coworkers, but after a while they are a used up field. The practical matters are very difficult.

Oh well, who cares about practical! This is about faith in God who is living and powerful! I think I'm going to connect to the people who call themselves organic church around here to see if they are legit. And I'm working for myself now as a translator/interpreter and a designer (web/print).

Pray for us(my wife and I) during this time. We are solely in the hands of God; there is no other secure place. Pray that we don't waste God's time and that we push forward and not backward into laziness.

Pray for Estuardo as he is trying to help his church transition from institutional to missional. He's starting a special "missional" group with the young people, and he's making those hard choices of starting something new and untried. All in a conservative church in Guatemala. Cool, eh?

Wow. Well, in between moving and starting a new job, it's been terribly busy. Traffic is amazingly different here in TX than in AR. In AR I lived a mile from my job. Here, it's at least 40 minutes of driving to get to my workplace 20 minutes away.

Now I have no idea how people who aren't paid to be missionaries or paid to write books plant churches have time for the work of planting a church.

Any ideas?

have a merry Christmas. glory to God for his great love and mercy by sending us his Son Jesus! What an awesome missionary God we have who would humbly live with us for thirty years and then burst forth with a radical message and kingdom, saving us by his death and life. oh what a patient powerful and beautiful love! glory to God in the highest.

Well well well. My wife and I are finally getting settled into our new apartment. We desperately want to be missionaries here and now. Pray for us and for us to listen and heed God's wants for us

60-70 years ago, the concepts of recycling were championed as conservative, frugal values. Coke bottles were reused, encouraged by the 5 cents you'd get for returning the bottle. Flour came in cloth, reusable sacks. Victory gardens gave us fresh vegetables for cheaper. During WWII, the recycling of essential materials was rampant, seen as a patriotic duty to gather rubber, nylon, etc for supporting the troops. We even lived regulated by ration coupons - think of them as the foil of liquid currency that regulated overconsumption.

Now those values are seen as left-wing, communist ideals. Self-sustenance is a hippie thing. Recycling is for yuppies with a coffee shop conscience. Regulating food industries is seen as a leftist agenda of control by the so called conservatives.

All of this to say what God has already revealed - Babylon is such a whore. She'll switch sides for whatever reason suits her. Her political parties are like paying lovers who bargain for the best deal. And she is a metaphor for systems of bad government, greed, corporations, merchants. She's a counterfeit church of materialism and selfishness, welcoming and including all who want some of her delights. Now she entices us with her markets to not produce anything we can actually use.

Do we actually produce anything? Have you raised a chicken? Have you grown your own food? Have you tried making your clothes? -All, let me say again, All of these areas of production we outsource to that whore, that system of commerce, lies and sales - all of these areas are now humanitarian disasters. Factory chicken production is something that destroys the earth not only by perverting the life of a poor chicken, but also from the excess disease and super concentrated nitrogen runoff from feces that suffocates plant life. Clothing - you know what a sweatshop is and yet we still buy the stuff from the social backstabbing suppliers. Gardens are something that old people have - so passe. And yet, if Babylon failed, could you stand?

Revelation 18 stands as a solemn prophet. Excerpts:

"After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his splendor. With a mighty voice he shouted: "Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a home for demons and a haunt for every evil spirit, a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird. For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. The kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries."

"The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes any more— " ""

"Your merchants were the world's great men. By your magic spell all the nations were led astray. In her was found the blood of prophets and of the saints, and of all who have been killed on the earth."

Would you be weeping at her demise? I know I would, and that is a very sad thing to admit. I want to pull out of Babylon. I want to plug into Jesus - and He made the earth and its production elements something not to be exploited, but to be enjoyed in relationship with Himself.

May God grant us the grace and wisdom to seek to depend on Himself, for His glory - not for the glory of Babylon.

If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: raised in the church, born a Bible-belt Southerner, confirmed in the Lutheran church, baptized by immersion, a soul on fire for God; in regard to the church, a trained church of christ missionary; as for zeal, slandering the gays, Democrats and atheists; as for keeping the rules, I justified myself.

But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

My wife and I have been studying more on how to live holistically honoring God - love Him with our heart, soul, mind, strength. Like Deuteronomy 6, we want to wrap His ways around our arms, tie them on our foreheads, nail them to our doorpost.

In this, we've been on the journey to green our home. The funniest thing happened when we were shopping on an American website for energy saving gadgets. They had a hand crank puree maker that I really wanted to make mashed potatoes with. I asked my wife if I could get it. She said she had left hers (she had one? wow) in Guatemala (where she's from) and that everyone had one back there. And come to think of it, all the things we've been looking at on the green website shop are in place in the 3rd world.

They have tons of gadgets that work w/o electricity. And since Guatemala doesn't have coal, they've been using low energy compact fluorescents for years. They have gardens that they eat from. They eat fresh produce that's pretty organic. And in all of that - I wonder what else the third world has been doing for so long that they need to teach to us 1st worlders.

I used to think it was so terrible that we couldn't drink the water from the faucets in Guatemala. But then again, third worlders must think it strange that we literally flush drinking water down the toilet. We first world people call this superior infrastructure. Third worlders could easily say it's just a bunch of waste.

Lately, my wife taught me how to make recycled paper. Woah! so cool! We've been recycling for a while now through the conventional recycle dumpsters - but now we're starting to get the rest of that mantra -Reduce and Reuse.

We've turned an old plastic parmesan cheese bottle into a shaker for our homemade (and safe) scouring cleaner. We used old bottles to plant plants in (the ultimate defiance, I think) and to hold our homemade all-purpose cleaner. We're reducing the amount of food we buy that requires a ton of packaging, too. That means buying larger quantities sometimes. It also means not buying some stuff that has a ton of superfluous plastic and paper packaging.

It feels like we're a little freer in being simpler and more self-sufficient. I hope we don't forget that God is our sufficiency, not ourselves. But like I told my wife, I hope we can learn enough to be self-sufficient and green that we could leave the system of this world if we needed to. We don't want to be hermits, but we don't want to be so much a part of the system that we are hopelessly bound to it.

Give this way some thought. And if you don't think you can honor God by treating His creation well, then perhaps the idea of stewardship of money will help. Green - is cheap. Uses less resources, you get less diseases... you get the idea. So honor God with stewarship if you can't be an environmentalist wacko.

Anyways, I'm loving going through a little 1st world development, getting back to simpler ways. I'm so blessed to have a wife who actually likes the journey we're on to honor the Lord God with all of ourselves. May we bring glory to Him, and that's all. And may we all be a part of the Kingdom where Jesus is Lord, not the system.

We have a little urban gardening experiment going on with trash and plants: (the links are to photos on our shapevine account)

http://tr.im/lettuce
http://tr.im/AvMo

Made this bag using elements that were going to be thrown away:

http://tr.im/courierbag

I finally took the time to look at the passages in Colossians and Ephesians where Paul talks about a mystery he is telling everyone.

It's found in Ephesians 3:6,5:32,6:19 and Colossians 1:25-27,2:2-3.

Whenever I hear the word "mystery", I always think "whatever you're really missing" or "what you're really looking for". I love seeing Paul use "mystery" in his letter to Ephesus, the place where they had a giant idol-making guild to Artemis and where the Christians burned their priceless magic books. Or as Paul uses "mystery" in his letter to the Colosse, where legalist, overly spiritual religious snobs are trying to say there is more to Christianity than Christ.

The mystery is ... Christ. The treasure chest of all knowledge and wisdom. I love it. They're looking to their magic, to their angels, to their late-night visions, to their intricate cool rules, to their high-fallootin' philosophies, to their goddess - and Paul says that what they are really looking for in all that stuff is Jesus.

The mystery is ... Christ in you guys (you plural). It's not just an indwelling of the fullness of almighty God in the individual. It's about Christ being in all the brothers and sisters who have given themselves to the King.

The mystery is ... the Gentiles are co-heirs with the Jews. Following this line there is a beautiful picture of Jesus recreating humanity. Out of the Gentiles and Jews he makes a new human - those who are part of His Church. So, not only is the disunity destroyed, but a new, better humanity rises without the old distinctions. The unity is in Christ alone, though.

The mystery is ... when two become one - and Paul says he's talking about Christ and his Church. In the middle of a mutual submission speech, wives, husbands, Church and Christ get all tangled up in Paul's excitement. But the mystery is quite beautiful; through this powerful love and submission, we the Church will become one with our groom Jesus. It really sounds like Hosea 2:14-23 to me. God is our Husband.

The purpose of the mystery ... Ephesians 1:9-10 "And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. " I can't really add anything to that.

The mystery is ... the Word (logos) of God in its fullness that's been an ancient, hidden mystery until now. The Living Word, the Word from John 1. The co-creator with the Father. The one who was a mystery is now everything you've been looking for. In Colossians Paul talks about how the law and the codes were all just shadows - but Christ is the reality, and the reality is in Christ. It's like, if you were confused from the OT about who God was - if you didn't get it through the shadows - here's Jesus to look at and see, the reality, the image of God. This is God in His fullness. This is who God really is.

All the while he's proclaiming the mystery, He's talking about how Christ is holding everything together; He's the fullness, the completion, the everything. While everything we try to do to get forward in life, especially the things we try to do to get to God by building our spiritual towers of Bable - they are all incomplete shadows. I love how Don Richarson, a missionary to Irian Jaya, says that Christ is the completion of every religion - he has been prophesied in every place, but Jesus is the One who they are really looking for. Isn't that a nice, positive way to say that Jesus is the exclusive King of the universe?

I don't know why, but I never cared about this high theology before. Yet this is the grand purpose and reality which we should be a part of. This grand mystery - it'll blow your mind. It's everything we've been waiting for. 

The mystery: Jesus Christ, the reality, fullness, wisdom of the Living God, in us, the unified new people and Bride of Jesus all under the headship of the crucified and risen Lord. In Him, through Him, by Him, for Him, on Him, into Him, about Him...