Presently...

I have been thinking about starting a blog for quite some time. My hesitancy has been rooted in the idea that I have no new ideas, so why add my voice to the hundreds of thousands (millions even) who are shouting into the blogosphere about the importance of their existence and how everybody ought to know about it? Presently though, I feel a burden on my soul to speak and so I decided to write and see what happens.

Everything has been falling into place for me. Marriage, baby on the way, church life is great, enjoy my job there, very little debt. The youth I pastor are a blessing to my soul and I get paid to play my guitar and sing praises to Jesus every Sunday. Recently though, my very simple and pleasant life has been flipped from peaceful to struggling. Due to the decisions of someone close to me, the bottom seems to have dropped out. I know many of us have experienced this sort of feeling, so perhaps you can identify with me. I do not want to use this blog as a means to complain about my situation though. I would like to use it to give reason as to why I have a hope resting deep within my soul that no amount of trouble or pain can ever shake.

The title of this blog comes from the first chapter of Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and what he calls "The Hour of Dissilusionment."

"By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. Only that fellowship that faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God's sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that was given to
it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes for an individual and to a community the better for both. A community that cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permenantly loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wishdream
that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive... Thus the very hour of dissillusionment becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that [none] of us can live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together - the
forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ."

The hour of disillusionment is simply that point when God reveals the facade that has covered the reality of what our lives really are. At the moment that our illusions are shattered, we are shattered. When our dreams fall apart, we fall apart. When the safe and happy life we have created turns out be dream, we realize we have never been that safe or that happy. But Bonhoeffer calls this moment grace. It is in those moments when the bottom drops out that we recognize we were not standing on solid ground in first place. And that recognition is God showing us that we need him. In those moments when we are broken, we see that we are fixed by the Word and Deed of Christ on the cross, not our own efforts.

Recently, our dream was shattered, our reality was broken. To myself and to those who live with me in community, this is grace. Now we have the opportunity to see the grac eof God work in an amazing way. We can follow God and serve Him and continue to draw people into His kingdom, or we can run and set up another structure that will keep us from experiencing the true community that God has already bought and paid for by the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ.

"And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore you. To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen." -1 Peter 5:10-11