Longing for More (Part 2)

The topic of "Hawaii" became a tense subject in our household.  Starting in January, we talked with Pastor Ryan and Bohdana once a month.  I always left those conversations thinking that a move was possible, but I couldn't bring myself around to it.  We continued to discuss which Intentional Christian Community would be the best fit for our family, so we listed qualities we were looking for.  Eric felt like Hawaii met our "values" list, and we could use the summer as a training ground in discipleship.  I was absolutely certain God's call on our lives would be heard by both of us, and I wasn't hearing it.  We would go weeks without having a conversation about Hawaii, but we never went a day without thinking about it.

Somewhere in February I realized I needed to share from my heart to someone who could give an outside perspective.  I started with a friend currently living in an Intentional Christian Community, also has a baby, and totally understands the pull of family.  Looking back, it was probably most helpful to hear my own thoughts, concerns, and desires.  As I explained what we were looking for, and as she prompted me to think deeper, my own concerns became more clear.  Really, I had one concern.  I didn't want to be so far from our families.

I would be lying to say this is no longer a concern.  It's still very much a concern.  We want to see our families, we want Justice to know her grandparents, and aunts, and uncles.  Around this time I read a parenting book.  It was terrible, and I've already gotten rid of the book so I can't quote it exactly.  But on one page was an exercise where you imagine your child 25 years from now.  I try to enjoy the current stage of life, so I had never imagined my child at age 4, much less 26!  The book listed several questions... What is she doing? Who are her friends?  What is she influenced by?  What is she passionate about?  What do her deepest relationships look like?  Where does she live?  Is she following her dreams?  Honestly, I don't even remember if these were the exact questions, but this is what happened when I started to imagine Justice, just barely 1 year of age, 25 years from now.

Through tears, I realized my hopes and dreams for Justice won't keep her close to me.  Her God-given gifts, abilities and passions will (hopefully) take her to places I can't even dream up.  I want her to be so passionate about something God lays on her heart that she acts on it.  I would consider it a blessing to be part of that dream, but if I'm not, there will come a time as parents when we have to let her follow God's calling.  And what a (heart-wrenching) joy it will be.

In the same way, if God was indeed calling Eric and I away from our parents, we (I) had to be willing to go.  This acknowledgement allowed me to hear from God.

The next profound moment came through a conversation with a friend from high school.  It would be more accurate to say an acquaintance from high school, as we hadn't spoken in over 10 years.  She's living in Hawaii now, on Oahu.  I called her.  I wanted to know how happy she was, really.  And how her relationships were with family back home.  We spoke for nearly an hour and at the end of the conversation she said this: "If you're looking for a billboard from God, this is it.  You need to move to Hawaii."  

A few days later I told Eric.  It opened up our conversations once again.  During this time we were talking to our parents and siblings.  And our conversations changed.  Instead of focusing on why we "could never move" we began to discuss the possibilities.  I allowed my mind to imagine a space of wholistic health.

The final "event" that stands out in this journey was in a worship setting.  In March, Eric and I went back to Real Life Community Church of the Nazarene for their 10 year celebration service.  I was emotionally moved during this service in a way that rarely happens.  I can probably count on one hand similar experiences in my lifetime.  Was it Real Life? Maybe.  Did it remind me of worshipping with Kona Church of the Nazarene last June? Yes.  Or was it stepping away from the normal routine to see God with fresh eyes?  It's possible.

The next month or so is kind of blurry.  I can't explain it.  I count this as a blessing, because I know God was communicating in a way I can't claim as my own understanding.  What I remember is waking up one morning and before getting out of bed saying, "Eric, I'm ready for Hawaii."

We agreed to an official interview in April, and the rest... the rest is history in the making!

*For a plethora of reasons, we have decided not to intern at a farm this summer; a wedding in IL, the financial toll it would take on our bank account, wanting to spend a few weeks with our families before we leave.  Eric has a post in the works to shed light on how our new home in Hawaii meets some of our longing for community. 

Longing for More (Part 1 of 2)

Last June, 2012, we moved from our apartment in Antioch to a home in East Nashville.  We have always loved East Nashville, but I loath moving.  Our agreement to move centered around Eric working in East Nashville and the commute, though only 12 miles, took a good 45 minutes in each direction.

In the weeks preceding our move, we began to question our lives.  We wrested with deep questions about what we were doing (vocationally and as a family) and why we were doing it.  Our daughter was 6 months old, I longed to be home with her, and we were moving to a new part of town.  A community we loved to visit, but a place where we knew no one.

Nashville has over half a million people, and it's totally normal to commute to work.  People don't blink an eye at driving nearly an hour to get to church, or a friend's house to share a meal.  And we were part of the masses doing the same thing.  Except we weren't happy.  At the core of our beings we longed for deeper relationships.  We wanted neighbors.  I've come to word this time in our lives as, "we longed to live, work, worship in ONE place."

Our move seemed to fill that longing, on the surface.  In the next few months I would stop working full-time to raise our daughter, Eric was (is) employed by a church in East Nashville, and I joined a local MOMS club.  (A blog for another day - joining the MOMS Club is, hands down, the best thing I've ever done).  Eric's commute is 5 minutes, through a park and a neighborhood.

But God had begun to stir in our hearts.  We weren't settled.  No matter how hard we tried, we just couldn't foster the type of relationships we dreamed about.  So we started seriously considering intentional Chrisitian community.  What do they look like?  Where are they?  How can we be part of something like this?  Eric was reading book after book, we talked with friends who are currently living in different intentional Christian communities.  We slowly started to share this longing with our families and our closest friends.

And then we visited one.  We researched and emailed and talked with communities we were interested in.  In January, we visited Koinonia Farms, an intentional Christian community and active farm in Americus, Georgia.  We participated in their way of life for a few days and it was wonderful.

Right around this same time, we got our first call from Hawaii.  I immediately said NO, thought the idea of moving to the middle of the Pacific Ocean was absurd, and continued to talk with other communities.  We started dreaming about spending our summer (2013) learning from an established community.  In a perfect world, we needed to learn how to farm on a small scale, to do our part in living a more sustainable life, so we only talked with communities who could provide both.

I was most interested in a community that had a 9 month "internship" because I knew it would ground us for a while longer.  We had the potential to fall in love with the community and stay.  Eric was most interested in a community (Koinonia) that blended sustainable agriculture, peacemaking, and community.  Eric saw Koinonia's 3 month internship as an opportunity - a training grounds - for our (potential) work in Hawaii.

We had agreed to talk about Hawaii again in 1 month (with the Pastor and his wife).  We talked and I shared my concerns along with a handful of questions.  It was no secret that I didn't want to go.  The pastor and his wife are dear friends of ours, and during that call she said, "Joy, if you don't want to come, we don't want you here."

To be continued...

On Missional Living

The blog title admittedly describes a double meaning.  “Missional Living” points both toward our calling to live vocationally as missionary-pastors on the Big Island of Hawaii and in the more broad and conceptual way of living missionally.  I want to take the time to flesh out a little bit of what this broader more conceptual understanding of missional means to us and why it matters for everyday living.

Over the past 15 years, it seems the word missional is the buzzword of Christian evangelicalism on both conservative and liberal spectrums.  Its wide use across varying theologies and church models tends to confound what exactly we mean by the word missional.  Some have incorporated missional as a church growth mechanism, crafting mission and vision statements that incorporate nice language but acts cosmetically.  Like a tool, it will be laid aside when not found efficient or functional.  Still others drift into missional language to talk about social justice programs and compassionate ministry work.  The missional presence of the church is seen through outreach and service planned on a calendar and worked into our budgets.  We can serve the poor once a month, but it rarely works into friendships that interrupt our lives or carry any real transformation.  Still others describe a missional movement as a way of life, an embodied reality that points toward a complete reordering of personal, social, and political relationships.

In their book Prodigal Christianity, Fitch and Holsclaw sketch a few signposts that help guide the church into the “far country” after Christendom.  They pick up Barth’s analysis of the first Prodigal- Jesus- going into the far country incarnationally.  They write,

As opposed to the attractional model of the modern church in America, where a church puts on worship services and expects people to come, the incarnational model challenges us to be a people who inhabit neighborhoods, go where the people are, live among them and listen to them, know their hurts and their hopes. From this incarnational perspective, we are called to minister and proclaim the gospel while following the Spirit in specific circumstances. According to this approach, the incarnation of God becomes a model for entering into local cultures, a model for mission.

The Christian understands that even within God’s very self there is a giving and sharing- a Divine movement of self-giving love for another.  When we speak of God, we always speak of Trinity.  This movement of love within God overflows in creation itself.  Even more, God longs to dwell with creation.  And when the created order acts and continues to act in open rebellion against God, God continues to move toward us sending Jesus and the Spirit to reconcile the brokenness of existence and bringing it back to harmonious commune with God. 

It seems to me that imbedded within the character of God is this type of self-giving movement for the life of the world.  Theologians call this divine kenosis and point toward an early church hymn in Philippians 2 in which Jesus gives up equality with God and becomes a slave to death, for the sake of the world.  And when Jesus enters the synagogue and preaches his first sermon, he simply says that the work the God has sent him to do is to bring justice, proclaim good news to the poor, set the prisoner free, give sight to the blind, and establish just and healthy economic practices (Luke 4:18).  It sounds like God sends Christ to give birth to a new world, to establish a new pattern of living. 

So if this is God’s mission, to make things right and dwell with creation, perhaps this is how the church as the Body of Christ ought to understand itself: as a movement of self-giving love for the sake of the world.  Which brings me back to this idea of missional living.  The church has been really good at creating bad theology on a mass scale (one need only to take a trip to Barnes and Noble to understand this).  The institutional academic church has also done a really good job of creating good theology and scholarship that seems to remain cloistered in the recesses of the mind.  But the church has done a terrible job of living theologically.  Or, the church has done a terrible job of being a community in which the language and story of God interrupts our daily lives in any meaningful way. 

To put it another way, if Jesus is who he says he is (Lord) then everything changes. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we can no longer participate in the powers and systems of this world that bring death.  But, like the Prodigal God, we still choose to enter into hopeless and broken situations so that Christ’s life may be revealed.  This is why we (my wife and I) eat a meal with our homeless neighbors, why we consciously buy our meat and produce from local farmers/friends, why we speak out against drones, the death penalty, and war, why we no longer have cable, why we pray for God’s kingdom come, why we actively seek out communities that share resources, and why it matters where we choose to live.  Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we can talk of nothing less than the total restructuring of social Christian living. 

So this blog will be a place where we share both our ministry work and our everyday life, because there isn’t much of a difference between the two.  We’d love for you to follow us, interact with us in the comment section, hear about the work we do in North and Central Kona, look at pictures of our family, find new recipes, be inspired to start your own garden, help fund us in this endeavor, and pray for us on the way.  Welcome to Missional Living.

Changes Come

Our blog has taken on a new look today.  We are transitioning from a blog of my (Joy's) random ramblings, to a family blog.  You will see additional changes in the coming days, as well as details about where we're heading, why we're going, and how God has led our family.

In brief, we have accepted a call to be missionary-pastors in Kona, Hawaii.  Over the next few months we will be transitioning our home, wrapping up jobs in Nashville, and visiting family before making the move to the Kona Coast in August.

Click here to read our introduction to Kona Church of the Nazarene.

Simplifying

Eric and I have started reading Simplicity Parenting.  We're excited about this book!  It was first recommended by some farmer friends who blog at Radical Farmwives, and then by a few local mamas.  Admittedly, we have a ways to go.  But we're jumping right in.  We started with Justice's room (from the chapter on Environment).  I really hope this carries over into our own bedroom :)

Next, on to Rhythm, Schedules, and Filtering Out the Adult World.

The increased space has been welcomed with creative play and lots of dancing.  Justice is loving it!

Field Trip

Eric, Justice and I took a trip to Michigan this past weekend.  We took advantage of a Southwest sale (back in February), and flew up for a long weekend.  Despite a short bought of sickness, we had a great trip.  I've been calling it a field trip because Justice (and Eric) got to see and experience so many new things!  Already looking forward to coming back in July!

Ella showing Justice "these horses!" 

 Eric splitting wood

Tractor!

Petting the horses

Park-date with mama's girlfriends!

Modeling a new dress made by great-grandma

Spring

I realize my posts have been quite sparse as of late. Here are a few pictures from the last few weeks.

Grandma & Grandpa Paul's visit

Top of the hill with Daddy! 

Hugs for Daddy! 

Bare feet at the grocery store.  This girl won't keep her shoes on!

Trying to come DOWN the steps by herself... we're still practicing!