Totally having a crazy out-of-body type experience, so as usual, I’ve got to record the story…

In the Spring of this year, pastor and author Mark Batterson, talked about his upcoming book the Circle Maker that would come out in December 2011. It’s the story of how he has asked BIG things from God and prayed over property that he felt God had asked him to pray over. It coincided with a building on 78th street that we felt like God was putting on our hearts for our church. With a nod to the Circle Maker idea, we loaded up our church and went to the property to pray. It ignited our dreams and landed on the front page of the local newspaper, the Columbian. Our church was believing for $2.5 million dollars to buy a building in a not-so-great part of town and change the community.

And for many months, we’ve waited quietly for the miracle that we believe is coming. We haven’t forgotten, but in the meantime, we’ve looked at literally every option just in case God had a different plan. Nothing seemed to settle well in our spirits and so with a little impatience and frustration, we have just kept praying.

Fast forward to November 2011. Since we’ve been married (14 years now!), I have regularly asked Mark, my husband, the same question, “What do you think God is telling us?” And once again, I prodded his heart to see what was going on in there.

Mark’s answers vary quite a bit. He’s got no ability to sugar-coat anything, so sometimes he flat out says, “I have no idea. Totally unclear on God’s direction right now.” Ironically, I appreciate that answer because the last thing I need is a pastor who comes up with the “right” thing to say that comes from the wrong source. Just say it like it is and we’ll go from there.

Last month, however, he perked up at the question and gave me a very clear answer. He said, “I was listening to a message today that I preached a year ago and the story hit me like a ton of bricks. It was the story about how Moses went to God when the Israelites were begging for meat as they wandered around the desert. God said, “Give them what they ask for.” Long story short, even though Moses deemed this impossible, quail rained down from the sky in droves and overly fed them all!”

Needless to say, I thought this was the oddest answer he had literally ever given me.

That same week we had scheduled Jerry to come and pray with our staff. Jerry is the man who had felt impressed to come to our current rental property five years ago and pray that God would use this corner for His glory. We moved in shortly thereafter. He emailed us last month and told us he had a Word from God for us after He had read about 19 Cents of Faith (the story of our dream for the 78th street building), so we gladly welcomed him into our staff meeting.

Jerry began to speak and from most of our staff’s perspective, it was a simple Word, but Mark began to weep. The Word Jerry spoke, with a humble heart, was the story of the Iraelites begging for meat and God saying, “Give them meat, because I am God and what you see is not even the tip of the iceberg compared to what I can do for you.” It then began to rain quail.

Fast forward to today. Yesterday the mail came and the book that inspired me so many months ago had arrived. This morning I began to read the Circle Maker and fondly remembered the BIG, audacious goal that God had birthed in our hearts. And then I turned to Chapter 5…Cloudy with a Chance of Quail. Yep, the same story of Moses praying for meat was laid out before me. The third time in three weeks in regards to the same prayer.

Do I think that it’s a coincidence that God has used the same characters with the same Bible story for literally a year now? No, I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think this is confirmation. I think this is God saying, “Listen to me. I can do the impossible and I will. Watch me.”

The story isn’t finished, yet. But I sure can’t wait to flip the page and see what God does next…

The Cat in the Hat has some profound wisdom for life, if you’ll listen closely enough! Chattering away on the TV behind me, he had a conversation with his slightly-less-than-excited crowd. It went as follows:

“Why don’t I build a nest?”
“Because you don’t know how!”
“Well, I don’t know how now, but I will when I’m done!”

That is precisely the philosophy of our ministry. We’ll be the first to tell you that we have no idea how to do what we’ve been asked to do. (Moses and I will have long conversations in Heaven about being clueless to the task set before us. I can’t wait!) But what has always been true is that we are confident that God will set our course through our confusion. He will give us the tools, knowledge, and fortitude to make it happen if we are willing to listen to His promptings and follow them without question. We can literally accomplish the impossible if we rely on a God of possibilities.

You may be facing a challenge before you that seems big, but the good news is that when it’s over, you’ll have conquered that fear and accomplished something great. Don’t sweat it. Maybe you are just asking all of the wrong questions and the Cat in the Hat had it right. Maybe your best question is, “Why don’t I?” Yep, why don’t you.

Such a fun day! It’s Christmas time, so we started handing out some random blessings yesterday and will continue for the next couple of weeks. It’s awesome to surprise people with something thoughtful!

We had our team Christmas dinner last night! Our pastoral staff is remarkable and watching them laugh, reminisce, and tell stories is so much fun! They are each amazing in very different ways and we love them all dearly. Thank you to Alvina and LeeAnn for spoiling us!

Pastor Chris’ old small group guys sent a sax-o-gram to our staff party for him…I will never understand the relationship between a teenage guy and their small group leader. Ever. Thankful for it, but completely strange.

Mark preached a GREAT message on encouragement. If you missed it, catch it at www.coffeechurch.com. It’s worth your time!

Come to church 15 minutes early! It is such a great time to meet people and we get to talk to more people that way. It’s our favorite thing to touch base with friends and family.

One of our North Creek babies is due any day and we can’t wait!!!!! We are slated to get one every other month for a while now. We also pray frequently for those of you who are trying to have a baby and aren’t pregnant, yet. It’s hard to go through that and we are believing with you for God’s blessing of a baby.

Mark and I CRASH on Mondays. We relax, enjoy coffee together, go out to lunch, do whatever we feel like. It’s called a Sabbath and it’s mandated by God to work for six days and rest for one. If you aren’t taking time off, you aren’t wise. (I fall into that category from time to time as well, but even though it hurts to hear it, it’s true.)

Leadership principle of the day: calm down. Most of what you think is a big deal and needs to be dealt with NOW can probably wait. Things are best handled after time and prayer rather than in the heart of the situation. This does not pertain in the event of a building fire.

LOVING the new kid’s checkin system. Still a little slower than it will be while we get the database established, but we’ll be rockin’ in no time! And having the kid’s names and allergies attached to them is awesome…Zoey does not agree with me and thinks stickers should be played with!

Note on our upcoming schedule: Christmas Eve – Family Services at 6:30 and 8:00 pm (Nursery care for 2 years and younger). No services on Sunday, December 25.

Have a fabulous week!

When a leader stops taking risks because there is too much to lose…he is closer to losing everything than he actually realizes. We don’t follow a Savior who played it safe, if He said “take up your cross and follow me” then we need to understand that sacrifice and risk WILL be involved if we want to go where He is leading. -Perry Noble

I love this quote! I think it’s hits pastors right between the eyes. The strength of the pastoral heart is that we LOVE our churches. It’s birthed in us from the very core of our being. The problem that we’ve seen is that pastors often unintentionally love their church more than it’s mission and hold onto their church like a fragile egg instead of a solid hammer. When Mark and I became lead pastors we determined that our mission – Leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus – was more important than anything else. Our church was a living, breathing, thinking tool to not only introduce people to Christ, but then disciple people in the mandates of the Bible. Losing our title, losing the position, losing the corporation that we call our church… whatever it was didn’t matter if we held true to our mission. After all, North Creek is just a very small picture of the bigger plan of God called CHURCH. If we were on mission, we need not be afraid of risking our church’s future. It’s an oxymoron of sorts.

With that focus, it creates two things:

1. Peace to make hard decisions. If we lived with a fear that we’d lose everything by making the wrong decision, we simply wouldn’t make decisions. We would be frozen by our own passion, which is a very perplexing situation. We would very quickly become obsolete to the mission of God because we were too afraid to risk the very thing he had entrusted us to use to change the world.

2. Amazing enjoyment while it lasts. During one of our conferences for church planting, someone said to put an end date on your church. What if you HAD to shut down on Dec. 8, 2015? How hard would you work to accomplish what you need to accomplish if you had a time limit? What petty arguments would you forgo if you knew your time was ticking? If you lived with a stopwatch in the back of your head, risk would be much easier. We feel great freedom to love North Creek while it’s here to love. At this point, it is very likely will never see the demise of this church in our lifetime, but we haven’t always been able to say that!

The moral of the story is to hold loosely to the details and hold tightly to the big picture. What is the over-arching thing that God wants from your life? It’s probably not the concrete day to day objective that you work towards, but rather a much broader view with an eternal perspective. Love what you are doing, but not more than you love who you are doing it for!

Oh boy…it was a day! From my end, everywhere I turned was chaos! I am confident that not everyone had the same experience as me at church, but from the time I woke up until literally the minute I went to bed, it was pure insanity.

We rolled out the new kid’s checkin system yesterday! Although it took a bit more time on the first day, we were pleasantly surprised at how efficient it is and how much easier it is to have the information literally stuck to every child that we might need. Such a blessing!

We are working very hard to have a secure environment for our kid’s. If you don’t have a background check and are on the schedule for the day, you’re going to have to break an arm to get by that desk. Rachael will probably smile at you when she says that, but she’s not kidding. Our most important asset is our kids!

At our staff meeting, we had a special guest. Jerry, who prayed that a church would occupy our particular building, asked to come and pray with us again. He felt he had a word for us…basically, in regards to 19 Cents of Faith and needing a new facility to accommodate our growth, he wanted to remind us how big and competent our God is to do the impossible.

THANK YOU to everyone who brought stuff and donated to the Sarah J. Anderson Elementary Christmas Outreach. We ended up with a great pile of stuff at the church and more at my house from our small group. We will be delivering that this week!

Also, thank you to those of you who have started writing checks to our Benevolence Fund! If you are looking for ways to give all year long, please consider making this a monthly commitment. We use our Benevolence Fund for people literally sitting next to you in church who can’t pay their bills due to their current circumstances. This fund is almost always in the negative! We don’t let this money sit in our account when people are hurting, so we empty it as quickly as we fill it!

Thanks to Mike who filled in for our children’s pastor when a family emergency came up yesterday!

Remember that Simply Worship is this Wednesday from 7-8:00 pm. It’s a great time devoted to Jesus and the BEST way to start Christmas month off with the right focus!

I hope that your week is calmer than my yesterday! Many blessings…