Unsafe!

The theme of Winter Peak this year was Unsafe. My dear friend Casey McCollum was the speaker and he did a great job bring this message to the teens. It was a theme that I was very personally excited about and something that I have always been passionate about.

The basic idea was that God does not call us to be safe or comfortable. In fact, it's the opposite. Casey talked about that every bible should come with a warning label that says "Can be dangerous if followed". He used Purell hand sanitizer as a great object lesson and visual by squirting it in a bible and saying that too often we sanitize the Word to make it safe or more comfortable to follow. Instead of  "love your enemies" we may sanitize it to "don't hate your enemies"; instead of  "flee from immorality" we sanitize it to be more like "stay away from the really bad stuff". If we truly follow the bible we WILL experience loss. We may not be persecuted or lose our lives for our faith like some of the characters we looked at over the weekend, BUT, we may lose our reputation or our friends. God's calling is one that is drastically different from the world.

Another topic that seemed to really resonate with the teens and adults was that we need to be Kingdom-Followers not just Church-Goers. (Hopefully I will be quoting Casey Pate correctly here) Church -Goers worry about the world changing the church. Kingdom-Followers go out to change the world. We need to stop staying in our safe, comfortable buildings and be out in our communities and our world loving people for Christ.

I was convicted of a few things - first that too often I am not the kind of light that I should be in my office. The second is that I know God has given me a passion and love for things unsafe (unsafe things of faith and unsafe things like rock climbing). I frequently get ideas that I really believe are from the Spirit of how to share the word etc but I'm not always great at following through. I want to be consistent. I want to actually do the things that I feel God pricking my heart to do. I have a few things that I am currently praying about that wrestling with. Hopefully I will be able to share them soon!

It was a great weekend overall. Tonight in the youth group class we will be talking about the ideas we came up with of what the University Church of Christ youth group needs to do and deciding on some things that the group can actually DO instead of just talk about. Pray that our teens and all of the teens and adults who went to Winter Peak will not forget what they heard but will continue to grow in courage and faith as they live a life that is Unsafe for Christ.