would Jesus be accepted in your church?

I was listening to a song the other day and I was struck by one of the lines in it (can you tell that I listen to music a lot yet?). The song is called My Jesus and it's by Todd Agnew. The line was this one:

'Cause my Jesus would never be accepted in my church

The blood and dirt on His feet might stain the carpet

It got me thinking . . . is that true? Are we more concerned about something in our building getting dirty, than about welcoming people into the church?

I think sometimes, not always but sometimes, we get so caught up in how things look at church and in how we look at church, that we get forget about what is most important . . . the people. There is nothing wrong with wanting things to look nice . . . but when we get so caught up in that we have a problem.

Being raised in the church, I was raised with the idea of putting on your "Sunday best" to go to church each weekend. And when you got there every other family was the same. Is there anything inherently wrong with? No, not in my opinion . . . as long as we don't put this above the people who we are supposed to be showing the love of God to.

Or I've been in places where there is more concern about the building getting dirty than about reaching out to a hurting and lost community around them? This is wrong! As the church we are called to reach out to the world and welcome them.

When I think about it . . . I wonder, would Jesus actually come to one of our churches if He was on earth today? Yes, when He was on earth before He spent time in the synagogues and with the "religious" people of His day, but He also came down pretty hard on them for their hypocritical behaviour on more than one occassion. I think, if Jesus was on earth today, we would find Him with the lowest in our society . . . the poor and the homeless. Those are the people that I think Jesus would spend much of His time with.

And maybe, that's something we need to think about more. Church is good . . . and meeting with other believers is necessary. But, we can't ignore the poor, the homeless, those who are down on their luck . . . we need to reach out to them . . . and to those around us who may not know Christ yet. That should be our focus . . . not looking our best and keeping our churches neat and clean.

happy new year

Well, I have been bad at writing here lately, I just realized. So, to those who do read this . . . Happy New Year!

So we were singing this song at Alive last night, that was just really cool to me. I don't remember all of the words, who it's by, or even the name of the song, but some of the words are:
God in my living
There in my breathing
God in my waking
God in my sleeping
. . .
God in my living
There in my working
. . .
God in my hurting
There in my healing
. . .
Be my everything
Be my everything
Be my everything
Be my everything
. . .
Christ in me
Christ in me
Christ in me the hope of glory
Be my everything

The whole song just talks about God being a part of every single aspect of our lives.

As I sang those words, they really were my prayer, but afterwards I started thinking . . . I can pray that and mean that at the time, but so often I find myself not wanting God to be a part of everything in my day-to-day life. Not because I don't want Christ in my life, but because those are the moments when I find myself doing things that I know I shouldn't be doing anyways. Really the words to this song have just been challenging me in the last day or so to make them something I can say about my entire life. This means I need to do some changing of certain things in my life and it won't happen overnight, but it is something that I desire.

just a day of fun

So, I back home . . . tired, sore, and still cold . . . but I just had the best day that I have had in the last little while. My roommates and some of our friends and I just spent the afternoon tobogganing, having snowball fights, and just generally acting like kids again! It was so much fun!!!!! I haven't done any of that stuff in so long . . . and I needed to.

I tend to be someone who takes life pretty seriously (unless I've stayed up all night and I'm running on caffiene . . . which is just scary). And taking life seriously isn't always a bad thing. There are times when it's good to take life seriously. But, I have a tendency, especially when things happen that make life not so easy are going on in my life, to take life too seriously at times.

For the last month or so, since my uncle died, I have taken all of life quite seriously and I haven't had a lot of fun with anything that I've done. But, today, I just let it all go and played int he snow with my friends like I used to when I was a kid. It was so good! And it was so what I needed right now!

I know it's something that I need to learn . . . to not take life too seriously all the time. And today was another step in learning that for me.

All I have to say to close, is that I absolutely love the snow . . . it's the one time when it appears to be OK for adults to act like kids again.