I am not in the mood to append a previous post on here, where i was stating how difficult a month Shannon and I were having. I thought I would just open this up, and start typing. This may sound out of sorts, but having a week away to focus on my Dad's health and mentally disconnect from Alabama, has done wonders for me. Granted, I would take back my dad's heart attack in a second, so he wouldn't have had to go through so much. But even my dad would tell you that the knowledge he has of what is going on in his heart, will only add years to his life. As for me, not being weighed down mentally by the stress of this church, for a matter of a week, has opened my eyes in a lot of ways. I don't want to talk percentages or the what if's, when it comes to my future in Alabama, because that is really not my decision. I do know that my view of what the church means to Andy, is so different from what it used to be, and I hope I never forget this time in my life. Lets be more concise . . . . The church I am currently at, is not a church. It is a service station. I recently shared with a few friends, that church in our culture was a lot like the grocery store visit(Pagitt thought, not mine), you go there like once or twice a week, you get what you need, the relationships are like"hi, how are things? Good, see ya later!" and thats it. But you could go as far as what its like to get your car worked on, because we don't even go there with a mechanic, we just want our mode of transportation to be fixed, so we can go where want to go. We just want our souls to be tuned up enough so that we can turn the key and go when its time. That is where I work. The Sixth Avenue Service Station, where people want nothing more but to be serviced. This makes my heart cry out . . . When I was in NC, with my mom&dad, and dad was in CCU, for a whole week, we were bombarded by my parents bible fellowship friends. My parents were so looked after and cared for, it made me so jealous of my parents. These were people who were sacrificing their lives for my parents. This one lady Pam, she had like 3 other major medical things going on in her family, at the same time, and she sat with us in the Cath lab waiting room for like 3 hours. She even went and got Shannon's prescription, while we were in CCU. Don't get me wrong, I KNOW this is what church really is. But I have been on another planet for 3.5 years. What goes on at our house on thursday nights is church too, we even have kid that calls it church. It's a place where a group of 16-20 somethings feel open to share their lives and listen to each other's stories. It's not perfect, it's not structured, it's just there, and God is working in some hearts. I had nothing to do with it, and that is what I am intoxicated by the most, that God used a random act of people gathering, to work. This is why people are calling for my job, because they want those same kids to sit in 3 services a week, to be preached at, to be serviced. Pagitt used the term "post-protestant" in trying to illustrate what his church was creatively doing. The early church reformers realized that the way people operated in faith, wasn't working, and that the gospel was not reaching the hearts of men. I cannot sit quietly when it comes to some of the church I see today, especially in my current environment, and not proclaim that THIS ISN'T WORKING!!! I pray that God continues to reveal himself, as He always has, but I also pray that we never stop being creative, no matter who tries to stifle it. More later . . .