We had an excellent staff retreat last week. It's good to be back, although we're leaving again on Friday for a brief pre-baby vacation with some friends of ours, so posting will be a little bit sporadic next week too.
The highlight of the staff retreat last week for me was bungee jumping for the first time. It is something I had always secretly wanted to do, but it took the peer pressure of a couple of insane youth pastors to finally have an excuse to take the leap.
Let me just tell you, there's absolutely nothing like a 17-story swan dive, trusting only a zit-faced high schooler and the over sized rubber band he tied to your feet to get your adrenaline churning. But I got a good piece of advice from our senior-high pastor who had taken the plunge before. While we were standing on top of the crane, he said to me, "When you get out there on the platform, it's okay to look down, but jumping doesn't get any easier the longer you stand there."
Bungee jumping is a good metaphor for my ministry these days. There seem to always be hard decisions to make, and risky ideas to roll out in the face of uncertain futures. Sometimes it feels like all I'm going on is the experience of an over-confident pimply kid who uses the cash-flow from his career in bungee jumper attending to fund his Dungeons and Dragons obsession. But once you're out there, it doesn't get any easier to stand there and wait.
There are some neat things going on in the Young Adult ministry at McKinney, and in the church as a whole. But in order to really experience the excitement, it's going to mean a few of us have to stop peering over the edge and start swan diving.
0 comments:
Post a Comment