Creating space for new life

Now that the June arts conference and the recent Mission Radicale youth conference are over, I actually have time for other things. It seems like since this past March, my life has been a whirlwind of ministry activity. This has been exciting to see God work and everything, but I'm tired and need some down time.

We spent part of today in the IKEA store east of Paris looking for bunk beds for the kids. For we need to start finding ways to create space in our apartment for another young life to join us this February. When we moved here 5 years ago with no kids, it seemed like we had so much room. We wanted a place that had enough bedrooms to start a family in without having to move. This is a good place for 2 kids. However, it will be a little tight for 3. But we don't necessarily want to move, as we like our neighbors, neighborhood, and those whom God has brought into our lives in the midst of the baby swim class, our son's upcoming school this September, and just living here. It's our turf, our parish, our neighborhood.

I have a couple of strategies for creating space. The first is to go higher with things in our apartment, which is were bunk beds fit in. For the same amount of floor space, we get 2 beds instead of 1. However, we're concerned about the safety of a 3 year old, albeit an athletic one, climbing up and particularly down from the top bunk.

The second strategy is to start purging some things that we don't need. One of these things may be some of my course notes from Bible college. With the changes in life, ministry, and mentality during the last 20 years, a lot of my notes are worthless now in terms of being useful for ministry today.

This is a season in our lives where we also sense the need to create space for potential new life in terms of ministry. Our church, Mission Radicale, and la Fonderie are all going through some major transition right now. I'm wondering where and how well we'll fit in with each of them after the dust settles this year. With the church, I sense that this could be a very good year or a very bad year, depending on what direction the leadership takes.

I also sense that some of our relationships in Paris are going to take off. What this entails in terms of ministry is something I'm not sure of. If some of them become followers of Jesus, then it behooves us to consider what type of spiritual family we would want these our spiritual kids to become part of. It's important to already have thought through and gotten prepared for this before the spiritual kids arrive.

Working with physical babies and spiritual babies is exciting, but also very messy. They are noisy, need constant feeding, and make messes. Churches need to be able to deal with these things if they want the blessing of new life in them. Otherwise, they'll just be comfortable "bless me" country clubs with lots of self-centered, sterile, old farts in them.