Lon’s Blog

Yet another year is coming to a close.  After anticipating it all year, Christmas is over.  And I got through my first Boxing Day without taking a single punch!  Seriously, I hope everybody had a nice time with family and friends.  Did any of you get a chance to share Christ through this holiday that celebrates His birth?  I did, and it was a really cool Christmas Eve experience.  If you’ve got any stories along those lines that we could share with the Impact family, email it to me.  So now it’s on to New Years Eve!  I pray that you are all safe and find a fitting and fun way to ring in the New Year.  With that in mind, anyone up for some New Year’s Resolutions?  I know that many of you are so thoroughly counter-cultural that the idea of doing something so clichéd as making New Year’s resolutions is not on your radar.  Being a fellow counter-culturalist, I understand that sentiment.  But I do them. I like new beginnings. I like landmark dates and decisions.  I love making New Year’s Resolutions.  So, below, I’ve given you my list for 2008. More than once I have considered the wisdom of doing this, because this is making my life pretty a pretty open book with a whole lot of people!  I guess that brings a whole lot of accountability.  Oh well, what is better than a lot of accountability to help me reach these important goals!  And I think that maybe, just maybe, you might get inspired to make a few goals of your own this year that could bring you the change you hope for. If you do, I’d love to hear about them. So, without further adieux, here’s my New Year’s Resolutions for 2008:

First, I have one overarching goal:

To make relationships the uncontested #1 priority in my life: with God, my wife, my children, my friends, my church, my mentee’s and the lost.  This means serious quality time, doing lots of listening.

My ten resolutions/goals:1)      Learn to depend more on God: a) Begin and end every day with prayer, b) get up before everyone in the household and spend time in the Word and in prayer for one hour every week day c) read the Bible from cover to cover this year d) journal. 2)      Help my family grow closer to God. a) memorize one scripture and/or scripture story each week with my whole family, b) pray with each of my children nightly and c) have a more consistent weekly family night (with devotional)3)      Nourish my marriage. a) Take Amanda out on dates more often (goal: 1x a week), b) offer more words of praise, less words of criticism. 4)      Nourish my kids: a) spend more planned, quality time with my kids: take each child out at least once a month for one-on-one time, b) give them more loving discipline/structure5)      Organize, simplify and maintain:  Throw away stuff, make a place for everything and put everything in its place in my office, shop, and household. 6)      Reach 100% funding of our Budgetary Needs (we raise a majority of our own support each month, and I need to find some new supporters to help us meet our budgetary needs here). Contact supporters more consistently. 7)      Meet with as many church members and leaders each week as I can schedule.  Encourage, pray and vision together.       Engage more lost persons relationally for Christ through a) Prayer-walking b) “Exploring” and c) Storying in
Montreal at least once a week and d) deepen existing relational avenues of basketball, scouting, and neighbors. 9)      Get into better physical shape: a) through walking/jogging, elliptical and playing racquetball and basketball and  b) eating better and taking vitamins regularly (goal: lose a total of 50 lbs by Dec 31, 08). 10)   Grow musically: a) take guitar lessons  b) record an album of original songs c) involve music more often personally, with family and in ministry. Okay, so there they are. I’ve bared my soul.  That’s what I want to see happen in 2008.  There are more, but those are my top 10.  A few will be pretty tough to do, but hey, if they were easy, they wouldn’t be goals, they would just be reality.  It is exciting to see these on paper. But I can’t imagine how exciting it will be if I reach each of these goals.  Wow.  How about you?  What goals do you have for 2008?  What does God want to do in and through your life?  I look forward to hearing about that as we travel this journey together.  

Your Fellow Traveller, Pastor Lon 

Pain. Fear.  Frustration. Blood shooting out of my eyes. You guessed it, my laptop crashed recently.  For the second time.  The ole’ blue screen of death strikes again.  Two hard drives to toast in two months. The chances of which are like being struck by lighting on the same day every year while wearing fuchsia gauchos.  As my tech friend said, “I’ve never seen this happen before.” I did have a very old backup of some of the files, but most of the things that I’ve worked on recently – the stuff that has thus been important the last few months pertaining to our move to Montreal, etc., and stuff like pictures taken in the snow at Christmas, etc. are gone.  Such is the trauma we subject ourselves to in this technological age.  Live by the hard drive, die by the hard drive.  I learned that the hard way. Now I have an external back-up hard-drive that I back things up to frequently.

Computers may appear to be just so much plastic, metal, silicon and wires. But there couldn’t be anything further from the truth.  For those of us who store our stories, our thoughts, our dreams, our images (like all of our family pictures), our professional work, our communications with others, our links to the outside world, and more, they play a huge role in our lives. And it is almost like losing a part of ourselves when a computer crashes permanently.  A part of us, part of our history, and even part of our present and future, are gone forever.  Part of the work we toiled over is gone, lost, wasted.  In the modern age, the computer is a central part of our lives.  And I have felt that in an incredibly painful way twice in two months.  I cannot put into words what losing your computer – twice - can do to a person! (I have been wearing a lot of black).

Since my whole personal, spiritual and work “life” is in this piece of technology, its traumatic.  It’s also a huge pain in the neck getting everything put back like you like it - Email accounts configured, drivers re-installed, links re-found, files restored like you like them.  Even this blog is not the first, “first” Impact blog I have written to you. It is the third “first” blog.  I started – and lost - the others–you guessed it-on the other laptops-along with everything else I’ve done on it for the last month since I last backed up my files.

On the other hand, there has been some good from my computers crashing.  I have taken the time to get my computer into top working order. I’ve organized my files better.  I’ve learned to back things up.  I’ve figured out what things I do not need, and I’ve deleted them.  And in the process of having to re-set up so many things on my computer twice now, I’ve also learned a lot about computers.  I figure I’ll be in a better way next time something doesn’t work right because I know better now how things work and where to go to fix them.  Maybe I’ll even be able to help other people with their computer problems.

This is all extremely ironic.  Because in my first blog, I had always intended to talk about the positive and negative aspects of change.  That is the subject at hand for both Impact and my family, you having called me to be your pastor, and me having accepted.  That inherently means there will be a lot of change for us both.  It’s a whole lot like my laptop issue.  It’s different from a hard drive crashing – but actually there are striking similarities. For the Vinings, we are changing everything we know – our country, our town, our location, our climate, our friendships, our doctors, our job, our kids’ schools, our culture, our language and yes, our church.  And that’s just a short list.  For the church, you will have change, too, due to the natural differences in leadership I will bring. I am a foreigner, and have a different ministry background, vision, style, perspective and, place in life (I’m 38 with four kids). I have planted two churches, and also worked at one of the largest churches in N. America (16,000 members). I have served on the foreign mission field.  I could literally go on and on, but you get my drift.

My background and experiences and “place in life” are vastly different from Luc, or David, or even Robert Pinkston. Yet you believe that God led you to call me to be your pastor, we believe God has called us to Impact.  That means that God knew the changes that our family would have to go through, and He is cool with that. It also means that He knew the changes that I would bring to Impact, and He is cool with that, too.

I bring this up because change, any change, is hard.  As humans, we just do not like change.  We have the foods we like, movies we watch, music we listen to, people that we are friends with.  We do not naturally embrace change very often.  Usually, it is thrust upon us.  No one was looking for a new pastor of Impact in 2006.  Luc left.  Change happened.  The church in Jerusalem had the Great Commission fresh on their minds, but didn’t really budge until persecution drove them out of the city and into Samaria, and Judea and to the ends of the earth.

So, what shall we do?  For the Vinings, and me in particular, I am discovering that I need to embrace change rather than fighting it.  Like the computer crashing, there are some very nice things that happen when the unexpected hits and we are forced to go a new direction.  When I went to missionary training before going to the foreign mission field (Tanzania, East Africa), they taught us about the proven stages of culture shock that people go through in a new culture.  They are all due to change.  I won’t go into those here, but they are fascinating.  But the bottom line of their teaching was this: you will go through change, you will like things about it, then you will hate things about it.  It’s natural.  But in the end, you must embrace the changes in your life – and accept your new culture – to be successful and be what God wants you to be.

So, that’s my plan. Embrace change. I hope you’ll adopt that philosophy with me. We must trust that God is in control, well aware of the changes, and that He is working all things together for the good.  We must be honest and recognize that change will challenge us. But we must not be surprised by it.  We must not resist it bitterly. We should inspect the changes that occur, and look for God’s hand in them.  He’s there, in the midst of the changes.  And He’s always with us.

Sure, I backed up some of my data, but I’ll still be loading programs and tweaking settings for days.  But I am embracing this now. My computer will be better than ever!  And it will also be backed up!!!

Lon