I am freezing here in Colorado!

 

Ice crystals on all the trees.  Pretty.

It is like we are living in the Disney Frozen movie!  Perhaps partially because today I’ll be fashioning a 3-foot “Olaf” combination cake/Rice-Krispie-Treat for Averi’s 6th birthday celebration and there just happens to be a 4′ backdrop painting of Olaf here, too, courtesy of Grand-poppa!  So besides actually being beyond-believable COLD, Olaf is hanging around my house.

{Big Frozen party Saturday!  Because Averi is 6!}

Um, The Broncos lost.

But didn’t Gavin do a nice chalkboard, anyway?

And I don’t like football anyway – how did I get sucked in to that horrible game?  But Payton Manning seems like an honorable athlete.  Here is a win, though – my friend Pearl carved a snow sculpture in her front yard before the game.  Cool, huh?

So Donald Miller opened {this} can of worms the other day

“I Don’t Worship God by Singing.  I Connect with Him Elsewhere.

“It’s just that I don’t experience that intimacy in a traditional worship service. In fact, I can count on one hand the number of sermons I actually remember. So to be brutally honest, I don’t learn much about God hearing a sermon and I don’t connect with him by singing songs to him. So, like most men, a traditional church service can be somewhat long and difficult to get through.

“So, do I attend church? Not often, to be honest.”

And when I read it, I thought, “You crazy guy – do you know what you’ve done???”  Because it doesn’t matter how many years of perfect gold star attendance pins you’ve earned, if you’re not showing up regularly now,  there will be trouble!

His post got more than 400 comments , a follow-up post from Mr. Miller, himself and several other bloggers chiming in on the topic.  These two are thought-provoking responses I read (but oh my goodness – there are many more out there):

Mike Cosper wrote about “Donald Miller and the Culture of Contemporary Worship” and this is a true saying, I know it.

“…Miller, like so many others, has said, “No thanks. Doesn’t work for me.” And in this sense, I don’t blame him. But his solution is no less tragic. His new liturgy will orient his life around himself or around his work, and these masters will be as cruel and disappointing as any mega-church or celebrity pastor has ever been.”

Jonathan Leeman (The Gospel Coalition) wrote an open letter, “Dear Donald Miller” and made some strong points without just launching an attack, thank-you!

“And here’s where the rubber meets the road: I don’t know how we can say we love and belong to the church without loving and belonging to a church.”

Finally, here is Donald Miller’s follow-up: Why I Don’t Go to Church Very Often, a Follow Up Blog where he answers some of the more critical comments with thoughtful explanation.

I will tell you I have stood firmly on both sides of the topic, depending on whether I was full-time church staff, honestly.  Yes, honestly.  I can make a great case for the importance of the Body of Christ not neglecting the regular gathering and meeting together for the purpose of encouraging each other (Hebrews 10.25-26).  But I have also been a part of local churches that could have been summarized, when I finally got honest with myself, with Paul’s cutting words to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 11.17)

“Your meetings do more harm than good.”

Now you know I was born a church girl.  You know my very first sentence, spoken freely and repeated with glee hundreds of times was, “I’m gonna go to church!”  And I think we (me, too) especially, us Western-Church types have botched it so badly.  We have made a law of church attendance, idols of pulpit-people and rock stars of worship bands, practically enacting a shunning if some one doesn’t thrive on a steady diet of programs and personalities.   We’ve beat people with the church-attendance-is-the-test-of-righteousness bat or we’ve produced slick services meant to entice and lure them in with our “cool.”  And maybe we have missed the point completely of the gathering – meaning we may actually be doing things wrong to begin with?

“His intention was the perfecting and the full equipping of the saints (His consecrated people), [that they should do] the work of ministering toward building up Christ’s body (the church…

From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” Ephesians 4.16

Nonetheless, while I find myself in a church-search currently, these words by Anne Ortlund in her book, Love Me with Tough Love, compose a life-guiding question (one I have asked myself many times over many years) in light of the way the New Testament describes what the Church was, and how it worked at its’ inception.   And the answer to it is important – way more important than just where you are on Sunday mornings at 9 o’clock!

“Have I placed myself so deeply within a living, functioning local body that I myself am functioning in all these ways, and so living as a well-rounded, healthy, contributing member of the Body of Christ?”

Something to think about, yes?

Retweeted by Jeanie Rhoades  02.03.14

T. S. Harris?@T_S_Harris· Feb 3  “The animated Church inhales God’s power and presence and is then able to exhale the embodiment of the risen Christ.”  @lensweet #mrinow

A deal you should not miss out on!

Hurry-just 99-cents for Staci Eldredge’s Becoming Myself: Embracing God’s Dream of You {click here}.  SUCH a deal!  Get it.  Read it.  Them come to  my house and watch the video series she put together because Ransomed Heart sent it to me!  Yayyyyy!  Who is in?

Amelie Belle’s Progress Report

She knows how to pack her own lunch box.  A+

She works hard.  A+

She makes her Nonna happy.  A+

In super “cool,” but slightly warmer news

We have been able to use our fireplace much more often this year.  Usually we just don’t because it’s too hot.  But this year?  Very nice.  Toasty.

See?  THIS is what happens when I don’t blog for over a week.  It all comes crashing out in a tumble of odds and ends.  Whew. 

The End.