Solving the world's problems...

This is what Drew and I do when we get together and have a drink. You see, we are commonly misunderstood as men who just talk about sports. I mean, even if Notre Dame's football team should be ranked, I don't concern myself with being obsessive about that. And, just because the Cubs blew their chances at ending a 100 year drought, I have more important things to discuss with my Yankee-fan-friend. Okay, back to the reason for this blog post. Drew and I seem to always get going about this or that, and before you know it, we end the night with saying, "Well, we just solved some more of the world's problems, good night." In fact, just the other night we had ourselves another epiphany. We began to reflect a little on our time here (it has been nearly 3 months, holy cow!) and wondered how we were doing. Clint and Rachel were here recently and gave us some great encouragement. But, what tends to happen when you are unemployed and have no one else to talk to during the day, you begin to over-analyze, which is weird for me, right? I began to talk about our running group and that it seems like our conversations with people there have cooled a little in the past couple weeks. The obvious question I ask myself is whether it was something I said. But, if you know me, I don't say too much, so I figured it wasn't that. Then, as we dove deeper into our analytical minds, we came up with the hypothesis that maybe it was because they know we are here for a church plant and fear that we will try to convert them the more we talk to them, kinda like the Mormons that visited my apartment last week. Of course, this is not our purpose with the conversations we have. Sure, we want them to love Jesus and to experience His beautiful love and grace, but we also want to be their friends. As we continued this conversation, we started wondering what we can do to bridge the gap between thoughts of bible-thumping and wanting to befriend them. After careful logical deduction, Drew and I discovered that in the first few weeks at our running group, we were new. We were the ones who they did not know, and they did a terrific job at asking us about, well, us. We told them why we moved to Eugene, that we did not have jobs, and that we did not all live in one apartment. What we have failed to do is to return the favor. Initially, we did discover some things about our new acquaintances, but we have not done a good job at following up with them. So often, we make conversations about us, and not about who we are talking to. Whether or not we think they think we are trying to get them to our church thing does not matter. We realized as we sat in the cool Northwestern night that we need to engage them even if it means making ourselves vulnerable. Rob Bell writes in his new book, "Jesus Wants to Save Christians," that, "Remember, God is looking for a body, flesh and blood to show the world a proper marriage of the divine and human." As uncomfortable or awkward that it may be, it is our responsibility to love people as Jesus does. This means engaging them in conversation. There you have it, another of the world's problems solved, or that is what Drew and I claim at least.

Oh, a quick update: We had running group this morning, and through us being a little better at engaging people, we had some pretty good conversations. Thank God He helps us, because I could not do this on my own!

Derek (with compliments to Drew)