Integrate Your Sphere

With finals around the corner (next week) times here will be getting busy. Fortunately I have finished all of my writing for the quarter, and now all I have to do is read and work through notes. I have one final on each of the first three days of the work week and I am looking forward to having a bit of a break after Wednesday. It's time to buckle in for the weekend!

Whitney and I attended my staff Christmas party last night. We had a fun moment as we took in all of the conversations from 30-40 different people who work as a tutor. (Many of them being from Fuller Seminary.) While we often make jokes about constantly being surrounded by a bunch of seminary "nerds", (of which we also regard ourselves...) we feel quite fortunate to be around a place where so many people want to give their lives to loving and caring for people. I am often skeptical when I hear Christians talking about their desire to care for the oppressed and the marginalized. While the lingo is great, I feel like there is a component to this language that "cool" in Christianese right now. Sometimes I especially feel this spirit about people after learning more about the fruit in which they bear on a daily basis. This concerns me, and has often left me bewildered. BUT... I feel like I have been encouraged in my skeptical nature as many of the people around us here have REALLY lived a life that is focused on unselfishly loving and caring for the poor and the marginalized. There is a difference in the way that these people think and live. (I have a long way to go to enter into this type of thinking, and don't know if I ever will. (Even though it is so "cool" right now to be this type of follower of Jesus. May that always be the case!) I don't know if everybody is called to this type of love as a top priority. But I might totally be wrong...Or I might be right... Or I guess that I might be both!) Widows, orphans, homeless, other nations, our nation, they live to help people, and here is the key... without the sole anticipation of extending God's Kingdom and not their own Kingdom as a sub-component of God's Kingdom. This is their heart. This is there "centeredness". This is their ethos. I am energized by these types of people and feel so blessed to be in their presence on a daily basis here at Fuller. As Whitney and I closed the conversation, we remembered that while Fuller is wonderful, but that it is also a bubble. (As is everywhere else. For heavens sake, WE LIVE ON A BIG SPHERICAL BUBBLE!) A key, as I am processing through, is to integrate our bubbles to move into a deeper level of reality, and therefore a deeper level of the Kingdom of Heaven. So you wanna know what heaven is like?.??!?? Here is a five step systematic plan to learning more about the future (and hopefully the realized) eschatology of heaven... (This is for those of you that are modern/enlightenment thinkers. If you didn't like the set-up of the spew of random information from the last paragraph, then you might just be a modern thinker and this nice list is for you!)

1.) Accept that you live in a bubble.
2.) Accept that you live in multiple bubbles.
3.) Accept that other people live in bubbles too and that no one else’s bubble is the same as yours.
4.) Humbly recognize the strengths and weakness of your bubble. (Hopefully one of the weakness isn't an ignorance to the beauty of other bubbles!)
5.) Integrate your bubble!
6.) Be unified in the diversity of your bubbles as you humbly and generously say to one another... "Welcome to heaven! Can I get you a piece of bread and a glass of wine?"