check out what my friend jeff and some of his cohorts did in his east atlanta neighborhood.  so cool.   three minutes. that’s all.

be love.

i am not naturally a morning person, but when i wake up, i’m up and alert (typically).  sometimes i use sleep aids like lunesta or in really bad seasons, clonazepam, to help me sleep.

with the lunesta, i know i will wake up exactly 7 hours after i took the pill.

last night i took a lunesta at 9:10 pm, knowing i needed to be awake by 4:30 am in order to be out at our dickson campus by 8 am.  since it had been a while since i’d had a lunesta, i set two alarms.  however, 4:10 rolled around and i’ve been wide awake for the last twenty minutes.

since a lot of you are church staff members or volunteers, i was wondering…what time do you wake up on sunday to do your church thang?

i had been out of church for a good part of five years, involved in many things i shouldn’t have been involved in. my best friend and i had just moved from dallas to kansas city and i started crushing on a hot guitar player named chris. his band was playing at a church so we decided to go.

something happened in that church. i thought it was a panic attack but it ended up being god blowing my face off in a very clear way, calling me back. i hid in the back of the room behind a partition, trying to keep my heart rate under 250 and prevent myself from hyperventilating.

a very spunky girl with bright red hair came up and out of nowhere, asked if she could pray for me. just what i needed. another religious crazy person. at 21, i had vowed to keep anyone religious far from my heart. however, i obliged. she prayed for things nobody would have known about, including my future involvement in ministry.

over the course of a few months, she suckered me into volunteering in that church’s youth ministry. a year later, i was hired on full time, and now, almost five years after that church-induced panic attack, i’ve been in full time vocational ministry.

in that time, we’ve both gotten married to the loves of our lives (she was my maid of honor) and have moved miles away from our families. me, only to nashville but her to south africa, where she and her husband feed babies and buy food and love the least and the dying.

she lives and breathes in life and death all the time, and she had a post today i thought everyone should read.

go say hi to my friend kristi. give her a hug. she is in the trenches and more faithful to being obedient than probably anyone else i have ever met.

visit kristi’s blog here.

it may sound like it from what i’ve written before, but i’m really not about trying to pass the buck. i realize leaders have a responsibility to find accountability and talk about their issues.

but what is it that makes leaders feel unsafe to share sin in the church world?

why did hundreds of pastors and church leaders who took my mad church disease survey last year say that they were afraid of accountability, or that they have it but they lie in that relationship?

what can we do to make people feel less judged and more loved when they confess?

that fear holds so many people back methinks.

sometimes people get busted. and sometimes people confess.

either way, it seems that a lot of the time, those people don’t receive grace.

i think of john edwards. kind of busted, and kind of confessed. the healer song guy confessed. and yet, a majority of people just drag them through the mud or cry about how disappointed they are.

i will never forget two separate days in my life when i had to walk through dealing with serious confessions.

my former boss, a pastor, and very good friend confessed quickly to an affair he had with another very good friend of mine. yes, it felt like my heart had been ripped out but surprisingly, i felt unexpected joy (??!!) because i knew he had just taken a step closer to freedom and restoration.

two years later, another friend, who was almost like a father figure to me and my pastor confessed to his long term affair. my heart broke, but again, i still found some very random peace knowing that someone else was walking toward freedom.

there are obviously consequences and pain that come along with confession…i mean, when you confess, obviously you’ve screwed up somewhere along the journey. and sin does break the heart of god and causes problems in relationships. sometimes it’s even impossible to mend those human relationships.

people will let you down. i’d like to challenge you to suck it up a bit when you’re hurt or disappointed by someone who’s fallen.

instead realize that their confession is actually a huge part of them becoming restored. it’s a huge step toward holiness.

and that should be celebrated.

what makes the american church stand out from the american culture?