Four Things I Learned This Week

First:
Living Streams Church family is amazing.
I received many emails and messages of encouragement regarding the countercultural sermons of the past few weeks. It has been wonderful to to be a part of a community that is hungry and thirsty for a vision of the righteousness of God. Our community reminds me of the Apostle Paul’s hope for the church in Ephesus. He did not want them to be “tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine.” The Living Streams family can see deceitful ideologies for what they are and are willing to obey God’s decrees, no matter what our culture says. Allelu!

Second:
I learned more about the mental health crisis our society is experiencing.
On Tuesday, our staff was taken through a training session by an attorney who specializes in mental health. He gave us a clearer picture of how vast the mental health crisis is, how widespread it is in the younger generations, and how important healthy families and the hope of Jesus are. He said the numbers were bad before Covid-19, and they are expected to be exponentially worse in the year to come. Lord have mercy!

Third:
I learned the church has historically done a poor job of creating a space for people going through deconstruction.
There is a healthy and important deconstruction we must go through, but it seems the cry of our culture’s heart right now is to make deconstruction the end instead of a means. It is true that God is always refining our faith and understanding. Good theological study is less about accumulating knowledge and more about filtering out false ideologies and misinformed beliefs. A crisis of faith is something the church should make room for, instead of ostracizing someone in that place and leaving them to process outside of the community. There is a point at which someone needs to be “turned over to Satan,” but there is another point at which someone needs to be surrounded and sheltered by the community of faith as they pass through the valley of doubt, disobedience or unbelief. God help us!

Fourth:
My wife is awesome.
Out of the many things she could do with her life, she chose ministry to kids. She feels that God told her what would make Him the happiest, and her the healthiest, is for her to teach 3rd-5th graders at Living Streams. She doesn’t just teach them the Bible and about Jesus—although she does that well—she also teaches them to live and love, have fun and care for each other, and how to TP people. Yes, when I say TP people, I mean going to a house with a bunch of rolls of toilet paper and throwing it over the trees and bushes, mailboxes and cars, and on the house, if possible.

I know this message has the potential of ratting her out. But she did take a bunch of girls from her group TP-ing. One of the girls in the group has been quarantined for the last ten years due to an autoimmune disease that she and other members of her family have. Since Covid-19, she has been Zooming into this Bible study group. When the group decided to go TP-ing, they made sure she could join in through Zoom. She even participated in the TP-ing by throwing toilet paper all over her brother’s room. It was a ton of fun, lots of laughs, and everybody bonded a little more.

Oh, one more thing!
I learned some things about cryptocurrency this week—but I’m still so confused I couldn’t add it to the list of things I learned.

Peace to you and yours,

 David