church at watershed

that’s right!  our boi nate eckhart is the winner of the toms and element shoe and board drop contest.  he found out yesterday that he will be going to africa in 6 weeks to help give new shoes and skateboards to tons of children in need.  i am going to try to stuff myself into his luggage so i can go too!!  there were a lot of entries for the contest, but i have to say that when we finished the video, we knew he’d win.  i am so proud of his heart and his hard work to make this happen.

i truly believe that he had the best reason for wanting to go on the drop – the only reason he bought his skateboard was because it would help a kid in need, because it would keep a kid off the streets and increase his/her chances of remaining drug free.  that is the whole point of what toms and element is trying to do.  nate, you deserve this trip!!!  go put shoes on the feet of Jesus and give him a skateboard!!  we love you and are proud of you.

can you say we’re digging a well in rwanda?!  that’s right, give fest happened just this past saturday at roger reynolds hilliard municipal park in hilliard ohio!!!  i have to give major props to the watershed ladies that planned and pulled this thing off – you guys did a fantastic job.  thanks to all who came and served and to those who donated items for the silent auction.  as of right now, we have raised about $1200, and we are leaving the give fest site up for anyone who wants to give and didn’t get the chance to do so.  you can link up from here and click on the egive button to give online until august 31st, so hurry, hurry!!!  no, seriously…go there now!  thanks to jared mahone for an amazing concert!  thanks to just about every pizza shop in hilliard that donated pizza for those who came to participate in give fest.

if you missed give fest this year, you missed a great time and an awesome opportunity to show love to the people of rwanda.  about one sixth of the world’s population has no access to clean drinking water.  that is 1 billion people!!!  look at the number…1,000,000,000!!  thousands of people died every day from dysentery from unclean drinking water.  many of us in the U.S. just go to the store and grab some pepto, but so many others do not have that luxury.  we want to be part of something that changes that fact.

we did not do this to get publicity for watershed.  we did it because we believe that people who follow Christ are supposed to usher in his community into this world.  we do this by living the way God always intended things to be.  we bring heaven to earth – sick are healed, blind see, and the good news is preached to the poor!  digging a well in rwanda is a small way of bringing heaven to earth and ushering in a little bit more of the community of Christ.  those of you who worked, gave, or came to give fest were all a part of that!!

in addition, we had some food (some is an understatement) left over after give fest, so a few loaded up whole pizzas and delivered them to the homeless in downtown columbus.  that is what we are called to do…bring heaven to earth.  thanks to all who made this happen.  i am looking forward to the 3rd annual give fest in 2010!!

if you don’t know toms shoes, go to the bottom of this page and click on the link to their website under “visit our friends” before you continue.

toms shoes is a company that gives away a pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair that is sold.  they teamed up with element skateboards to do the same thing with a really stinkin’ sweet looking board.  nate eckhart from the watershed crew bought one of these boards for the simple fact that a kid in need would get a skateboard.  that may sound odd to you that a kid in need would need a skateboard, but the fact is that there are tons of kids that don’t have much of anything at all, and the street offers mostly violence and drugs.  kids who have skateboards can go to the parks in their area where some organizations offer camps and such in order to keep these kids off the streets and give them something fun to do so that they don’t get involved in drugs and crime.

now, toms and element are heading to south africa to drop off all the free boards and shoes that they have stored up, and they have put together a contest for 2 lucky people to go with them on the drop.  contestants could either write an essay or shoot a video to tell why they want to go on the drop with toms and element.  i might be a little biased given my friendship with nate, but he made a video that freakin’ rocks and i wanted to make sure that everyone sees it.  if you don’t know nate, then you don’t know one of the most loving people on the planet.  he has a huge place in his heart for kids, especially those in need.  honestly, both he and marcy (his wifey) are some of the most caring people you will ever meet.  he works to help people acheive health and fitness for a better life and she is a nurse in the surgical intensive care unit where she cares for people in the worst stages of their lives at times.  i am glad God brought them to our community and i wanted to make sure that watershed supported nate on his contest entry – which by the way it think he should just pack his bags now!!

here’s the video…

i (luke) woke up this morning with a cool breeze blowing through my window.  i got up and began to get ready for work like i usually do and stood before my closet ready to pick out my clothes for the day.  it took me a couple of minutes to decide what to wear as i sampled through different shirts in my head and how they might look with different styles of jeans.  wow, what a blessing it is to be able to do that.  i next moved to my breakfast cabinet to decide what cereal i would eat (yes, i have a whole cabinet just for cereal).  another sweet blessing.

in my life, i have the blessing to pick and choose between all sorts of options; food, shirts, shoes, etc.  and basically anyone reading this shares in the same blessing.  but lately, this blessing has begun to haunt me.  we all pick and choose right, and im not just talking about food or clothing.  im talking about scripture, the words of God that we see on pages of our bibles printed in black and red.  we, readers of the bible, have decided what passages work best for us, and what passages we want to ignore.

lets examine how we do so.  take for instance exodus 20:14, “do not commit adultery”.  seems pretty simple right?  you don’t have to be a christian to understand or even believe in the validity of these words.  so believers in Jesus as well as nonbelievers look at that passage and take it literally.  God said it right?  so why not live by this command?  what about the passage in john 14:6, “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.  no one comes to the Father except through me’”.  practically any evangelical christian would look at this verse and say, “yup, heavy J is right, if you wanna get to heaven, gotta ask Jesus for forgiveness, and thats your entrance in.  heavens’ gates just swung wide open.”

but what about passages like the rich young ruler.  in luke 18, a rich man runs up to Jesus, states that he has kept all of the Lord’s commandments since he was a child, and wants to know how he can inherit eternal life.  we have all heard this story.  now to the controversy.  is anyone flinching yet?  Jesus looks at this man and says, “sell all of your possessions and come follow me.”  can i say that again?  ”sell ALL of your possessions.”  does this verse mess with the heart of anyone?  is the holy spirit moving you right now?  we as believers, primarily us in the good ol’ U.S. of A, look at this verse and glaze right past it.  if scripture does not comply with the way we want to live our life, then we put it on the backburner, simply forget about it, and pick and choose what we want to take literal.

so are we to take every verse literal?  no, i do not believe so, because that’s not the point,  but i hope that we who read the bible see that many times we get caught up in picking and choosing what makes us happy and comfortable, and WE prevent the Holy Spirit the right to work in our lives, when maybe there is something huge that he wants to do with you, maybe something along the lines of having you sell all of your possessions, abandoning the comfort of your lifestyle and relentlessly following Jesus…  or is that even an option?

in an age of philosophical skepticism and theological cynicism, added to a culture where relational infidelity is celebrated in all areas of media, it is no wonder that “trust” is a word few people would say can truly exist. betrayals wreak havoc on the lives of all people from young to old.  we have learned at a young age that you can’t trust anyone and so we build up walls to keep people at a distance.  we do the same thing with God.  in fact that is the one thing God has wanted from us since the beginning.  he created us for relationship and love, and the one thing he wanted from us was trust.  think about it, he placed the pinnacle of his creation, made in his image and breathing his breath of life, in a garden, and gave us all we needed. he only asked us to refrain from eating the fruit of one tree.

the problem came when the serpent entered the scene and deceived eve.  it wasn’t that she didn’t know about the fruit or what God had said to do that made her susceptible to the serpent’s deception, it was that he planted a seed of distrust in eve.  the serpent was able to make eve think that God was keeping something great from her.  he made her think that God was a liar and she fell for it, but God cannot lie.  he didn’t lie when he said that humankind would die if we ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  we did die.  we died spiritually by becoming separated from God and we all die physically.

the point is that when it comes to trust, though we may not be able to trust others because we are all broken, we can trust in God.  God gave us his scriptures so that we could know him and come to trust him.  he has taken thousands of years to prove to us that we can trust him even though his ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts.

God told abraham that he would give him a son, and when he was 100 years old abraham’s wife, sarah who was 90, gave birth to their son Isaac.  God told moses that he would lead the israelites out of egypt.  he told the israelites in the wilderness that he would feed them daily with manna, but only a day at a time – and when they gathered enough for 2 days except on the day before the sabbath, it got all nasty and had maggots in it.  God told the children of israel that they would take the land of canaan.  God said that if the people of israel followed the torah, that he would bless them, but he would curse them if they did not follow the torah.  God did everything he said he would do just as he said he would do it.  God proves himself faithful every time…every time.  the question becomes, will i trust him, will you?

our dress code is pretty simple – wear something! there is no need to go outside of your comfort zone when dressing for one of our experiences. come as you are. most people wear jeans or shorts.