I didn't know the kid from the "Wonder Years" played basketball!

Intensity.

That’s what happens when the commanding officer calls his or her platoon out and moves them to another level.  Or when the coach builds a plan to utilize the strengths of the team in an effort to win the game and ultimately, the championship.  Or what happens when a leader builds a plan to take his tribe through a new open door of possibilities.  Or when a pastor calls the people in the church to move out of Ur.

The platoon or the team or the group or the church begins to feel stretched and intense and insecurities come to light, and all the good and bad of the group floats to the top for all to see, and the question remains, “How do we handle the good and the bad now?”  Or perhaps a better way to put it is…

How do we handle the intensity?  Peyton Manning or Brett Favre?  Kobe Bryant or Allen Iverson?  Ulysses S. Grant or Leonidus Polk?

In my middle school years I played basketball for a small Christian school.  I remember one night in 8th grade at the York School (our home ‘arena’) we were playing another middle school rival known to us only as Stateline.  The Red Machine came into our home and I figured we would beat them, because I thought that of everyone we played.  That night the game was close (tied at half) and then they took the lead by 5 with a minute to go.  Their lead was still 5 with 14 ticks left on the clock, and with that amount of time remaining, I brought the ball down the court and launched what felt like an NBA 3 pointer into the air.

Now I move to present tense for the play by play.

Thankfully the ball swishes through the net, making one of the most beautiful sounds ever made in history, and the crowd goes wild.  Time out.  8 seconds left on the clock – they bring the ball in and we foul them.  Stateline goes to the line, and misses both shots.  We quickly bring the ball in, but in some freak of nature, we lose the ball and it’s Stateline’s ball under our basket.  We call another time out.

Intensity.

The coach gives us a quick speech about hustle and winning and getting the ball in the hole, and we head out onto the court, and I swear the point difference between the two teams is 3 points.  I’m standing at the middle of the key guarding my player in a mano y mano press, when the whistle blows and play starts.  The crowd is still cheering us on, and everything is kind of blurry, when out of nowhere the ball lands in my hands.  He throws it right to me.

I stand stunned, trying to figure out what to do with the allotted time left on the board, and I head for the 3 point line.  I wish I could end this story hailing myself as an excellent hero of this intense game, but alas, the Spirit of Brett Favre took hold of me (he started his career about 4 years later), and the referee calls me for traveling as I dribble (or not) the ball out of the key.

My return to present day and past tense.

To make matters worse, the point difference between the two teams was not 3.  It was 2.  So as I stood by myself about 4 feet away from the basket, all it would have taken was a layup.  It was an intense game, and intensity took hold of my body and spirit, but unfortunately the intensity controlled me, and not vice versa.

When a team or a platoon or a group or a church decides to move past where it has been, it gets intense.  But the intensity can’t control us…

We must control it.

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My head is spinning.

As I told you before this year is my dream year – the year I implement some of the ideas that have gone on in my head over the last several years.   I will tell you what those things are, but, alas, that is not even the purpose of this post.  Somewhere between Christmas and now, my beliefs about what God is going to do here at Fellowship have gone huge, and it’s going fast.

Fellowship Holden is building. (more on that on Sunday)

“The Splat” is coming.

Fellowship Worcester is not far behind.

And on top of all this, Fellowship will be pouring into Haiti in finances and people power.

Of course none of this has literally started yet.  It’s all in planning stages, but God willing, very soon in this year Fellowship Church will never look the same. And this is why my head is spinning.

A mentor of mine says, “A dream without a plan is only a wish.”  I never understood what he meant until recently.  He told me that all of last year when I talked of my dreams, and I just plugged him as somewhat of a realist.  He should get out and dream more, I would tell myself.  Then after I found out I had been accepted into Ben Arment’s dream year, I made a plan to accomplish some of those dreams.  Without having spoken a word or having written a recent email to Ben, I just made a plan.  Certainly I could have done this beforehand, but something about this transition and 2010 and acceptance and people believing in me set me off, and a plan was made.

Then I sent my plan to my mentor, believing that he would think I was crazy and “settle me down”.  I was wrong.  He said this plan looked great and we may need to be fluid and changeable in regards to the plan, but it could be done.  Then he reminded me of the words he had spoke so many times before, “Marty, a  dream without a plan is only a wish.”

For the first time I got it.

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I’m reading through the Bible in 90 days right now.  I finished the Pentateuch yesterday.  One interesting verse I ran into a few days ago says, “If the prophet predicts something in the Lord’s name and it does not happen, the Lord did not give the message.  That prophet has spoken on his own and need not be feared.” (Deuteronomy 18:22 – NLT)

So in scripture when things were destroyed, like say the world or Judah or even evil, cannibalistic, homoerotic places like Nineveh or Sodom (My Sunday School teacher had a terrific imagination), typically those things were foretold by a prophet of God or even an angel of God who came beforehand and warned people that they have time to repent before God acts.  Now before you get all bent out of shape that I’m making light of the OT, please know that I believe that these things did happen and that God, though He is love, is also a God of justice.  And I believe there are plenty of times in Scripture when God reacts immediately to people’s individual sin.

But I can’t find a time anywhere in Scripture when a tragedy of epic proportions happened to a group of people, and a prophet of God reacted with “I told you so.”  “You know, I’ve been preaching for years and years about God and who He is, and now this tragedy happened, and I’ll tell you why it is, because of the way you acted. I told you so Sodom!  I told you so  Judah!  Now God got ya!”

No, welcome to the modern world of reactive prophecy.  We don’t actually have to prove that we are speaking for God, we can just talk about stuff after the fact.  Oklahoma Bombings.  September 11th.  Madrid bombings.  Tsunamis.  Hurricanes.  It’s easy for us to speak of why God did it after the fact, isn’t it?  Parents, this makes for an amazing child rearing technique.  You share with little Johnny that he shouldn’t touch the hot stove, and then when he ignores you, bring it up again.  Amidst the pain and bruising on his hand, at the moment when he’s writhing in pain,  feel free to bring a “You should have listened to me.  If you had listened to me, your hand wouldn’t be red and your skin would still be on your hand, and you wouldn’t feel the pain that you do now.”

The truth is, if God wanted you to speak to Haiti, Mr. Robertson, I respectfully ask you to consider the fact that he would have asked you to do it a month or two ago.  Yesterday was too late.  The pain was there.  The lives were lost. The homes were destroyed.  And now we pray that we all learn something about life and love and God.

But we don’t say or even infer, “I told you so.”

Please donate to help Haiti here.

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For years I’ve known I’m an ideator, but many times, the fact that I wasn’t a good executor of those ideas led me to sit on several of those good ideas like the devil can sit on a tack.  2010 is different.  This year provides me the execution skills (no, I’m not the guy with the black hood walking around with the ax) that have caught up with my Ideation, and wallaa, look out world.

I have a new coach, a great team, a set of amazing dreams in line with the vision of the church I pastor, and a great big God who has given me much to risk, because after all, it’s not mine to keep, it’s His to do whatever he wants.

This year is going to be amazing, crazy, and I hope I won’t be the same person I was when it started.2010

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This last Sunday at Fellowship, I laid down a challenge:  The “Love Spreads” challenge.

It’s based on the premise that love is always a better choice than pride, and always impacts our world more positively than it’s “p” word counterpart.  So I laid down the challenge to our church that for one week, we would make every effort to communicate everything we do in love.  Because many times we find ourselves immersed in bad habits of communication, it’s easier to explain in the things this excludes.  This means:

Sarcasm
Negativity (that is not needed to express a valid point)
Bitterness about another person or a negative circumstance (like someone who does something “stupid” or an electronic device that wont do what you want it to)
Joking around which tears down and busting
Talking to someone with malicious intent about someone else
rolling of the eyes when someone’s name is mentioned

While this is not an exhaustive list, I’m interested to see how it’s going for those who accepted the challenge, or if this is the first you’ve heard of it, what you think about the challenge in the first place?  I most certainly have failed a number of times, but I’m still working on it.

Are you willing to “spread only  love” for one week?

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