Matt Legere.

Yesterday Carie and I made a trip the Texas BBQ Co in Northboro, and connected with Matt Legere and his family.  Matt has a great spirit and heart to connect with people.  So I wanted to share with you three reasons you should get to know Matt.

1.  His Passion
All it takes is a few minutes of conversation to find out that Matt is not your ordinary guy.  He wants more for his life, more for his family, and more from God.  You can hear all that as he talks, and it’s not just good for him, it’s good for me too.  I believe the word for Matt  is contagious, and his passion is contagious.

2.  His stories
Matt told me this amazing story I’d like to share:  He felt God wanted him at one point to share some grocery gift cards with some neighbors in an apt. building.  As he prayed, some apartment numbers rolled through his mind and he wrote them down.  Then he sent those gift cards in the mail to those apartments, just sharing with them that if there was anything he could do for them, please let him know.  A few days late, a lady called him crying and telling him what an incredible encouragement that was and that is exactly what she’d needed that day.  Then Matt said something I’ll never forget.  He said that many people would take that and want to make a “gift card” ministry out of that, but it was just God using him and that’s the way He chose to do it at that time.  I should stop this section by mentioning that Matt didn’t tell me this story so I’d blog about it.

3.  His attitude through tough circumstances
Matt hasn’t had the toughest life in the world, but he’s gone through a lot to be where he is at right now.  He moved his family up here (wife, Heidi, and two sons) without any other family members within a few hours drive of them.  Their reason for moving was to help plant a church in the Framingham area.  Matt has been laid off in the past,  but God has been faithful through everything, Matt says.  And as I talked to him, I realized that there are certain attitudes that succeed through hard times, and then there are other kinds of attitudes.  Matt majors in the former.

So those are my three reasons.

I’ve been pondering the idea of the media “favoritism” (if this is what it is) towards Obama.  I’e also been thinking of what McCain’s response might be to this as time goes on.  Not because I have made up my mind on the candidates, but being a pastor, I’ve been focusing on leadership and responding to different situations I might run into as time goes on and how I might respond to these situations. This is a great case study.

Someone (or some thing) has a lot of momentum, and I want to exceed that momentum, or at least “catch up” to it; So how do I respond?  For instance, in the transition to begin as the pastor of Fellowship Church last October, and as a new pastor, I knew that I would not have momentum, no matter how good things were.  I knew that questions and doubt were the song of the hour, and I wondered how to respond.

I could have given in to the questions and attempted to please everyone, but this just didn’t seem to be appropriate.  “Pleasing everyone” is never the appropriate answer.  Neither is getting mad and expecting people to automatically get whatever message I’m trying to share with them.  Or to attack any naysers.

I hope that this is not the way that McCain responds to “favoritism” on the part of the media.  There is really only one good response – to stay focused on his message.  The message, in the world we live in, is the only way to win momentum and to win hearts.  It can be powerful, whether it is a right or wrong message, and the proper response in the world we live in, to defeat another message is not to “cry foul” about the other message or the other mediums that message is getting across, but to powerfully present your own message with passion, heart, and an unwavering drive to say what you believe needs to be said.

This is what I did (because I’ve been taught to do it), and I’m proud to say that momentum is building at “The FC”. 

If you had one message to share right now, (that I would not edit) what would it be?

This has been a Watercooler Wednesday kind of post

This last Sunday a young girl in our church, I would say about 19 or so, came up to me, with her parents and started chatting with me. They are new to our church, and I would almost say new to church, period. We were making small talk, when I asked her what she was holding.  I could see that it was a stack of pages and that on the front of the page, towards the middle, it said “BY: (Her full name)”

She told me it was a book of poetry and writing that she had done.  I asked her if I could look at it, and she hesitantly said yes, then told me I could keep it for the week,and could return it next week.  I accepted this offer, and this morning, made a point to read her writing.

I should probably mention that this girl openly struggles with some difficult learning disabilities.  It was one of the first things that I found out about her when I met her family in November, so I really didn’t know what to expect in the pages I was about to read this morning.

I took off the paper clip and began turning the pages, and for the next half hour was immersed, not so much in the technical excellence of the writing, though she clearly has some talent and time poured into her work.  But I was immersed in her writing because of the passion and the themes it projected.  Here was a girl who I know struggles with some serious issues, and never wrote one word about how unfair her life was, or why God would create her with so many problems, though It would have been perfectly understandable for me to read about this in pages written from her own words.

But her work was not going to be stifled by talk of pessimism and complaint.  She wrote of beauty and creation and our need to change ourselves, if the world was ever going to change.  She wrote of peace and love and of God, who expects certain things from us, like for us not to hate each other.  And the entire time, I sat at my desk in awe that what I expected to fill these pages was not there, and what I did not expect conveniently arrived in the vehicles of these poems and stories so that I could be inspired to keep doing what it is that I do.

I have a similar work of writing from Chuck, an old student of mine from Atlanta, Georgia.  Chuck was amazingly talented and did a project of writing and poetry in one of my classes.  He had the project bound, and gave me a copy, which I still have today, 11 years later.  He wrote of many of the same themes and challenges of the girl I read this morning.

I have the privilege of talking to Chuck every once in a while to this day, and even had breakfast with him a few months ago while attending a conference in Atlanta.  I wondered, though I never asked him, if he felt time had jaded him or made him better from the ideals he wrote about in his youth.

I also wonder this about me.  I had a book too.  A book and journal where I wrote my ideals and passions and ways that the world needs to change.  And when I think about Chuck and when I read this guy and this guys writing and when I read poems and stories like the ones I did this morning, I wonder, “Have my passions been limited to a pop song with great lyrics?”

Or am I doing something about it, starting with myself?

This post is for Watercooler Wednesday with Randy Elrod.