at the refuge on saturday nights we have been spending some time in the “upper room” with Jesus in the texts of john 13-17 leading up to easter. these are some of my favorite passages of scripture. so challenging. so beautiful. as most of you know, i spend a lot of time thinking about “church”—not church as in a building and a meeting time and 3 songs on power point and a wow! sermon, but church as in the body of Christ, people on the journey, learning to practice the ways of love together. one of the things i always say is that “the church” is a place to love and be loved.
the other night at the refuge we talked about john 13 and how Jesus modeled sacrifice and serving one another in love as he washed the disciples feet. while i do think Jesus demonstrated to us the importance of a life of humility and servanthood as part of following him, i also think sometimes we miss out on the other side: a life of receiving love and care from other people, from God. we talked together how it is probably easier to give than receive. when we receive, sometimes there’s this feeling attached to it that somehow we are supposed to “give something back to make things more even.” we don’t want to be beholden to someone else’s love and care because it makes us so vulnerable. i can so relate to this. i am a much better giver than receiver. i am doing better at receiving, but it is utterly against my prideful nature and shows up not only in my relationship with people but also in my relationship with God.
receiving requires even more humility than giving. the tension between pride and humility will always exist in us as human beings, and i believe part of our spiritual transformation is the ability to love AND be loved. just loving, giving, serving, caring will not cut it and we’ll miss out on so much. just being loved, receiving, being cared for will not cut it and we’ll miss out on so much.
i don’t think it’s formulaic, that if we just learn how to do A and B and C, we have “loving” mastered (and oh how i wish it were that easy!) but i do believe that it is in true community that we have a place to practice. that it will be in relationship with others that we’ll rub against our tendency to harden our hearts, judge, protect, resist, run, hide, and do whatever we can to avoid the kind of intimacy that Jesus modeled at the last supper. and it will also be in relationship with others that our hearts get stirred in ways that we might not have ever imagined, that we’ll see Jesus in the poverty of our friends’ spirit, that we care in ways we never expected to care, that we are somehow supernaturally propelled to step in and love in places that somehow surprise us.
i think relationships with people and relationship with God are all tangled up. as we learn to receive from others, we learn to receive from God. as we love others, we love God. and as we love God, we learn how to love others. it really is a beautiful mess! and none of these relationships are clean and simple and definable and manageable. that night in the upper room i think that is what Jesus was somehow communicating—the tension between pride and humility will always exist and we’ll need his spirit to help us reconcile this tension and let God and others “wash our feet”, whatever that looks like, as we learn to wash theirs.
oh, we all know that is easier said than done! but thankfully, spiritual transformation is an ongoing journey, little experiences along the way where we notice God moving, prompting, challenging, changing us, softening our hearts, and revealing things that probably need revealing.
i’d love to hear some of what God has been stirring up for you lately when it comes to the tension between loving and being loved, giving and also receiving. let’s keep practicing together.
last sunday, february 8th, we had an evening of reflective stations to wrap up our series on hope. it was a beautiful evening of hope & connecting with God in all kinds of ways. several of the stations had questions about hope. here are some of the collective responses:
hope. it can mean all kinds of things for different people, but i think it mainly implies “expectation.” a possibility that maybe things could be different, that there’s more to this life than just what we see, that there’s something better ahead. many of us, for all kinds of reasons, are afraid to hope. we have seen many of our dreams dashed. jobs lost. relationships crumbled. addictions destroy. God-not-delivering-the-goods-the-way-we-had-hoped. so we hunker down our hearts and do whatever we can to protect it against believing that good is really possible—again, or maybe for the first time. we settle for loneliness. we settle for disconnectedness. we settle for going-through-the-motions. the thought of something more hurts too much. what if we make ourselves vulnerable and hurt again? what if we try and they all get dashed anyway? what if we risk and lose again? the “what if’s” mount, hope gets held at bay, and we miss out on the thing that Jesus kept pointing to over and over and over again—life now. love now. hope now.
at the refuge’s saturday evening gatherings we are walking through the 
but i want to remind everyone, remind myself, that the refuge would have been perfectly fine without this space. you see, the church is always the people, not a building. and people committed to God & each other, no matter where they gather—houses, coffee shops, golf courses, apartment buildings, weird rented spaces—are what create the church, the beautiful, diverse, wild and wonderful body of Christ. the conversations that happen during the week, the phone calls, the emails, the prayers, the tangible help & hope that gets passed on in big & small ways, the neighbors that are loved, the scriptures that are shared, the words of encouragement, the serving, the giving, the learning, the growing, the falling down & getting back up, the grace, the truth, Christ’s love made real—that’s the church. 
NOTE: this is a re-post from 
as you all know by now, i have a lot of issues with “church.” i love love love people gathered together in all kinds of ways to learn and practice loving God, our neighbors, ourselves. it’s the programs, the inauthenticity, the power b.s., the unnaturalness of it all that i can do without. i believe wholeheartedly, in every fabric of my being, that without community and deep connection with other people (whatever that may look like) we will never be able to live out the ways of Jesus and experience the fullness of relationship with God. i am fairly convinced typical church systems that feed inspiration addiction provide a false sense of spiritual maturity where learning “about” certain things becomes enough and we are never forced to actually be in meaningful intimate connection with the people we sit next to week after week. lives need to be rubbed up against other lives. that’s where the real action happens and we learn what it means to really love & be loved.
