This year (2009, in case you missed the turnover) will be choc full of landmarks for me.  My 10th wedding anniversary, my 10th year of full time music and tonight, the church I helped plant in 1999 (still my home church) celebrated it’s 10th anniversary.  My being at Malone University tonight meant that I unfortunately missed the celebration-gathering.  I’ve been receiving tweets and texts off and on through the evening that make me feel missed.  Knowing that I’d miss the actual event, I asked my wife to read a letter of mine to the people who have been a part of this 10-year journey.  Below is that letter:

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In a way it is fitting that I cannot be with you this evening.  Much of my relationship with this community has been marked by my absence over the last few years.  I am currently in Canton, Ohio where it is twenty degrees below zero.  I’m here for the same purpose I go anywhere; to announce that the Kingdom of God is at hand and that it would be best if we quit playing at life and, instead, lived it fully.  That is a quality I have valued deeply in our community of people; that we have chosen to embrace “life to the full.”

While there is far more to the celebration of this community than what I can collect in words, I wanted to share a few snapshots of what 10 years of being together has meant, at least as I see it…

-It has meant having had long memories and short accounts.
-It has meant knowing more about one another than we’re comfortable knowing at times, but still choosing to care.
-It has meant being known by another to a depth that we are uncomfortable with, but still choosing to trust.

-It has meant carrying the weight of another person’s life for a while when they could not walk in their own strength.
-It has meant sharing our strength when we weren’t sure we had enough for ourselves.

-It has meant joyfully forgetting who paid last for coffee or dinner.
-It has meant paying someone else’s rent.

-it has meant learning that we are blessed to become a blessing.
-It has meant buying a truck for our friends in Liberia, Africa.
-It has meant raising money on Facebook to provide a motorcycle for another Liberian brother to start his own taxi service
-It has meant helping our African brethren build a medical clinic, an orphanage and start their own businesses.
-It has meant telling children in the poorest parts of the world “I’m here for you.”
-It has meant telling High School and JR High kids in our own valley the very same thing.

-It means that many, if not most of the people on our speed dial or favorites lists are in this room.
-It has meant some late night phone calls bearing the worst news.
-It has meant some late night phone calls bearing the best.

-It has meant seeing the best in each other when we were blind to it.
-it has meant praying for healing especially when the sick and broken person no longer believed it for themselves.

-It has meant believing in the resurrection of friendships, of marriages and of whole lives.
-It has also meant celebrating those resurrections as resurrections and as miraculous.

-It has meant that “family” is a much bigger, much deeper word than we expected.

-It means we have seen something in ourselves and in each other that is more beautiful than we knew was there.  It is a beauty that makes each of our lives more colorful and more complete.  It is a beauty that provides hope for a humanity that has to learn live together in a smaller and smaller world. It is the beauty of a people who have chosen to to live faithfully instead of in doubt, to hope against despair, and ultimately to love “though the mountains fall, though the earth should shake, though the seas should roar with all the heartache, though our hearts should pound and our throats run dry.”  This is the beauty of the people of God, living in the way of Jesus and His Kingdom.  It is worth celebrating.

Tagged: church, Community, Ecclesia, justin mcroberts, Malone University