How a TV Show Planted a Church

Have you ever had a movie or TV show that you connect with a specific time period in your life? I always identified with Gilmore Girls because the main character was the same age as I was. When I was a college freshman, most of the girls in my hall watched a ridiculous show called "Average Joe". It wasn't so much about the content of the show, but that we would all gather in a tiny dorm room for an hour every week and bond. I think we could have picked a better show, I still remember way more content about "Average Joe" than I should.

One of the shows that coincides with with milestones in my life has been So You Think You Can Dance (if you've never heard of it, the show is like American Idol for dancers). I am partly fascinated with SYTYCD because I am an awful dancer, so it's great to watch people who are talented where I am not. But what really stands out about this TV show is not what was on it, but what was happening in my life as I watched it.

The first season I watched was also the first summer I spent in Spokane, in between my junior and senior years. It was one of the first times I learned to love this area and not just tolerate it. My friend would walk over to my house or I'd go over to her's and we'd watch it together. If she was busy, I'd watch it with my Grammy and discuss who we liked the best. It was a show that guaranteed a weekly time spent with friends and family, which spilled out to the rest of the week and made that summer my favorite one in Spokane so far.      

I would watch it here and there for a few summers, but I didn't have a friend to watch it with every week, so I didn't watched a whole season again until last summer. That's when I started spending a lot of time with Kym and Jacob. A couple of months after it had already been decided that I would go with them as they planted a church, I was over there for dinner and we realized we all really liked that show. We decided to dedicate our Thursday evenings to SYTYCD. Every Thursday after work, I would head over to their house. I'd play with their two amazing boys (I always ended up getting my arms and legs "cut off" by their swords), we'd eat dinner together and then after the boys were put to bed, we'd settle down to catch up with the episodes they had DVRed.

It was during these times that we would talk about our church plant. Sometimes it would take us over two hours to watch an hour long episode. We'd pause it and end up talking for an hour about how we would want discipleship to look like, how we would want to raise leaders, where we would plant the church, when we would start a small group in the area and other things like that. At times, it was fun to sit around and talk about what would happen in the future and other times we could hardly stand that we weren't planting a church the next week.It was definitely fun and it was all talk, not quite any action.

A couple of weeks ago,  the 10th season of SYTYCD premiered. And again, after the boys were put to sleep, we went downstairs to catch up on the episodes. But it's different this year. We're watching it in Kym and Jacob's new house, in Airway Heights, where we're planting the church. It no longer takes me 20 minutes to drive across town to get home after we watch it, because I live 5 minutes away in the same town. Instead of pausing the show to talk about what we hope our small group will look like, we just finished up meeting with our growing small group. We didn't spend very much time talking about our church plant because we'll do that in a week with our launch team.

A year ago it was all theory and hypotheticals. Now it's happening for real. We are being stretched as we continue to follow God's calling for this community. Some details we have figured out, some we don't have a clue about and all of it hinges on God, not us. We simply chose to say, "yes" when He asked us to do something. 

What has God done in your life in the past year? What expectations do you have of Him in the next year?

Adage #19: Never give a baby a dog biscuit.

For three and a half years I worked at a large coffee chain. There are always entertaining things happening around you when you work in customer service. The level of entertainment grows exponentially when most of the people you are working with have gotten out of bed between the hours of 3:30-6am. I have no idea how they expected me to be awake enough to serve coffee to the crazy people that chose to be up at 4am. Most of the business at our store was from our drive through window. I have said some absolutely ridiculous things to people while working in that drive through. One time instead of greeting the car at the speaker box with the name of our store, I said, "Welcome to Wandermere donuts." This is a mystical donut shop that does not exist and this greeting led to hysterical laughter from myself, the customer in the car and everyone I was working with. Of course I said it again a week later because I was trying so hard not to say it.

Our customers really liked their dogs and loved when we gave them dog treats (although this is completely against health code, just a little FYI). There were some of my co-workers who loved giving dog treats to customers in our drive through. Shockingly enough, I was not one of those people, but I can appreciate a well behaved dog who isn't trying to attack me as I hand the treat over. I'm really glad that you love your dog, but I do not, especially when it's about to jump out of your car. But I digress, back to the story. One morning I was working with a particular co-worker in the drive through who is just altogether friendly and fun to work with. In fact, she trained me, so I'm a bit partial to her. She is also a better person than I. She was doing her due diligence and cheerfully giving every car with a dog their treasured treat. As I finished making a coffee beverage and I turned to hand it off to her, she looked back at me with a sheepish grin which immediately turned into fits of laughter. She explained to me that she had just offered a dog biscuit to the baby sitting in the back seat.

We often make judgments with our peripheral view. We notice the skateboarder out of the corner of our eye that is about to run us over and we get out of the way. We duck when we see a bird flying right at us from a a glance we caught while shifting our eyes. We make a decision without all of the facts. Our peripheral view is important to keep us safe, but it also can be misleading. Sometimes that bird was really far away or the skateboarder turned the corner and we look like an idiot jumping out of the way for nothing. Our descion turns out to be pretty ill-informed. Or we give a dog biscuit to a baby.

When we take the time to look harder at the peripheral view, we get better clarity and avoid some embarrassing situations. But it's impossible to focus on everything that comes our way, right? When we bring these things to the Lord, he can give us the things we need to focus on. He can help us heal from hurts, let us know we need to let go of the pain someone caused us, he can send us in a specific direction. He might take something out of focus and put something lying in the outskirts to the front and center of our attention.

Earlier this week I took a whole day to do a personal prayer retreat. To take all the stuff running a thousand miles a minute around my brain and dump it all. I put it in front of the Lord and asked him to help me sort through it, what's important and what's not as important? 

When was the last time you spent a significant amount of time in one day with your Creator? What has he been asking you to focus on lately?

Adage #9: Make sure to leave your glass slipper on the stairs before you leave the party.

I have loved the story of Cinderella since I was a little girl. It is the only movie I can tolerate watching over and over and over. I will watch any version of it I can get my hands on, no matter how cheesy it might be. So when my sister, my dad and I talked about what we would go see while on our trip to Europe this May, I only had one request: to see the “Cinderella Castle” (Neuschwanstein) outside of Munich. This castle inspired Walt Disney and it did not disappoint, the place looked like it was straight from a fairy-tale.

The castle was built by “Mad King Ludwig.” He built some gorgeous castles - these castles he dreamt up were not your run of the mill. They are everything you think of when you think fairy tales and princes and Disney movies. But Ludwig never finished Neuschwanstein Castle and never got the chance to begin construction on his next castle project because he was arrested for being an unfit king.

Ludwig was too caught up on building his magical castles to care about running Bavaria, . His whole story is very interesting and his death is shrouded in mystery (check out the links above for more info). As my sister and I were taking in all this information while on a tour of two of his castles, it occurred to me that Ludwig got so caught up in the magic of other people’s stories that he never lived his own. He built a castle based on Versailles because he wanted his own version and Neuschwanstein was based on the music of Wagner. He had the power to do incredible things as the king of Bavaria, but instead he chose to build castles and ignore what was happening in his kingdom.

I love stories: telling stories, hearing other people’s stories, and watching stories unfold on TV shows, in movies and in books. The life of King Ludwig reminds us that we can’t get caught so much in the fantasy of other people's stories that we forget how to live our own out. You are in the middle of an incredible story. You might be in the part where the characters are being introduced, maybe you’re building up to the big battle or maybe you’ve just won a huge victory. But you’re story coincides with The Story, the one God started in the Garden of Eden and ends with eternity (which is more of a beginning than an ending).

What are you doing right now to live out your own story?



Suggested reading:
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller
To Be Told by Dan Allender