Continuing the Conversation

Blurfing tonight, and I clicked through to two sites with posts on "conversation" that worked me over, in a good way.

I still believe in leadership. I see it completely different than the way I used to see it. But I see a vacuum without it. It's a God thing. He offers leadership to a community through person(s). I clearly see things and think about things that most other people in our community don't consider. Are they not 'mature'? No, they are just as much as I. Is there something wrong with me? No, I'm done feeling bad about it or assuming that everyone else should be thinking about these things constantly. It's just the 'gift' I've been given for this group of people. I'm not gonna argue hierarchy crap, 'cause it would take too long to re-explain language. I'm not about hierarchy, let's just leave it at that.

So, if I have been given something, designed a certain way by the Father and am trying to - as a part of the Body - help others find how the Father has designed them than I can't do that rightly by avoiding who I am.... Redefining leadership/gifts/calling/bodylife as opposed to acting like it is unnecessary is what I see as useful right now in the "emerging/fill in the blank" church.

- jason, the living home

This post jumped out at me (just taking these paragraphs out as "mine" right now). "Leadership" is so different for me, and I've had no one really to talk to about it. The place we're in as a family is good, and I'm getting to a point where these conversations have room to breathe again. But it's been a long time, a painful time, a trying time. I'm the one with the "gift" of asking questions no one else is bothered with, and I think it's a plus - not a negative, not an attack, but complementary and supplemental to whatever else is going on in the kingdom being as it's lived out together.

And then there's this piece from Gordon at Real Live Preacher: "We Can Talk at Starbucks". His conversation with his daughter is inspiring, because Trace is 9-yrs-old and beginning to ask questions and have his own "faith". I want to be a father who trains his kids, guiding them through their own stories, their own lives. If "questioning" is a gift, then I want to cultivate "listening", too.