Perfect Summer
Podcast Rewind, Ministry Foundations, Fighting Despair, and Car Pie
Welcome back!
Our kids have officially started counting down the number of school days left in the year (13, counting today, if you were curious), so summer must be right around the corner. Their smiles get bigger each day as the number gets smaller, and they look forward to the freedom and fun coming their way with that last carpool pickup.
I’m excited too, but I also feel the pressure rising. Mabel, our oldest, has a babysitting gig lined up for most of the summer, which leaves me solo with two wild boys to wrangle most days. While they’re prepping for freedom, I’m scheming for a plan and a routine. How can I organize each week to ensure that they’re getting outside, moving their bodies, knocking out chores, keeping math facts in their brain, and eating something besides goldfish and frozen pizza each day? I don’t have the answers yet, but I’ll keep you posted as I crack the code of THE PERFECT BOY-SUMMER (patent pending).
Where’s this pressure coming from you might ask? It’s certainly not from them. They’d be happy to play Fortnite all day, with the occasional trip to the pool. It’s not from Annie. She’s not a pusher, and still has the scars from playing the perfect mom when I was doing full-time ministry. No, most of the pressure is from myself. I want them to have the best summer. I want them to love spending all this time with me. I want them to forge the bonds of brotherhood that will last a lifetime. This push for performance is entirely self-inflicted.
Thankfully, while feeling this weight to get it all right, I finally cracked open a book I’ve been sitting on for awhile. My pal, Jeremy Linneman, released Pour Out Your Heart a few weeks back and was kind enough to send me a copy. I initially thumbed through the intro, but it got tossed on a pile as I was in the middle of other books and projects at the moment. Looking back, it was God’s good gift that I delayed diving in. His intro and opening chapter were the perfect balm for my pressure-driven mind this week.
As long as I’ve known Jeremy, he’s been a prayer guy. He modeled prayer for me, first as a friend, then as a pastor, and later as a force of encouragement from several states away. He’s also proven to be a good writer, and if he wasn’t a great pastor I’d say he may’ve missed his calling as a sports writer somewhere along the way (Fidelity Sports for life!). He uses all his pastoral gifts to great effect when writing about prayer here.
In this opening chapter, Jeremy paints a beautiful picture of what it looks like to embrace both the beautiful truth of the gospel, and the relational presence of God. Obviously, when we’re talking relational presence we’re talking prayer. So what then should prayer look like? He begins where Jesus does, showing us first what prayer shouldn’t look like. In Matthew 6 Jesus calls the Pharisees hypocrites, praying loudly in front of others to draw attention to themselves. Instead, Jesus invites us to pray quietly to our Father with no one around so that our focus might be on him. The Father will hear those prayers and reward us (Mt. 6:6).
It’s this strong emphasis on God as OUR Father that’s so striking. Obviously, Jesus is God’s son, but he functions as our Father as well. Through Jesus, the Father has adopted us into his family, and longs to draw near and be in relationship with us. He loves us, and that love is made clear by his gift of the Spirit to us who believe. God invites us to pray to him as his children. We can cry out to him simply as Abba.
Linneman put together a picture of what a life marked by childlike spirituality might look like. How does someone living in this reality think God sees them? What’s their posture toward others, the church, their time, or even their suffering? As he works through this childlike spirituality, an image emerges of a life that most believers long for. A life that flows out of an identity as a child of God, trusting that God loves them completely, loving and serving others, present in relationships, finding rest, content to be with Jesus, longing to spend time with the Lord, and learning to trust him more deeply.
On my best days, I experience some parts of that reality. But most of the time, if I’m being honest, I feel more insecurity in those areas than I’d care to admit. It’s easier for me to be affected by my own successes or failures than it is the finished work of Jesus. Instead of resting in the Father’s love, I’m tripped up by my own failures as a father. Rather than finding joy in serving others, I chase joy for myself wherever I can find it. It’s what Linneman calls an “insecure spirituality.” He’s got a list for that one as well, and sadly I was pretty familiar with it.
It’d be easy to forget this is a book about prayer, and just start working on to-do lists to move ourselves from insecure spirituality toward childlike spirituality. It might even work for a few days. In the end, chasing that shift on our own is a fruitless endeavor. We need God to step in and make a way, and in his loving kindness he provides.
Linneman closes by reminding us about the truth of who God is. “God is our good and loving Father. He has done all the work to prepare our adoption. Jesus is our atoning sacrifice. And now, he’s also our big brother, intercessor, and advocate. The Holy Spirit is God’s abiding presence within us and our promise of future good.” This is the truth that we must cling to. This is the truth that we must pray, trusting that what God has told us is true. We are his children, he loves us, and longs to be with us.
My hope is that as I pray these truths, they become more and more rooted into my heart. My pressure for perfection might dissipate to make room for the perfect work that Jesus has already provided. My presence toward my family and friends becomes more rich and inviting instead of distant and bothered. My comfort is found in the presence of God, not in whatever I’ve accomplished in a day. That my prayers might be a source of joy and strength instead of a final fourth quarter heave at the end of a long day. That I would hold on to the truth that I’m God’s child, and not just a cog in his cosmic wheel or an employee in his heavenly flow chart.
So what does that mean for THE PERFECT BOY-SUMMER? Well, for starters, I may need to change the patent description a bit. Perhaps it looks less like filling every hour of every day with to-do lists, activities, and marks to hit. Maybe it’ll be teaching my boys about their own sonship with the Father, and exploring what it looks like for them to take off some of the pressure to perform that I’ve inevitably heaped on their young shoulders. My hope is that it’s a summer we look back on as spiritually formative in their young lives, but I wouldn’t mind them dropping some PR’s in the pool either. Perhaps a bit of both? More to come.
Podcast Rewind
We started the Press Pause REWIND a few weeks back, taking you back through the first season of our pod. I wonder why we’d be highlighting old podcast episodes. Could it be that the long wait for season two is coming to an end? Might there be a fresh, new season coming your way soon? Perhaps around the end of the school year, when the season one rewind wraps up? You’ll have to stay tuned, but get caught up soon so you’ll be ready to dive in with season two when it launches this summer!
Ministry Foundations (Kids/Student Ministry)
“You probably know the feeling of serving on a team in which people meshed well, felt excited about their roles, and worked hard—all pulling together toward a common end. Meanwhile, few things are more dispiriting than a divided, disorganized, or dysfunctional ministry team.” The folks at Rooted always feature great writing, but this one somehow slipped by me last fall. Andy Cornett has an incredibly helpful piece for those supervising ministry teams, or bridging gaps between ministries (think kids and students working together). He writes frankly about what can be difficult in holding these positions, while also offering plenty of gospel encouragement along the way. I love his emphasis on our work being tied to our witness, and our to-do lists being being connected to our discipleship. All of it is integrated into the work of the Spirit in us as it overflows into our work/ministry.
Fighting Despair (Discipleship)
“As the pressure ramps up, so too does the thirst for relief. The Christian faith addresses this thirst in tangible and radical ways, most profoundly via its conception of grace. The gospel makes the audacious, enlivening claim that a hope exists which transcends our ability to obstruct or avoid it. God’s love is not only real, but targets the undeserving, forging a redemptive way forward where there appears not to be one.” I’ve been a fan of David Zahl and his work at Mockingbird for a number of years now, though I’ve never actually read one of his books. This little “why I wrote this” intro from him on his latest, The Big Relief, was enough to get me to order a copy. He identifies the despair that feels like it’s sinking in all around us at work, home, parenting, the church, and our own heads. Instead of wishing the despair away, he seems to be concerned with setting the grace of the gospel before us to offer some relief amidst the struggles we each face. Check out his pitch, and see what you think. I could certainly use more grace, and I’m guessing I’m not alone.
Car Pie
I think every dad has some secret that they eventually let their kids in on at a certain age. As far as I’m concerned, this story is the peak of secrets being passed down in families. Can’t wait for our next pizza night! “No babe. I’ll go pick it up. I don’t mind at all!”