Wow!  Right when we least expected it, a great house went up for sale last Friday.  We had been looking at the piece of junk/BAD foundation house when a call came about a house down the street from the Pruett’s (the Challenge director and our temporary home until Nov.)  It was listed at a great price and looked really good.  So Julee, after stepping off a plane from a week in OK, and I looked at it the same day and made an offer the next morning.  It seems to be a God thing from location, to price, to provision and is more than we could have asked for.

Now of course it is not ours yet (we close March 3), but we are thrilled to have the opportunity to own a house in Boulder, where you get less house for more money.  This will put us just 3 miles from campus and students will be able to easily get to our home to hang out, pray, party, eat, be involved with family life, sleep, eat, etc.  And I can ride a bike or bus to campus, or even walk.  So because ministry here is so centered around our homes this is an answer to prayer and something I wasn’t sure could happen like this.

We appreciate your prayers as we move forward.  We are also very aware of how God has led us here and desires us to serve Him at CU and invest our lives in students.

Table talk Tuesday is continuing.  Today’s topic was “Why do bad things happen to good people?”  Of course it is hard to answer this in a few moments at a table - books are written discussing the topic.

We did have a good opening discussion.  First we began with what the question assumes.  This actually took a good bit of time as we brought up issues of who or what is the determiner of who is good or what is bad.   Without a solid basis the question doesn’t work too well.

The discussion moved to how God, in His love, gave us as people freedom to choose.  When Adam and Eve exercised that choice to choose against God, the door was open for good things and bad things to occur or be chosen to be done by people.

We also talked about how we just cannot comprehend all of God’s ways.  It does seem that He sees a picture we can’t and that this picture (just like pictures we can see) is made of the blend,or juxtaposition of dark and light and shading.  So even some hard things we experience are contrasted with a blessing, or understanding of God, or etc.

There is also an enemy contending against us.

Finally, the ultimate reality we are living for is beyond this life and that perspective can help deal with hard things and great things.  Sometimes, though, we just don’t know.

I didn’t intend to answer the whole question in this blog, but to let you in on a ministry moment.  If you have any comments, please add them.  Who knows where we may end up!

We had a good discussion yesterday at our staff meeting.  We were talking about one of our values which is example.  This principle can be found in 1 Corinthians 4:16 where Paul tells them to “be imitators of me”.  It is also found in 1 Cor. 11:1, Philippians 4:9, and 1 Thess. 1:6.

The principle here is that, as we invest our lives in people and their growth and maturity, we ask them to imitate us.  But imitate what?  Doesn’t this smack of arrogance - I have it all together so just copy me.  Or doesn’t it put the pressure on us to always measure up to some high standard?  Imitate every outward thing we do?  Imitate the intentional spiritual practices I do in the same way?  Are we trying to make little carbon copies of ourselves?

Well, we don’t think so.  We are asking people to imitate our faith and the heart attitudes we try and often fail to live out.  Imitate the way I am striving to live a life that glorifies God, that seeks to help others move closer to Jesus, that pursues intimacy with Jesus, that displays a desire to keep relationships clear and to serve others and to be transparent so that I can be fully known and fully loved, that asks forgiveness when selfishness reigns.

So that means we are not trying to make little carbon copies, but laboring to help others display growth in spiritual maturity in a loving community.   So we, like Paul, seek to be an example and ask others to imitate us.

Discipleship is a passing-on of what we have learned as Jesus’ apprentices.

As I have thought about one of the primary tasks of our ministry, I think that it is connecting people to Jesus. Not just passing on information, teaching some skill or other, playing, running people through a set of ministry programs so they have been discipled, rather setting an atmosphere where students can hear, see, meet with Jesus.

We might like to think ( certainly only in moments of pride) we can transform individuals with our vast ministry skill, but O how wrong we are. Jesus transforms people from the inside out and our ministry is only truly successful when students are connected with Jesus so that He is changing them from the inside out. Discipleship is helping people become apprenticed to Jesus in His school (to borrow from Dallas Willard).

So when we say that we are discipling students, first we mean that we are doing all we can to introduce them to close, intimate relationship with Jesus.