the week that was

here's an update about our week.  it has been a good, full week of fun and study.  we switched out jobs early in the week - while one of us spent time with isaac, the other studied and planned for our speaking engagements in july.  lots of reading was done and isaac saw shrek 3 at the movies with sherry and he took geoff to scienceworks (a hands-on natural history museum for kids - here he is creating a sculpture for a public space and forecasting the weather).

we have been reading through an amazing book called, "The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible's grand narrative" by Christopher J. H. Wright.  we've also thoroughly enjoyed "God Next Door" by Simon Carey Holt and reading Matthew Sleeths book (again!), "Serve God, Save the Planet."  We've also been looking through "Affluenza: when too much is never enough" by Australian economist Clive Hamilton.   at the back of our minds we're still working over the significance of the remarkable beauty of the trinity outlined by Dennis Kinlaw in "Let's start with Jesus: a new way of doing theology."

all these books have been very helpful in our thinking about how the people of god might be motivated, empowered, and formed by god's mission of love and justice in the world.  loneliness and the lack of 'place' (holt), rampant consumerism that sponsors discontentment (hamilton), and the destruction of the planet by humans (sleeth) all point to the desperate need for the kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.  god's story of self-giving, outwardly oriented love seems to be the only narrative up to the challenges of our age (wright, kinlaw).

friday was a great end to the week as we had the chance to spend all day in the city.  isaac spent the day with his poppa, grandma, and uncle brad and we caught the 6:16am train to flinders street.  at 9am we meet simon carey holt for coffee and toast at 'mr tulk's' (the coffee shop attached to the state library).  simon was wonderful company, remarkably gentle and kind, and rich with insight about mission and theology.  He also had the good sense to marry a woman from the United States so we loved sharing our cross-cultural marriage stories and finding a great deal of commonality in this uncommon pairing.

after 2 hours of stimulating and encouraging chat we left simon to his reading and wandered up to the urban seed den to meet with marcus kernow and chris lacey.  these guys (along with many others at urban seed) have lived their way into an incredible expression of kingdom service and advocacy.  urban seed is the kind of thing we would dream communality would grow into. sitting with these two and hearing the stories of urban seed was like finding a family member you didn't know existed on the other side of the world.