An Announcement

     We are moving to the Chicago area, into an intentional Christian community called Reba Place Fellowship (www.rebaplacefellowship.org).

     If you know me then you know that I like the idea of following Jesus in my ordinary life, and that I like the idea of living with other people and disciplining my soul to love people when it’s costly and inconvenient… I like the IDEA of it. I expect that actually doing this will be a good bit harder than agreeing with the notion.

     We feel God has led us through the discernment of friends, through our own prayer, though circumstances and the discipline of the Holy Spirit. Several times before we’ve asked God if we could leave this town and this church, but always we were detained by some thin suggestion that we should stay. Now we have permission in a sense, to go on. I personally feel like this is a step toward my life calling as I understand it – to one-day start a community.

     There is a lot of excitement in following the lead of God as we understand it*, but also some nerves and pain for leaving the people here that we have loved for five years. I have not moved away from a place without a predetermined exit date (graduations, or contractual jobs).

     Nervous because we don’t know people out there, we will need jobs (pray for us for those!) that pay more than we currently make, we haven’t dealt with a Chicago winter before, we leave Gonzo behind, Jedi is not going to know what’s happened… we just have our routine going for us here, and we’re leaving all that.

     I wanted to tell you people about our stuff. I want to talk about some of the disappointments from living here as well. I want to explain how I need healing, and how I think that Reba will help with that. Maybe if you’re interested, I’ll talk to you about it.

JWM

 

*Please know that I don’t claim to be fully informed that this is what God is telling us to do (that would mean you cannot contest it because “thus saith the Lord!” and well, we aren’t like that.)

**Originally posted on Josh's MySpace - sorry for the repeat info.