That is indeed the question.

As for this latest week in the saga of when in the world will OGC get into its new building, the answer is, I am sorry to say it, not to CO.

However, we are making progress. Next week may bring an entirely different response.

New handrails got installed today. We have requested a final building inspection. It may happen tomorrow or Monday. At this point, that remains undetermined.

As for the site, that work in regrading the approach should get finished over the weekend. A surveyor may or may not have to re-shoot the elevations which could lengthen the process of approval somewhat but not beyond next week.

The civil engineer needs to get what they call record drawings to the city from which they make something called Mylars. That might take a week. All depends.

All of that to say that we have a chance of having everything done by next Wednesday or so and then it depends on the city to answer the question of questions – to CO or not to CO?

So here is the deal. We definitely won’t be in the new building this Sunday, May 20. I plan to recommend to the board on Monday night in our leadership team meeting that we hold off on our first “soft opening” until June 3, just to be safe. Actually I have an ulterior motive in that suggestion. Nancy and I will be out of the country from the 27th to the 31st for our son’s wedding. Those plans have been on the books for months. I never thought they would conflict with the opening day of our facility. Just can’t imagine missing the first Sunday we get to take possession so I will ask for grace to wait until we get back.

So now you know what I know. I choose to believe that God has been working behind the scenes all along for His glory and our good in these delays. The timing will prove perfect as far as He is concerned. How could I conclude anything otherwise after what I preached last Sunday?

All I know is that we are in for a splendid time in our new digs. I can hardly wait. Can’t thank God enough for the privilege of getting to do this on our watch.

The first time I truly understood the concept of grace was at the end of the spring semester of my sophomore year as an undergrad student at the University of Pittsburgh.  I remember the feeling of horror like it was yesterday.  The final paper was due and it was worth 50% of the final grade.  For a variety of reasons, I did not have the paper ready.  I deserved a failing grade for the paper and the course, which would cause my full academic scholarship to disappear.  Instead, at this “secular” institution I was extended grace by a seasoned professor who would open my eyes to a much larger truth: God’s grace is truly undeserved.

The elder brother inside is probably upset that I didn’t get the failing grade and learn my lesson.  Maybe that part of you could learn something like I did.  You might be wondering what happened as a result of his grace.  Did I continue my immature ways and repeat this pattern in other classes?  Or did I imitate Jean Valjean and change my ways as a result of his grace?  (You’ll have to ask me to find out.)

How many times have we withheld extensions of grace due to elder brother-like impulses?  “They don’t deserve it!”  “He should have known better!”  “I would never do that!”  Praise God that Christ is the true elder brother!  Romans 5:8 proclaims,  “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ dies for us.”

Let’s look for opportunities to extend grace to each other and trust God to use them for His purposes.

On Sunday toward the close of my Mother’s Day message, I inserted an acrostic using the word ABLE to help crystallize four practical application principles for making the journey from a place of resentment in our spiritual lives to one of true blessed contentment. Naomi (means pleasant or sweet) suffered so greatly from a battle with bitterness over all the hard providences of  Ruth chapter one that she requested a name change to Mara (means bitter) in keeping with her frame of mind. A root of bitterness springing up does cause trouble (Heb. 12:15).

I went over it fairly fast due to the time. Also, it wasn’t in the notes as I only came up with the idea early that morning. I thought I would review it here in the blog in case someone might have missed some or all of it.

A – admit your struggle. There is something of Mara/Naomi in all of us. This was a godly woman. She struggled as we all do. I personally find this encouraging. The Lord loved her enough to bring her through it graciously over time. It doesn’t do any good to deny feelings of resentment. Rather than run from the Lord, take those feelings to the Lord for His help.

B - believe the truth. Begin with the truth of the gospel. I love J. D. Greear’s gospel prayer that he unpacks in his book on the gospel. The first point goes like this: In Christ, there is nothing I could do to make You love me more; nothing I have done that makes You love me less. That last phrase is particularly applicable. Satan loves to accuse us when ingratitude and other sins take hold. When he does we must cling to the gospel and remember that our standing with God in Christ is not about our performance; it’s about His provision. We have become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Cor. 5:21).

Beyond that, believe the truth of exceedingly great and precious promises of God’s word that reveal His continual plotting for His glory and our good in every circumstance, even the difficult ones. Romans 8:31 stands out among them. If God is for us, who can be against us? Psalm 118:6 is a good one to wage the fight for joy against unbelief and resentment as well: The Lord is on my side; I will not fear.

L - look for the sweet providences a midst the hard. I spent a good bit of the message demonstrating how Naomi’s bitterness blinded her to all the good things God was doing even in the midst of her struggles. Calling herself empty when she had such a treasure in the partnership of Ruth was only one but perhaps the most obvious. Ask the Lord to help your eyes to be open to signs of His goodness that you might not be noticing, like perhaps a good friend sticking with you through your trial. I failed to mention this on Sunday but one way to help cultivate that discipline is to write your thoughts down in a journal. That can tend to focus concentration on things in a marvelous way.

E – engage in thanksgiving. There is no room for bitterness in a thankful heart. If you practice the art of giving thanks for the many providence of your life, it tends to keep resentment at bay. And when you can’t find even one, as a believer you can always give thanks for the gospel and the fact that God has made you part of His greater story of redemption and that, in the words of John Piper, your life and mine in Him is not given over to trifles.

His words were on this matter were so good, I will quote them once more here:

The book of Ruth wants to teach us that God’s purpose for the life of his people is to connect us to something far greater than ourselves. God wants us to know that when we follow him, our lives always mean more than we think they do. For the Christian there is always a connection between the ordinary events of life and the stupendous work of God in history. Everything we do in obedience to God, no matter how small, is significant. It is part of a cosmic mosaic which God is painting to display the greatness of his power and wisdom to the world and to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places (Ephesians 3:10). The deep satisfaction of the Christian life is that it is not given over to trifles. Serving a widowed mother-in-law, gleaning in a field, falling in love, having a baby—for the Christian these things are all connected to eternity. They are part of something so much bigger than they seem.

Are you able to make the journey from bitter to blessed? Neither am I. But He is.

At first glance one wouldn’t think John Lennon and John the Apostle would have very much in common. One, a self-proclaimed atheist and pop star, the other, one of the twelve disciples and author of more than a few New Testament documents. Though there are obvious differences, there exist some similarities. We’re going to quickly look at John Lennon’s Imagine and the John the Apostle’s Revelation and see what there is to be gained from both.

Differences
Okay, it’s obvious, but let’s state it. There are wild differences between these people and their work. This is the easy part to see and understand and doesn’t require much from us. Imagine puts forth the possibility of a utopia on earth through erasing the things that so often divide us as humans: religion, nations, class differences, etc.:

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too…

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can…

In the book of Revelation, John writes about a utopia on earth, too, but describes it differently, as in Rev 7:9:

“…behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands…”

Like Imagine, palm branches symbolize peace, but there are differences in people. Tribes, peoples, languages— the things that normally divide us are still present and are being brought together.

There is a difference in how this utopia looks, but also in its purpose. Lennon’s image is of world peace, sharing in our unity:

Imagine all the people living life in peace…
And the world will be as one…
Imagine all the people sharing all the world…
And the world will live as one

John’s image is one that includes this human-to-human peace, but also incorporates a larger goal:

“All nations will come and worship you [the Lord], for your righteous acts have been revealed.”  (Rev 15:4)

There is not only a difference between the purpose and vision, but also in how these two perfect places come into being. Revelation teaches that this world will not be enacted through what we do, but through what He will do, and is doing:

…and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” (Rev 21:4, 5)

In our worship of our Creator/Recreator God, we find the product of His mission an actual utopia here on earth, renamed as the new heaves and earth. If we think our national or economic differences are the ultimate roots of a lack of unity, the answer would be to remove those differences. Imagine tries to remove all of our differences and substitute a new religion, a form of secular humanism. But if we’re all the same, is that unity or merely a shallow sameness?

Revelation affirms the existence of some differences (race, national boundaries, etc.), but draws upon one ultimate difference: those who worship God and those who worship something else. Differences in humanity are more than accepted, indeed, cultural differences are celebrated, but only in the light that comes from the glory of God (Rev 21:23; 22:5).

For Imagine, this responsibility lies completely on our shoulders. It is entirely up to us to bring about world peace. Not an easy task (impossible, even?). Revelation affirms our responsibility and actions, but also teaches that ultimately God is solely responsible for bringing about His peace. This doesn’t relieve Christians of doing work, in fact quite the opposite. The comforting design of God’s sovereignty over all things gives us freedom to be human, to work and to live.

Lennon says we need to remove our idea of God for peace, the Revelator says we need to submit to the real God for peace.

Next week we’ll look at the similarities between the two works and see what Lennon can teach us.

One of the first ways to analyze a holiday is to look at the genesis of the official holiday. When we do, we see that it was really the brainchild of a lady named Anna Jarvis, who herself took the baton from her mother, Ann Jarvis. She originally wanted it to honor those mothers whose sons had died in war. It quickly became commercialized to the point where Anna Jarvis spent money to fight what it had become.

Looking to the pre-history and the actual reason Ann Jarvis began any celebration was she started “Mothers’ Work Day Clubs” to provide medicine for the poor, to inspect milk for children, and to provide nursing care for the sick and shelters for children with tuberculosis. When the Civil War broke, She felt there was a need for legitimate peacemaking. At that point, the clubs made a pledge that friendship and goodwill would not be a casualty of the war.

Now, if there is one value that I see as a distinctive of Orlando Grace it is peacemaking. So, I think that the original intent, at least, is something that we would value. But, of course, the mere facts suggest that the history itself is not enough to view, though it does give us a few positives (incidentally, positives that I have never previously heard).

While recounting the history of something is very enjoyable to me, it cannot be all we look at. As those who dwell in the past are stuck without a reasonable opportunity for success in the future, we must look at what it has become and what we should do with it.

Going back to my thoughts of high school, we tend to treat the holiday like it is a time to give some small, insignificant gift to our moms. We throw her something in the way of a card, a lunch, or a box of chocolates (that we, naturally, help her eat) and believe that we have leveled some cosmic playing field. The reality is that we may or may not take time to honor different people we appreciate during the year, but generally speaking women are the glue that holds the family together.

Moms are incredible things. To start with, we just wouldn’t exist if they didn’t take good care of us before we were born. In fact, while human, the one person Jesus made provision for in an immediate physical sense, while providing for all of us in a spiritual sense, was His mother. We need to be teach our children to be thankful for and bless their mother.

God even tells about His own comfort being similar to that of a mother. So we should definitely honor our mothers and Mother’s Day is as good of a time to make time as any other. I hope you are smart enough to do something (whether big or small) special for your mom on Sunday, but I hope more so that you create an environment where appreciation of the mothers in your life is a regular part.

Before this devolves into a discussion on the Regulative Principal, where we argue about what specifically we should do in church on Sunday, we should be excited that mothers are a gift from God, but mostly we should recognize that good mothers are one of the best tools God gives us to point to Him, and for that we can be immensely grateful!

I am really looking forward to our church getting one of these from the City of Altamonte at some point in the near future.

Our fearless building committee chairman gave me the skinny today about where things stand after almost another full week of trying to dot every “I’” and cross every “T” on our site to the pleasure and approval of our government inspectors.

The good news is that we are really close to finishing the building proper. We expect to have the handrails go in tomorrow. Hopefully first thing next week we will schedule another inspection on the facility and we pass. If and when that happens, then Ross plans to go to the city for that conversation with the powers that be that he talked about last Sunday. He will petition them for a provisional C O that would allow us to occupy our building while we finish up items on our site.

Speaking of the site, the man holes have been adjusted. They need to be surveyed and inspected. We thought that was all we needed to do in the way of finishing up outside.

However, yesterday the Seminole County inspector came back for another pass on the property and brought some friends with him. The list suddenly got longer. Apparently we have some sidewalk to tear up and re-position. And a portion of our entry drive needs to get taken out and regraded and paved again. How long will that take, you ask? Good question, but if we don’t get that provisional C O we are likely looking at the end of the month before we finally get into our new facility.

Sigh. Double sigh. Triple sigh.

How many cliches can I quote you. It is what it is. Good things come to those who wait. Murphy’s law. If we didn’t have bad luck we wouldn’t have any luck at all. That’s probably not the best thing for somebody with my theology to say.

Think I would rather stick with the Scripture in Proverbs 21:1.

The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will.

Just substitute inspector for king and you will get the picture.

As for me and my house, we will wait upon the Lord and renew our strength (Isa. 40:31).

How about yours?

The letter came today.

Voice of the Martyrs (Nancy and I receive their monthly newsletter and give as led to their ministry from time to time), fiercely devoted to serving the persecuted church across the globe since 1967, confirmed what I had already heard via the internet.

Executive Director, Tom White, took his own life last month. This husband, father, grandfather, and articulate voice for the persecuted (I know, I’ve read many an editorial by the man), himself once imprisoned for his faith in Cuba, did what to many, especially Christians, can only be described as the unthinkable. He committed suicide.

Not much is known about the circumstances. But, to VOM’s credit, they revealed that the day before his fatal choice, “allegations were made to authorities that Tom had inappropriate contact with a young girl.” Here’s what the writer of the letter speaking on behalf of VOM gave as his settled-upon explanation: “I personally believe that rather than face those allegations and the resulting fallout for his family and this ministry, Tom chose to end his life.”

What are we to make of this? How are we to respond?

I say let there be compassion. Only days ago I read in 1 Kings 19:4 of the great prophet Elijah’s plea, gripped with fear, for God to take his life as he fled into the wilderness to escape the threats of the evil Jezebel. God’s servants can and do know cavernous depths of depression. William Cowper, poet and hymn writer (he gave us, among others, God Moves in Mysterious Ways His Wonders to Perform) made multiple attempts on his angst-filled life. Believers do not escape the slough of despair.

I say let there be perspective. By that I mean providence perspective. I have no earthly idea if Tom White did anything untoward the girl in question. Of course that is possible. I admit, it doesn’t look good. But what if he didn’t? What if he was entirely innocent? What if the truth lies somewhere in between? Only eternity will tell.

But one thing is for sure. In interpreting the hard providence of dreadfully incriminating accusation, Tom White, who, from what I can tell, no one believes was a false professor of Christianity but rather a true believer, failed to count Romans 8:31 ultimately true for him – If God is for us, who can be against us?

Who knows how God was plotting for the man’s good through a Romans 8:28 kind of working out of things? And this cancer survivor and pastor of four churches over time does not say such a thing flippantly.

Naomi made the same mistake, an incomplete and inadequate interpreting of providence in her crushing circumstances in the book of Ruth. That is the subject of my Mother’s Day message this Sunday. I wish I didn’t have such a pertinent and recent illustration with which to work. But the truth is I do.

I trust the Lord will use it, the text, and my words somewhat to serve us all on the journey from bitter to blessed that will keep us from such a fate and oh so much more – deep, abiding, exquisite, even-in-the-hard-providences joy in Him.

We believe that empty spaces are wastes of spaces. Like all good Americans we place a high value on efficiency, and how can a vacant moment be accomplishing anything? This is why we have such a hard time with waiting. And this is also why we create all sorts of diversions to make sure we never feel the weight of an ounce of boredom. But things do happen when nothing happens. In fact, the silence of a moment is often when we are confronted with ourselves and with God. And that’s why we want to run away from it.

I’m currently reading through Chuck DeGroat’s book, Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places, and came across this quote from Thomas Merton:

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.

As a musician this makes sense to me. Most people think music is made up of the notes we choose to play, and of course that’s true, but music is also fundamentally about the notes we choose not to play. The rhythms and melodies leave space in the right places. How annoying would it be to have a guitarist play an incredible ripping guitar solo full of a million notes going a million miles per hour on an acoustic ballad? Or how annoying would it be to have a drummer constantly play a drum solo, slamming his sticks into every piece of equipment imaginable in the middle of a singer’s melody? The melody would get lost in the notes.

If all notes and rhythms were being played at once, it would sound like a horrible cacophony. And one interesting point: we can’t even do that if we wanted! No human being on any instrument (that I know of, non-electronic at least) can play every note all the time simultaneously. That should be a good anaology for us.

We submit ourselves to violence every time we try and cram two tons into a 16 oz. container. And then we feel guilty that we couldn’t fit it all in. Knowing what goes in that container requires us to trust and rely on God to tell us: to tell us more of who He is, more of who we are, more of what our world is about. We’d much rather make those decisions ourselves, but we’re not made for that, we can’t do it.

What are the melodies that might be getting lost in your noise of notes? How are we not honoring the empty spaces that God has designed us to live within? When a day doesn’t work as planned, are we completely wrecked? When we don’t cross everything off that to-do list, are we unloving toward others? When a building takes much longer than anticipated, are we unduly frustrated?

We all tend to orient our lives around removing these “empty” spaces, where God is asking us to seek Him in them.

This is a strangely nostalgic time of year for me. A couple of things, including the end of Jacob’s school year, the preparation for the beginning of Emily’s formal education, and the ending of a fictional world with which I have become acquainted, have made me start down nostalgia boulevard.

While many of these instigators of my journey have left me thinking about things with finite periods of existence, I was really shocked into forced contemplation by the death of a friend of my brother-in-law. While I have previously stated some thoughts on death and there are doubtlessly many more thoughts to have, the thing that makes looking back at death even more difficult is that life is not really a finite existence. Our life on this world, of course, is. While this made me strangely desirous of looking back at how God blessed us through the life of one of His Saints, I felt we could look at this in many areas.

I do understand that any beginning is the result of the end of some other, previous beginning. So, as Orlando Grace has learned that our desire to move into a permanent facility has caught an unfortunate delay, I felt now would be the time to look back on some of the great things that have been accomplished in the previous phases of our existence. Since I am a relatively new member to Orlando Grace, the depth of my knowledge certainly can be surpassed by many. Nevertheless, I do have good memories of the facility where we are.

First, when we visited the church seven and a half years ago for one Sunday (and we thought it was too far, as we were living in a temporary shelter ourselves), the service really changed our lives, which we are still applying. Selfishly speaking, because of the fact that we have been in a temporary home, I was able to meet and build relationships with what would become members of my church family through some combined events before we even became members. The facility we are currently in marks the location where we joined, the facility where we saw our first “Not a Talent Show,” and the site we saw “our elder” Will have hands laid on him and join the leadership team formally.

I know there were many life-changing decisions reached in the facility. I know there were countless friendships initiated at the facility. I’m sure that the story of moving into the SDA, which was so close to the property and the office was a real story of God’s work. And while I know we are all very excited that something new is coming, I also know that we would be remiss if we didn’t thank God for the great work He accomplished at where we are.

As we meander through each other’s lives, it is great to know that God uses things of which we are anxious to do away to accomplish His purposes. I know God has great things planned for the new facility, but I’m also quite confident that He will accomplish a few great things in the last two or three or ten remaining weeks we have in our temporary home!

Strange way to intro this blog post, yes? It will make sense quite quickly, I’m afraid.

Wednesday saw us undergo a number of inspections on our property. We faired pretty well on the inside. We passed some items; others need a little more fixing. But overall things look good for the CO from that vantage point.

I wish I could say we got the same high grades on the outside. Turns out we have a problem with not just one manhole cover (we had some inkling about that already). Apparently we have multiple manhole cover issues, two to be exact. Something’s not quite right. Don’t ask me. I don’t even want to know. Smarter folks than I have got it covered (pun intended).

So what’s the bottom line? This I do understand. It will take seven to ten construction days to fix the problem. Best case scenario now for our first soft opening looks like May 20. Wish I had better news for us, but I simply don’t. All I can tell you is that we are doing all that we can and working every angle possible to get closure on this deal. Please pray for wisdom to that end. And of course, please continue to pray for favor with the city.

I thought about concluding by saying something spiritual about the virtue of patience from texts like Romans 2:6-7 and James 4:7-11. But I have to be honest. I’m not feeling particularly spiritual at this moment. Think I’ll go look for a working manhole cover and crawl inside for a pastoral pity party.

Just kidding . . . I think.