Words

Yesterday, the girls & I went to a 6 hour worship retreat with our pastors and a few other people from our church. It was held at one of their neighbor's house who had an indoor pool, so the girls mostly swam and listened while we talked. We swam a little too, but I have sort of become one of those mothers who does not like to get her hair wet. Sad, I know. During this time, we also went through a very unique process of coming up with the worship theme for the next several months.

We wrote words on cards, talked about the words, grouped the words, narrowed down the words, thought about the words while we ate supper, decided on the best word, and then branched out on this one word. This is a good opportunity to hear what people are thinking and to get to know them better. The word we chose was "unplugged." After talking about it some more, we went to different stations to write down stories, images, bible verses or ideas that went along with this word. The main idea behind "unplugged" is that we can be so plugged in to the noise of our culture (ipods, cell phones, TV, IM) but we should first plug in to God's Word.

As I thought about it more today, I realized that "unplugged" would correspond to the discipline of silence or solitude, where, as Dallas Willard says, one takes body & soul out of the circuits of sin and finds a new habitual orientation in the Kingdom. I think it's a pretty good metaphor. Bridget told me the other day that she likes this church because it's easy to understand and I was amazed at all the different things the girls recalled from our time there.

John said he missed a bloggable moment yesterday when he didn't have a camera so I will have to describe it to you in words. He took Edward to a Tiger game with 2 of his friends and in the 9th inning when the Tigers were losing, the boys put their "Rally Caps" on and clapped. A rally cap is your regular hat put on inside out and backwards. The Tigers still lost.