Weekend Update

This post is slightly delayed, but consider this your update from our weekend here in Dayton.

I could tell you a lot about this weekend. 

I could tell you about our time at the Miami Valley Women’s Center Saturday morning and how we powered out more projects in one day than I’ve seen us do in several months combined.

I could tell you about our Friday night hang out at the site of the first NFL game (Go Triangles!).

I could tell you of our adventures on the RTA Saturday afternoon as we explored our city.

I could tell you of our Sabbath rest on Sunday spent at John Bryan, and how many of us experienced very real healing. I could even tell you of our Sabbath play at Young’s Dairy and how I was better at the driving range than all the students. Okay, I guess I probably shouldn’t brag about that.

I could even tell you of our worship and service at Target Dayton Ministries Sunday night and how for many of our kids it was their first real interaction with the homeless population here in Dayton (roughly 1000 people on any given night).

I could tell you about all of that and more, and I hope to, and I hope our kids do, and I hope you ask.

But I want to tell you about Ron.

Ron lives in Dayton. Ron’s mother passed away a couple years ago. Because of the grief of the loss of his mother Ron began drinking more. And that drinking led to a DUI. And that DUI is the reason Ron found himself on the RTA with us Saturday afternoon. Obviously confused as to why 30 obviously suburban kids piled onto his bus, Ron began a conversation with one of our adults and told us his story as we told him ours. 

You see, Ron knows he shouldn’t be drinking. He knows he should be reading his Bible and trying to live how God wants him to live, but it’s hard.

And that’s why Ron was stunned when he was told that there were 30 high school students from his city that cared enough about the broken and hurting and loved God so much that they would give up a week of their summer to help others. Perhaps stunned isn’t the appropriate word. Ron was moved.

His exact words were, “It was no accident that you were on my bus today”.

We probably won’t see Ron again (although we could, we do after all share a city with him). But Ron’s story is just one small example of how God can and will and has used our students, your students, to do the subtle, quiet, incognito, subversive, powerful, unstoppable work of His Kingdom.

If there is a theme to our trip it is redemption because we worship a God who is in the business of redemption. God is in the work of healing his creation and calling it all back to Him. We are honored to be part of that work. We look forward to telling you about it. We pray for the continued redemption of our City, and for the life of our new friend, Ron.

Technical Difficulties

We all love technology, right? Gets us where we need to go, teaches us what we want to know, never works when you want it to. Perfect! I promise I wasn't being lazy when I didn't post on the blog, the internet was just having a joke at my expense.

Well, I obviously got it figured out! I still want to share with you the blog posts I put together to update from the trip. It may not be timely or useful, but allow me to share our thoughts from the trip in the following posts over the next several days!

Thanks for being patient and forgiving and thanks for allowing me to spend time with your amazing kids. They humble me.

Josh

Dayton Trip Price Reduction

It's still not too late to join us for Dayton 2017.

This blog is to let you know that it is still not too late for you or your students to join us for our trip to Dayton this summer. We have pushed the application and deposit deadline back to next Wednesday, March 1st. If your student is interested in being part of the team, but has not managed to turn in their application, make sure they find the gumption to get it in. If you would like to join us on the trip as an adult leader we would absolutely love to have you be part of the team as well! Please contact me if you are interested.

One other piece of information I'd like to share with you is that we are dropping the price of the trip from $500 to $250. 

The reason for this change is that we want the trip to be affordable for all our students. We know that your families have many costs in the summer, and we don't want the price to be a reason for you or your student not to be part of the team. The initial $500 was in interest of raising funds with which to support our partnering local organizations during the week, but our planning team decided this should be an additional and supplementary goal.

Thank you for your support of our ministry and for sharing your students with us. I look forward to being able to share more details about the trip with you as we continue to solidify our plans.

Josh

Here I Am

The phrase “Here I am” appears 24 times throughout scripture. All but one occurrence takes place in the Old Testament. Eight times it appears in Genesis in the story of the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Five of its appearances are found in the story of Samuel’s calling in the temple in I Samuel 3. 

This statement, by nature, is a response. 

But it is also, by nature, an unnecessary statement. 

Let me explain.

When someone asks you where you are or says something to you and your response is, “Here I am”, you are not telling anyone anything they couldn’t have said themselves. To say, “Here I am”, is to say, “I am here”, but of course you cannot be anywhere other than where you are. So you see, the answer itself is not useful in giving your location. Furthermore, in most of these stories the speaker was responding to God. God did not need help finding them. So why is this response significant?

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We live in a culture that does everything it can to change the statement from “Here I am” to “There I am”. Whether it is our compulsive need to live inside the world wide web or simply our desire to know what is next and be there, we struggle to be present.

I see this in almost every conversation I have with students. We have created a culture that forces our students to constantly focus on what is next. Where are you going to college? Where are you going to work? Who are you going to marry? Are you going to live here or there? High School has essentially become a launching pad to the future, focused solely on getting students to the next stage.

Please don’t hear what I’m not saying. It is obvious that High School should prepare us for the rest of our lives, but what I want to suggest is that we have created a system that is willing to sacrifice experiences now for what you will be doing then.

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One of the more difficult stories involving “Here I Am” takes place in Genesis 22. The story starts with God calling to Abraham, and Abraham responds by saying, “Here I am”. God was not asking where Abraham was, he simply called his name. Yet Abraham felt it necessary to respond by stating his location.

Here is the significance of Abraham’s response. Abraham was present. Abraham was “here”. 

He was not throwing on his coat, preparing for God to send him somewhere else. 

He wasn’t getting his passport so he could go to another country. 

He wasn’t waiting until he received his education or “grew up” a little more.

Abraham was present, ready for the task God had for him in that very really moment and in that very real location. 

What if we responded to God right now? What if we served God right here? What does it look like for God to use me as I am and where I am, instead of assuming he needs to fix me and my circumstances before He could find a use for me.

Forgive me if this has gotten long, but this is the fuel behind our “trip” this summer.

At the end of our trip to Nicaragua we as a team shared the same thought: “This is great and we love being here, but how can we do this at home?” I fully believe that God is stirring the hearts of our ministry to love and heal the city we call home. We are creating partnerships with people who are way ahead of us in this work. We are building relationships that we hope will last beyond a single week of ministry work. We hope these relationships can allow us to continue to spread the Kingdom of God here in Dayton.

So this year’s experience is not so much about “there”, although “there” is good too. But this year we want to focus on “here”, because “here” is, after all, where we are.

I truly feel the Spirit of God calling our ministry and our church, let our response be “Here I am”.

2017 New Heights Go Trip Details:

Location: Dayton

Dates: July 14-22

Price: $500

Applications are available at Washington Heights and are due February 1 with a $50 deposit. 

Please feel free to contact Josh Tuttle with questions.

Diaper Champs

My daughter poops.

I would apologize for such a blatant statement, but she does not, therefore neither shall I.

But yes, my daughter poops, and not in the toilet. She does her business in the everyday wear of a diaper. We have a fantastic invention to collect the used diapers that we lovingly call the “poop bucket”, although I think the actual term is the Diaper Champ or something uncreative like that. The purpose of this container is to collect the dirty diapers so that your trash can does not regularly smell like poop. That is the plus side. The down side of this foul, waste-carrying, stench receptacle is that whenever it is cracked open the tiniest bit it unleashes the most deadly, unforgiving smell that is something akin to hundreds of dirty diapers trapped in one place over 10 months. Oh wait, that’s exactly what it is.

To make matters worse, our beautiful, joyful, curious daughter likes to open this repository-from-gehenna and unleash its abysmal stink with apparently no shame whatsoever. One minute she’s beebopping around pulling shoes and books off shelves and making cute noises, next minute she has let the reek of death out of it’s cage. At least she’s not pulling it’s guts out.

Why this story? Well bathroom humor is always funny, and I thought this would be an effective form of birth control. Also this is a perfect picture of what we do with our sin.

In the eyes of our loving Father our sins are infinitely worse than the built up stank of a million diapers trapped in diaper jail. What’s amazing is that this knowledge does not make Him love us any less. In fact, He is at the ready to help us change our dirty diapers every time we soil ourselves (forgive our sins). And we need to let God change us. George MacDonald writes, “The sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of, is the sole ruin of man.” So at the very least we need to let God wipe us clean.

What we, like my insatiably curious daughter tend to do, however, is open the pail back up. God helps us to clean ourselves from the mess we’ve made and once He sets us down clean and new, we go right to the bucket and let the stink into the room.

And this is why God came: not simply to wipe away our past sins, but to teach us how to stop filling our diapers.

MacDonald continues, “This is what He came to deliver us from—not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things anymore.”

Too often we are content in the forgiveness of our past sins, in the correction of old mistakes, but we neither feel guilt nor a compulsion to cease future ones. And God is faithful, He will forgive us our sins (1 John 1:9), but  the sole purpose of salvation is not to cover up our past, it is to free our future.

I long for the day Clara is potty-trained (we were shooting for next week), the day she stops making the same old messes. I am patient in the meantime, but our goal as parents is to teach her how to be clean. And how much more does our perfect Father in Heaven?

Brothers and sisters, let’s stop soiling ourselves and pretending it’s okay because we know that God will clean us up. The Christian life is not settling for a passing grade, it’s aiming and achieving the perfection exampled for us in Christ. Stop opening the pail.

Nicaragua Journal

I found this as I was rereading through my journal I kept in Nicaragua. I wrote this on the plane ride home as I reflected on all we’d done and seen and began to focus on where we go from here. I hope this encourages you today as it did for me:

“I am overwhelmed with a longing for the restoration of God’s creation. God’s world is so beautiful even despite its fallenness. Clouds, lakes, rocks, trees, animals; God’s beauty is everywhere if we will choose to see it.

I’m starting to think it’s the same for us as well. It’s hard to remember sometimes (oftentimes) that each soul God has made has the potential for explosive love and life and glory. I think I am beginning to understand what [C.S.] Lewis meant when he wrote that we’ve never met an ordinary person. What an overwhelming blessing to be surrounded by so much potential for God’s glory, power, love, and redemption! 

Let us not be burdened by the task, let us be honored and humbled to be used. We’re all orphans looking for an open door. We’re all just looking to go home.”

That CS Lewis quote mentioned earlier is the following from The Weight of Glory: “The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken . . . There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal . . . It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.” 

I am ashamed, but not surprised to admit that this is a lesson from our trip that I had not thought much about over the past month. But as I am reminded of what God taught me during our time in Nicaragua, I realize that this is the reality of not just a trip overseas, but of our every day lives. Here in Dayton we are surrounded by people that desperately need the redemption of God. Let’s bear that burden for them.

The Morning Star

Being the father of an 8 month old, I have recently found myself awake before the sun most mornings. For many this would be a bother, but being awake to see the sun come up is highly underrated. 

There is this beautiful stretch of time when the sky goes from dark to pale gray to an explosion of orange, purple, and other colors I don’t even have names for. As the sun continues to rise in the sky (this always happens much quicker than I expect) everything is still cool and bathed in long shadows because the sun is mostly below the trees, but between those shadows the morning sun shines through the branches to create patches of light that give a golden brightness to everything it touches. This morning light is so marvelous that it makes leaves and branches and even backyard sheds look extravagant and kingly. 

Then there is the music.The crickets are finishing up their nighttime song, but the cicadas have already started and the two songs blend together into a beautiful symphony. The birds occasionally add in their chirps and the squirrels and rabbits play their instruments of the trees and grass. We’ve learned to block it out, but if you listen closely before the interruptions of the sounds of cars you notice how the sound actually fills in all the quiet. Once you listen you realize just how loud and beautiful it is.

The smell is hard to describe, but it is cool and fresh and wet. It is significantly different from the smell of the rest of the day, which is hot and dry and stale. The smell of a morning gives the impression of newness and freshness and possibility. 

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We find in Isaiah that Satan, our great enemy is called the Morning Star. If this is true, then it’s no small wonder that he is often referred to as Heaven’s most beautiful angel. But he fell. Unsatisfied with the privilege of being the beauty of the morning he tried to make his throne higher than God’s. 

But we also see in the very last chapter of the Bible, Revelation 22, that Jesus calls himself the bright Morning Star. Some are confused by the fact that both Satan and Jesus are referred to as the Morning Star, but those who choose to look at the depth of the meaning behind this are given the privilege of seeing one more layer to the beauty of God’s plan of redemption. 

So how can both Satan and Jesus be the Morning Star, the light of the dawn, the beauty and golden brilliance of the sunrise?

Let’s start by assuming that this use of this description for both was not an accident. If Satan is the Morning Star, the sun, the beauty of a morning, then evil and sin have so corrupted creation that even the beauty of the morning sun is fallen. If our enemy can make a fallen and corrupt sunrise look so beautiful, it is no wonder we give in to sin so easily. If our enemy has so corrupted creation what chance do we have?

According to Revelation 22 and Jesus himself, all the chance in the world.

This double use of the term is not simply a mistake or the writers of Scripture running out of analogies. This repeated use of the title of Morning Star gives us a glimpse at how Jesus has overcome our enemy. 

CS Lewis writes in The Screwtape Letters from the perspective of our Enemy: “He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least - sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s of any use to us”. 

Satan’s true power comes only in twisting what God has made. But Jesus is in the business of straightening the crooked paths the devil has led us on.

If Satan was created as the beauty of the morning, and that position was corrupted (as we know it was), then we can only assume that privilege was either removed at his fall from heaven or will be removed at his final defeat.

But in His redemption of His creation there is not one stone (physically or metaphorically) that God will not turn over. Jesus is taking over duties as the Morning Star. He is reclaiming the beauty of the morning, just as He is reclaiming the beauty of our souls. We no longer will have to live under the oppression of evil, but will dwell in the light of a new and perfect morning that is infinitely more bright and beautiful than the one we know now.

So if you ever have the distinct privilege of waking up before the sun, pay attention. Stop and be silent. And in that silence recognize the beauty of all that God has made. Then take joy in the knowledge that this is not even scratching the surface.