While preparing for a message on foolishness/wisdom for our middle school program today, I ran across this prayer from Proverbs:

“Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, a“Who is the LORD?”or lest I be poor and steal band profane the name of my God.” Proverbs 30:8-9

I thought how unAmerican. I’ve never lived anywhere else… so maybe it’s so “unhuman” but regardless- I think it’s unAmerican to pray for less or that God would give you just what you need and nothing more. It’s also unAmerican to fear the influence of materialism or even poverty on one’s faith as a possible negative.

I’ll never forget watching a group of women in Mexico crying with our girls after a week of ministry with them years ago. I thought they were crying because we were leaving. But, upon further investigation, I discovered the Mexican women were actually crying because they feared for these girls going back to what they perceived as the “land of materialistic distractions”. Maybe we are in greater danger than those in poverty of leaving God.

Last night Shannon and I had some money to spend… 2 VERY RARE THINGS IN OUR WORLD:

1. A wed night where I had NO commitments so we went out on a date.
2. We had “money to spend” at Costco and gift cards for a Cheesecake Factor dinner afterwards.

I have a “business” card for Costco which means we pay a little more annually to get in at 10am (an hour early) and because it gives me a “percentage kick back” of what we spend here (mostly for church) as a gift certificate at the end of the year. I had 2 certificates- one of which was going to expire in about 10 days- so we decided to go spend them. They totaled $165. We never get to go through Costco and ask- what do you want to spend it on?

• I bought a dvd set, socks, coffee beans, and some cereal.
• Shannon bought a shirt for herself and a CD for the boys, and some Bear Naked trail mix.

We had like 20 bucks left over. But.. in the process… I felt a little weird. I had money to spend however I wanted… and as I browsed the store I discovered that they sell a watch for $19,000!!!!!!!!!!!! Um… I can’t imagine being wealthy enough to spend almost 20G on a watch. (by the way- they don’t make those in America- the world has “richer” taste in some places than we do- Americans didn’t invent Ferrari, Mercedes, or BMW either. Maybe this is a human condition issue.)

Anyway…. I wonder if that’s not the fear of Proverbs 30 lived out. I dunno. But it makes me scratch my head and wonder what this world is all about.

For mother’s day this last year, my mother’s day gift to my bride was a family photo op. We decided it was time for the beach scene. We did some in balboa park a couple of years ago- so we decided we needed sand and waves.

TJ turned 10 (the end of last month) and with it, his grandma bought him all 7 hardback copies of the Harry Potter series. Tonight, he came down to kiss me goodnight and told me he finished book 1- almost 1 week to the day since he got home from our camping trip and started reading it.

I better get crackin’…. my kid is kickin’ my reading butt big time.

I spent most of today reflecting on learnings from the past few years and planning for the future- both personally and professionally. I still feel like I could use another day or two to finalize some things and I know I’ll have to revisit these decisions every week to keep them going… but I at least got the ball rolling I believe.

One of the things I did was go over some notes from previous leadership summits. In so doing, I ran across this quote from Jack Groppel at the ’05 summit.

Um… so I have good news and bad news:

GOOD NEWS: I started to do something with this years teaching and I’m putting action to it within the 3 day window.

BAD NEWS: It took me 2 years of doing virtually nothing with a lot of stuff to figure out Jack was right. I suck!

For about the 6th or 7th time now, I’ve had the privilege of attending the Leadership Summit from Willow Creek. I’ve never been to it live, I always watch it a few hours later on some kind of time delay satellite feed at some church somewhere. Once in San Jose, several times in Walnut Creek, and now 3 times here at Journey where we host it.

Each time I go, I try and summarize my learnings from each of the presenters or “faculty members” as they call them, in a sentence. This year, I’m also taking Tuesday to review and re-think and stew on what I heard. I’m going to turn off my cell, my e-mail, and the world and lock myself in a room to think and pray about what God might have for me. In particular, I’ll be thinking over these one or two sentence learnings:

• Session #1. Bill Hybels: founding pastor of Willow Creek Community Church