Time with the Kids

I'm not the father I want to be. I don't find often that I have the ability to manage the many different priorities that present themselves each day in such a way as to demonstrate to my kids that they matter to me.

This week I think I took a small step forward. Maybe it is better to say that I fell forward a bit. I was able to spend three hours of 1-on-1 time with each one of our children. Two of them opted for the air show at Nellis Air Force Base. Both yesterday and today some really gracious friends allowed me and one of my children to tag along. Without this kindness I would not have been able to pull off two trips to the Aviation Nation Show because of the hours it takes to park at the Las Vegas Raceway and to then shuttle over to the base.

My kids each loved it. They loved the big airplanes. They loved the fast airplanes. They loved the root beer floats.

I have never seen the F-22 demo before. It was incredible. At one point the plane was standing perfectly still in the sky. At another time it was slowly falling to the earth in a flat spin. There wasn't anything we could imagine that it couldn't do.

Just as the demo was finishing, and we were all noticing that our mouths had been hanging open in disbelief, my neighbor's wife said something really insightful. She said, "I can't believe that during that demo there were so many people just shuffling around with no interest in what was happening in the sky." I agreed. Then I pondered her point. How many of us are living in a world filled with God's general revelation as though we have no sense of what is going on around us, or what our context of reality points us to each minute of the day? The heavens declare the glory of God, and yet we rarely give it thought.

Worship today brought great refreshing. We enjoyed the company of more first-time guests and some other new friends who have just moved to town. God continues to grow City-Wide Redeemer in number. I don't pretend to know what He is doing.

We are just two weeks away from our Roadmap '09 meeting for CWR. There Eric and I hope to express some sense of the directions God seems to be presenting for us as a church over the next year. The opportunities are very exciting. We are holding our plans loosely, though, because if we had held tightly to the plans for 2008 we wouldn't have been able to experience half of what we saw God accomplish through our meager efforts this year.