Team Building - Ropes Course

The Cornerstone staff took Wednesday afternoon this week to do some team building at Camp Campbell Gard - where our own Rick and Deb Taylor work and lead. It was a great - scary - nerve-wracking - exhilarating - breaking through kind of day. Everybody did the course - some more than others but that wasn't the point.


The first step is safety - an hour of it. The preparation time made some more nervous standing there, listening, looking and wondering. Several of us thought out loud later - "I wonder if there's a sermon in that somewhere? An hour of safety preparation and then up we go."

Some had done a ropes course before. Others had never seen one so there was a variety of responses. But everyone made it up and down and across.

This was an especially big deal for Sarah, our Office Manager. Being a cancer survivor she's ready to try things she would have never considered before. She had a blast - and pulled her partner, Micheall, around the course with her!

Graduation

As I sat watching the high school graduates come forward last weekend I was remembering back to mine and imagining forward to my oldest daughter's next year. WOW - it's already here! Graduations are a part of life. The alternative is unacceptable. The life of a Christ-follower is all about graduations...from babies in Christ to maturity, that's God's goal.

The great danger in the Church today - I see it at Cornerstone and the Church in general as much as I see it in my own life - is we'll miss or even avoid graduations in our spiritual lives by being busy. The spiritual phrase is: "an inch deep and a mile wide." We don't ever grow we just get busier doing spiritually looking - even very good - things. But God is looking forward to our graduations.

I spoke with some of the graduates after worship - a couple from high school and at least one from college. "How does it feel?" I asked. Each of them said in their own way that while they were excited there was also some feeling of: "O my, now there is greater responsibility. I'm feeling more like an adult." I remember that feeling.

God wants us to graduate - to take steps to grow spiritually; to step out of our comfort zone (the things we know we can do) and into the learning zone (the things we know we can't do without God's help). As long as we keep overly busy we can avoid those graduations. We can also avoid them by staying only in familiar territory.

Graduation is fun, exciting and causes anxiety. It's the gateway into new territory. I'm glad I graduated from High School and College and Seminary. I've been privileged to be part of too much wonderful God stuff since then to wish I was back there - as incredible as those times were. But now I recognize some areas that are in need of a graduation in my spiritual life:

• to new ways of studying scripture
• to new ways of relating with other pastors in the area
• to new ways of coaching my kids in their spiritual growth

...just to name a few. To stay in one place is not good - it's called stagnation. May we not stay there as individuals or as a church.