Trusting God in the Here and Now

How do these three ideas relate to the Dandelion Seed Company here in August 2008?

1. The DSC is changing. Part of our DNA has always been creativity, but in this new season God is calling us to live creatively in new ways and in new areas of life. We are called to be courageously planting ideas, relationships and projects, assuming that many of them will not succeed. We really need some successes and God wants to give them to us. They will only happen if we individually and corporately sow ourselves into the Kingdom with a 25% mindset. In the next year I believe there will be projects (artistic, entrepreneurial, and relational) that will sprout up. This applies within our friendships, marriages and families. We can generously sow into each other with prayers, encouragement, service, and listening. A few of these "sowings" will be wild successes. Many of them will be learning experiences. If we expect otherwise we'll get discouraged and quit sowing (trying dreams, encouraging people, praying, serving, listening).

In the parable 75% of the seeds don't make it. Can we deal with that? Are we willing to go ahead and try? Can we let the rest of the DSC people in on our attempts? Part of why God called us together was to challenge each other to plant the seeds God has given us to plant. We're also called to celebrate both our learnings and successes together and model a different way of living -- based on trust and courage and growth and God's generosity that far exceeds our ability to get things right or keep them together. The NING and peoples' blogs are a few practical ways we can let each other in on our journeys of sowing generously and living out the 25% principle of the Kingdom.

2. The DSC is changing. Part of what DSC is about is relationships between people who are following Jesus. That is kind of what "church" is, at it's core, although we've got all sorts of ideas of what church is and how it looks or should look. Church is changing. What it looks like to follow Jesus is really up in the air for more and more people. We've got to do trust transfers individually and corporately. God has met us in the past. How that's looked has changed many times through history. Both those who've gone before us and we ourselves have grown and been changed in numerous ways. We need to transfer trust to God for the here and now -- that God will meet us, help us grow and change in ways that fit who we are, who we're becoming, and the need around us for Jesus that can't be filled by old ways of being religious. Jesus talks about "new wine" filling new wineskins. We can ask God to bring himself to us in ways that we desperately need (even though we might not even know what those new ways are).

3. The DSC is changing. (Do I sense a pattern here?) In some ways we're in a DMZ. We've been one thing (a loosely connected group of mostly artists meeting together once a year for a conference) and we're becoming something else (it's not clear yet what that is but it includes art stuff, some "churches" (although what they are called and what they look like may make them unrecognizable as churches to most people) as well as the inclusion of people who are not necessarily artists -- including entrepreneurs, administrative people, hackers, etc). We're also growing larger and smaller at the same time as the new emphasis of gathering locally in smaller groups has emerged. And the online thing we can't even begin to know what it means. All that being said, we're losing some things. We've got some things to mourn. For example, I'm sad that we haven't all gotten together in person for over a year now. I'm sad about some people who have dropped off the radar. I'm sad about projects that have started and died or are slowly choking to death in some back room.

All that being said, death comes before new life, so we can trust God as we let go of the things we need to let go of and walk forward together.


Jonathan