Getting Ready for the Keenagers

This week we're sending four issues of Christian Standard
to the printer. Our annual megachurch
issue is the first of them.

The only thing more hectic than the day before vacation is the day before a business-related trip. Today I've dealt with correspondence, printer issues, marketing questions, and customer service problems. Today I wanted to spend editing copy for the June 3 issue of Christian Standard, thinking about art for those articles, and making a couple of assignments ahead. Actually, I'm getting some of that done too.

As soon as I can get away, I'm driving to Worthington, Ohio, to spend overnight with Marshall and Judy Hayden. And then tomorrow it's on to Round Lake Christian Camp, close to Mansfield, Ohio. I'm speaking at their daylong Keenagers Retreat tomorrow!  Cool,  huh? I'll drive home tomorrow evening after eating supper with my fellow keenagers. 

This morning it was my turn to lead our brief Monday-morning prayer time with folks here at Standard Publishing. I read an illustration from Tim Keller about a man who didn't believe in God and had a huge concrete slab installed on top of his grave with the words, "I do not want to be raised form the dead. I don't believe in it." But when he was buried, an acorn evidently fell into the grave, and in the next 100 years, a towering oak grew through the grave and split the slab.

"If an acorn, which has power of biological life in it, can split a slab of that magnitude, what can the acorn of God's resurrection power do in a person's life?"

Each of us wrote a fear or concern that was a slab threatening to separate us from seeing the power of God in our lives. We collected and redistributed the slips and then made them our prayer requests this morning. 

I dunno what this did for the small group assembled, but it was very helpful for me to consider how God's power might work in the face of situations that seem overwhelming or impossible in my life. 

On the drive today, I need to decide whether that's something I want to share with the Keenagers!