I just finished a tough week at school. To help support us financially, while planting Mosaic Church, I'm working as a Therapeutic Day Treatment counselor at Eastern View High School. I basically work with at-risk kids all day at school. Kids who are on the verge of being kicked out of school. I'm there to help, hopefully, to keep them in school. After school I am working as an In Home Counselor for a troubled kid and his family. A family that has had generations of anger and dysfunction. I'm there to help give them some hope and help them find a way to change. So many broken lives from so many broken and dysfunctional homes. When I was a full-time pastor, I tended to stay in my "church world". I hung out with mostly my Christian friends. I did "Christian" things with my "Christian" friends. It was safe and non-threatening. Working in these two environments, a public high school and a dysfunctional home, has, and continues to open my eyes to the broken, lost, and desperate world I live in. At times I feel like a missionary in a foreign country. Stepping out of my "church world" and into the "real world" seems foreign to me. A whole other world. Where I'm the minority. Yet, that is where I need to be. I believe its where Jesus would be if he were here in Culpeper. He'd be where the broken, lost, and desperate people are. He'd be at a public high school and a home of a hurting family. And yet when you think about it, He is there. He's there through me, because He lives in and through me everyday. It reminds me of "Jesus and his disciples were at home having supper with a collection of DISREPUTABLE guests. Unlikely as it seems, more than a few of them had become followers. The religion scholars and Pharisees saw him keeping this kind of company and lit into his disciples: 'What kind of example is this, acting cozy with the riff-raff?' Jesus, overhearing, shot back, 'WHO NEEDS A DOCTOR: the healthy of the sick? I'm here inviting the SIN-SICK, not the spiritually-fit." Mark 2:15-17 (The Message)
Duane
