Things break. Things wear out. They get old and stop working. They get damaged and have to be fixed or replaced.

Over the weekend a ferocious wind storm molested our city. 90 mile per hour winds. Three days later parts of our city are still without electricity. Cheryl and I walked through our park last night. Entire trees were toppled or snapped off at the base like a #2 pencil. On my way to church I passed at least three homes with huge trees puncturing their roofs – even a brick home with a crushed exterior wall!

Where do you begin to remake things? Do you fix it? Do you throw it out and start all over? Can you do anything with it all? Depending on the scope of damage, you just stand staring with your mouth open till you can wrap your mind around it all.

Welcome to RE-
It’s a new thing here on PBR. In the weeks ahead RE- will become an entire series of blog-post bible studies exploring what happens when things break down and have to be RE-made. If there’s one thing I hope RE- shows us it’s this: God is a relentless creator. He cringes when his stuff gets trashed and can bring as much power and ingenuity to re-making as he did to creating in the first place. And we’re the ones who benefit the most. We can’t forget that we are one of the biggest reasons RE- has to happen at all! Humanity is a sort of natural disaster, let’s be honest. At 90 miles per hour we can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time without even knowing it!

In each of these studies, we’ll look at God doing a work of RE-. God remakes, restarts, renews, replaces, revives, regroups, redirects. He never gets his thing out-trashed by us or Satan. He is stubbornly resourceful. Hopefully we’ll see why God is this way and appreciate anew his patience and wisdom. Maybe we’ll see something of ourselves in these studies. Humanity has it seems an endless proclivity to wreck things. We damage things a lot, but God renews his grace, invites us into his remaking and refuses to abandon us.

So where do you begin remaking something that’s been totally trashed? In scripture there are countless RE- moments. RE-01 is a classic – but maybe not the one you’d think of first. I’ll try to keep RE- fresh for readers. It would be easy peasy to lunge for something like The Flood – everything gets flushed and God starts over with Noah. Let’s start somewhere else.

Israel: a broken nation.
Almost everyone instantly knows who it was that rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem once God called his people out of exile. Nehemiah, humanly speaking, was the project manager for revitalizing the city in the midst of haters and trashers who scorned Israel’s rebirth.

Restart before Rebuild.
Sixty-ish years before Nehemiah arrived on the scene a much more humble (and more foundational) initiative was started by Joshua and Zerubbabel. Not the famous Joshua, BTW. Almost no one gives these two the seat they deserve at the table of salvation history. Their passion was the soil Nehemiah’s vision would grow out of. But they weren’t rebuilders. They didn’t care about walls, water or waste! Local trashers didn’t distract them. Their idea of remaking Israel was to restart the entire worship-calendar of God’s people. “If we restart our worship life, everything else can follow from that.”

The Altar first.
At this point, I’d like to pass you off to the narrative itself. Ezra-Nehemiah is a book in the Old Testament we usually think of as two books. It’s one. Ezra records when and how the exiles first make their way back to their homeland and their capital city. Below you can get a clean copy of the Ezra 3 Manuscript. You inductive bible study fans will know exactly what to do with this. Download. Print. Grab your highlighters and colored pencils. Tear into it and see what you find.

Here are a few pointers to guide your eyeballs:

Look for interesting words. Words or ideas that repeat. Look for contrasts, opposites, strong differences. Use a highlighter, pens, colored pencils. Scribble everywhere! If something is a road-block, identify the barrier – what questions does the passage leave you with? Write those in the huge margin on the right.

As you get started, put yourself into the story:

1) What would your life be like if due to some disaster or cultural displacement, you weren’t allowed to go to church each week, or celebrate Christmas, or Easter, or gather with other Christians for prayer or worship? No Christian radio. No on-line church. What would that do to your faith year after year, after year?

2) Suddenly you were given complete religious freedom again, but all the churches in your city were left in piles of rubble. You are free to assemble, but you have no place to go. What would you need in order to restart your life as a community of worshiping believers?


Find a friend or small group – print them a manuscript and get together around Ezra 3. In the next post, RE-02 we’ll pick up with the process and learn more about RE-starting from God’s formerly exiled people. Meanwhile email me if you need help getting started. I’ll post RE-02 in about a week.

tim.perry@intervarsity.org

I think it’s safe to say we all want to die well. But Rob Moll is saying something slightly different. “Not everyone who dies grows old. Though we may expect to live to a ripe old age, nothing guarantees it. Younger people die in car accidents, while cancer frequently strikes those who are middle aged. We all need to learn to die well, whatever age we are. Our lives will be enriched by thoughtfully and prayerfully considering our death.”

Rob Moll was a journalist and Christianity Today editor who wrote the book, The Art of Dying. It’s the best book I’ve read in a while – originally published in 2010 it was re-released after Rob’s death in 2019 from a fall while hiking in the mountains. Rob was one of those younger people who die in accidents. But he was not one of those younger people who failed to think about dying.

Maybe you’ve experienced the death of a friend or loved one recently. When I started reading Rob’s book this spring I wrote a list on the inside fly-leaf.

• Micaela Schneider, Dec 2019
• Steve Walters, Feb 2020
• Jon Lee, Oct 2020
• Diana Metz, Feb 2021
• Susan Darlington, Apr 2021

These five loved ones are why I’m not only reading Rob’s book, I’m doing what his book asks readers to do. These are all people who died too soon. A friend’s daughter taken in an auto accident, a former team-mate of mine at Christ Community (four years older than me) passed away from cancer, two high-school classmates of mine (both my age) – one dropped to his death on the floor suddenly from a cardiovascular event while retrieving his mail, the other a rare cancer took her life in less than a year. The last person on the list, the mom of an in-law of mine, needing an emergency surgery she never awoke from. All these people lived well. Only two had time to think of how they would die while still living.

Rob says in his book that the church has forgotten how to prepare people for death. This is partly because of shifts in today’s culture and partly because of the availability of medical, end-of-life intervention. Till recently he contends, Christians have known how to die well because they thought about it, prepared for it and belonged to communities that knew what to do.

“Death was not just a medical battle to be fought, nor a loss to be mourned. It was a spiritual event that required preparation. The dying performed it in public as evidence of their faith and to provide instruction to others. Rather than waiting for illness to overtake them, these Christians were actively involved in their own dying.”

These five, their surviving family and many others over the years, are my teachers in the school of learning to die well. I am a part of a community that needs to learn what to do with death. I need to learn what to do with death so I can be present with others if/when they face death. I need to learn what to do with death because it seems to be happening around me more frequently the older I get. I need to to learn what to do with death because one day I may need to bring those I love along side me at the end of my life.

Doug, Terry, Janet, John and Lisa – thank you for sharing the life and death of your beautiful loved ones with me. Thanks for showing me the path of courageous lament and grieving. Our world is so much richer because of your loved ones. I hope I learn how to be present and how to bring hope and joy in the midst of loss. I hope I am more ready for my own passing when that time comes.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you’d like a copy of The Art of Dying. I can get it to you for a nice discount. Just hit the link below and email me directly.

“Prepare your heart for your departure. If you are wise, you will expect it every hour. And when the time of departure comes, go joyfully to meet it saying: Come in peace. I knew you would come, and I have not neglected anything that could help me on the the journey.” -St. Isaac the Syrian

Be blessed. Stay well.

tim.perry@intervarsity.org

…when you see a picture like this? “I want to be there.” “That has to be Ireland…”

InterVarsity’s study abroad program has developed a growing number of pilgrimage experiences that have sent InterVarsity staff and students to places like Finisterra, Spain. Achingly beautiful places. And equipped with very little gadgetry of what I’d call Christian tourism. Commissioned instead to walk, learn, and do mission.

https://intervarsity.org/via-divina

What are you doing in your quiet times with God these days? Can we offer you something different in the month of May? Follow the link above for all the details. The Via Divina is a virtual pilgrimage you can engage from the comfort of your own community and on your own schedule.

What are the critical pieces of the experience?

• Two walks a week at your own pace and on your schedule.
• Podcasts you listen to while on your walks.
• Guided spiritual exercises to help you engage God in your surroundings.
• Great questions for you to reflect on.
• Access to a community of fellow pilgrims doing the same thing.

Starting the week of May 14th, my staff team will be doing the Celtic Way together. We’ll each soak up the pod-casts while we go on our walks. I’ll try to keep in mind that I’m walking somewhere in Nebraska, not Ireland. And here’s a further perk – because we’re doing it virtually, its easy to make available to you as well.

As a ministry partner, or a donor, or an InterVarsity alumn, or volunteer – you are invited to sign up and take advantage of the Celtic Way. The cost is pretty cheap… And if you let me know you’re doing it, we’ll find a way to connect during the four weeks of the Celtic Way (May 14th thru June 11th). Everything you need to know is at the link above. There’s an eye-catching video that takes less than 2 minutes to watch. Careful – it will ruin you for wanting to travel.

More one the Celtic Way in the weeks ahead. Back to my back-yard office. It’s actually about as nice as it can possibly be in Nebraska today (sunny and 83 at the moment).

So I got an education Wednesday night this week. I was with our Creighton Occupational Therapy students helping them process their year. It was their last small group meet-up before the end of the semester. I’d sent Maddie and Emily a few questions last week – they’d turned them into a power-point presentation. Off we went for an entire hour!

Here were a few insights they had – see if any of this sounds familiar to you (paraphrasing a bit here):

• “I learned the meaning of the word lament. Taking inventory of loss. Expressing grief. Feeling sorrow and empathy for the state of the world around me.”
• “I know myself and my family better after this year. I hated being confined, but the extra time with my family actually made me appreciate them more.”
• “My empathy tank got a real work out! After a while you realize these aren’t just numbers of Covid cases or numbers of deaths. The numbers are people. Death is real.”
• “I actually got Covid! I felt awful, yet had to keep pushing my self to accomplish my work. I didn’t think I had that much determination in me!”
• “I lost my grandfather this year to Covid. I’ve been angry and disappointed with God to be honest. I’ve gone deeper into God, but I haven’t liked what he’s allowed to happen.”
• “Presence! I’d forgotten how important it is to just be present with people. When you can’t fix things you learn what it means to just be present with people.”

I was curious to see how they’d answer this… “What’s one thing your teachers have modeled for you that you hope will be true of your leadership?” Teaching became quite a challenge this year as you could imagine. “Our professors have had to put up with a lot of adjustments. I was pretty worried about how well I was learning procedures in practicum when we couldn’t actually be in the same room with my teachers. But they were great examples of being creative and flexible. They were patient and forgiving.”

Conversations like this are happening everywhere around me. Maybe you’re noticing that too. When you realize how strange a pandemic is bear in mind the adage “familiarity breads contempt.” We hate this thing, let’s be honest. But don’t let the scale of Covid’s menace keep you from learning valuable skills and insights. Be a champion of processing your experiences. And serve others by asking simple questions like these.

Faculty Meet and Greet – April 17

Tomorrow we’ll be hosting a virtual meet up with exactly the same agenda! My Year with Covid – Three Lessons Learned. We’ll flip the audience this time – and see what the professors are learning! Pray for our gathering – we’ve invited about 30 faculty members here in Omaha and across the state. Pray for a good turn out.

This box arrived about a week ago. A box like this always means a virtual conference is soon to follow. This week Graduate Faculty Ministries has its annual National Staff Conference. Usually we do this in Mundelein, Illinois at the University of St. Mary of the Lake each spring. Covid cancelled our event last year. Covid has virtualized our event this year.

This year, our staff team will participate in a Digital Camino as a part of our Virtual Mundelein. What is a Camino? I’m just learning about these myself. The Camino de Santiago is a spiritual pilgrimage taken on foot over a 500 mile trek -historically thought to be the very missionary itinerary of the Apostle James to the destination of Finisterra on the far northwestern coast of Spain.

“Traditionally, a peregrino (Spanish for pilgrim) would begin their journey to Santiago from their front door, eventually converging with one of several ancient pathways in northern Spain. On a Digital Camino, you can join the tradition via five audio-guided walks done on your own, accompanied by times of fun & reflection with fellow peregrinos.”

So a Digital Camino is a virtual experience undertaken by a home-bound peregrino through the use of a pod-cast. InterVarsity staff and students have done the actual Camino De Sontiago in connection with our study abroad programs. Many of them have become guides for peregrinos travelling digitally! Last summer over 400 GFM faculty members took part in the Digital Camino. This week, I’ll be doing my first!

If you have a few minutes, check out the orientation video. Let me know what you think! Pray for my 5 Camino walks this week and for God to meet GFM staff through this creative tool.

Be blessed and stay well!

Our crew is doing really well these days. We’re all enjoying good health – got to spend a few days together over the holidays in southern California. And yes…it looks like we may be adding to our tribe. Definitely more on that later! Let’s just say we’re maybe going to all be together again later in the calendar year… maybe in a warmer setting… after Covid has loosened it’s grip a little more. Stay tuned. That’s all I can say for now!

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Quick updates: Aaron, Savannah and Poppy live in Camarillo, California (in the L.A. area) about half an hour from the coast. Aaron is in his first year with an aero-space company after graduating last May. Poppy turns 3 this April. Phoebe and Ryan also live in California – Phoebe dances for the San Diego Ballet and is opening her own massage therapy business. Silas is here in Omaha – knocking out his first year of Computer Engineering at the University of Nebraska. There’s a certain girl in these pictures he is VERY serious about. Cheryl is finally working just one job! She’s full-time with Omaha Bridges out of Poverty and really loves being a facilitator.

The Pacific ocean attracts birds that eat small fish. And then there’s Nebraska – you might just have a red-tail hawk eating a squirrel in your back-yard. We’ve had tons and tons of snow this winter – just got another 7 inches dumped on us one week ago today! Just about when I could shovel it no longer we’ve had a break in the temperatures.

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Random other things I’m so grateful for these days: a date with my wife to enjoy Ranky Tanky at the Holland…Charlton Singleton’s horn… Quiana Parler’s vocals and their Gullah tunes! My youngest is just killin it all the way around – terrific job in school, working an internship at Union Pacific, and getting to know this beautiful young woman he met last summer at Camp Rivercrest.

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And yes… as painful as this looks (actually just catching my breath and stretching), I’m enjoying a renewed interest in cycling! Nebraska has given us a handful of 50 degree days in January and February. I’ve taken advantage of all of them for rides on my mountain bike. Can’t wait to get the road-bike involved in the fun (too many snow-melt puddles out there still). Spring, please keep it coming! Winter and Covid…we’ve had quite enough, thank you!!

Staff directors always think about two teams. The team you’re ON. And the team you LEAD. The team I’m on is the South-Central Regional Leadership Team (above). These are the folks who do the same job I do across a 17 state chunk of the U.S. Together with our Regional Director we lead a strategic plan to develop InterVarsity’s mission on campus among Faculty, Graduate and Professional Students. We meet weekly via zoom. We used to meet annually for several days in Nashville – retreating together, working on vision, direction, strategic planning and leadership development. We have to do that now virtually. That’s the team I’m ON. Evidently our boss experienced that feline hi-jacking that’s recently gone viral (yes he did this to himself)!

Here’s the team I LEAD (most of them … missing Jake and George). We work directly on a dozen or so campuses building faculty and student fellowships. Our geography is mildly ridiculous compared to our Region – only Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri. This is where my Third Team comes in.

GFM isn’t the only InterVarsity ministry that connects with faculty and students. We’d be crazy not to collaborate with the undergrad side of InterVarsity’s ministry. Undergrad IV is spread all over my four-state territory. The Undergrad entity known as the Central Region overlaps exactly with my four-state Area. The undergrads have a team of Area Directors for Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Missouri. You guessed it. I consider them my third team. I don’t supervise them. They don’t report to me. But I’d be crazy to ignore them. Here we are hanging out together last month talking ministry collaboration.

Since coming to this leadership position three years ago, I’ve been pretty intentional about my Third Team. My Third Team is led by Kathy Haug. She and Will Chu, her Associate Regional Director, graciously give me access to their Area Director team. Before the pandemic I used to actually hang out with them if I came to their town. Three people in the screen above actually live in my town! We’re practically family by now. They’re probably getting tired of me to be honest!

Stuff I’ve done with my Third Team in the past couple of years:

• Met with Kathy (RD) twice a year to talk ministry collaboration.
• Starting two years ago began thinking though a combined staff conference for UFM/GFM in our four states.
• One on one conversations with all the undergrad Area Directors (once or twice a year).
• Joined the undergrads for a Prospective Staff Weekend (shared staff recruiting structures).
• Our two teams share a staff member who is matrixed – George Stulac is a GFM staff member in St. Louis AND George is a Spiritual Formation resource for the undergraduate ministry.
• Kathy invites me to her AD meetings once a year – talking strategy and collaboration.
• This past year we pulled off our first combined staff conference with both our teams present. See my post from December.

Since our shared Staff Conference, our teams are working together this spring on growing our faculty ministry. Faculty Meet-ups and Square Inch Stories are a couple of new tools we’re putting on a shared work-bench in our four states moving forward. Stay tuned for the details, but here’s the strategy: team up in our approach to faculty members in particular. The undergrad side is committing to involving faculty members in their planting strategies. In most cases, undergrad student groups need to have a faculty or staff sponsor in order to affiliate a group with a university or college. GFM can help faculty discover and network with each other. New corners on new campuses can be planted. And possibly new faculty Bible studies and fellowships can be established.

What that looks like here in Nebraska is a possible Faculty Meet and Greet event that GFM and undergrad IV work on together. On the GFM side we’ve been trying to grow an Omaha Area Faculty ministry for about a year. Even though we’re on three of the same campuses, GFM isn’t fully aware of faculty members our undergraduates know and partner with. Additionally, GFM has no presence further down I-80, but drive to Lincoln, Grand Island, or Hastings and you’ll find our undergrad team mates planting and growing ministries. The left hand just doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. We can fix that!

This zoom session is as good as it gets. I’m meeting up with the undergrad Regional leaders (Kathy and Will) AND the three of us are dreaming and scheming with Kathy Tuan MacLean – InterVarsity’s National Director of Faculty Ministry. KTM is helping us identify where we have collaborative hot-spots in the coming months. In addition to a Faculty Meet and Greet in Nebraska, we also identified another strategic location – Kansas. GFM has a well developed faculty ministry at Kansas State University. Yet there’s even more potential when you consider Kansas University in Lawrence, a faculty group we have at Emporia State plus what our undergraduate team mates can bring to the table in other places like Kansas City or Wichita. We’re in the early stages of planning a state-wide faculty event for early August.

Pray for our collaborative work in the coming months. There’s still so much uncertainty about when our campuses will recover from the pandemic, but the beauty of virtual events is that they’re much easier and cheaper to pull off. And it looks like virtual events might be here to stay! Thanks for your partnership!

I like learning. I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master of Divinity degree. I like to read. And I like to build book shelves for the books I like to read. I’ve always liked school, book-learning as well as learning new skills. When my parents passed away in 2011, all manner of memorabilia made it’s way to me- my kindergarten through junior high report cards among them! I remember trying to show my kids how solid my grades were even as a youngster, but what they noticed instead were the teacher’s written comments.

“Timmy talks too much!” Says so right here, Dad, on your kindergarten report card! Wait, your first grade teacher says you needed to work on getting along with your classmates better. And that your printing could be neater. And that you liked music class but spent more time talking than singing! Dad!

Ok, maybe I like learning so much because… there was always a need for me to grow up, get along better with others (and stop talking without permission). One curious thing I noticed about my report cards is that in the first few weeks of being in a new grade level, it would say “Timmy could use some real improvement in ________________ (subject).” But by the time the last report period came out: “Timmy has made a lot of progress this year – we’re very satisfied with his achievement. I highly recommend he move up to the next grade level.” I always seemed to make great strides that last 6 week grading period. Hmmm.

I’m taking two classes this spring.

Because I love learning (and my bookshelves still have some open spaces) I signed up for a course about racism, and a training class for marriage counseling. I probably should explain both. One thing I love about InterVarsity Graduate Faculty Ministry is that I get to be around people who teach, research, write and lecture on fascinating subjects in every discipline you could imagine from plasma-physics to sociology. When I noticed GFM was co-sponsoring a course on the subject of race (for faculty members) I jumped on board. Making sense of the historical and political context we live in has never seemed more urgent to me than now. I’ve exposed myself to no small amount of reading and training on race, gender and class throughout my ministry career and seminary training. But the current unrest of our country among people groups I am called to minister makes me want deeper explanations. 2020 troubled me greatly. It still does.

Why Does Blackness Matter? is being offered through a partnership between InterVarsity Faculty Ministries and The Veritas Forum. If you’re seriously curious about the course content, you can get a look at the syllabus at the link down below. It’s a deep, revisionist dive into the American story evaluating the impact of slavery and its many ongoing economic and social bi-products. It’s not only a story about the glaring racism that has historically caused such episodic damage. It’s also a bigger story about systemic injustice with stubborn roots that have never been fully dealt with. Racism is just the presenting surface, racialization is the underground network of causal tributaries – quite alive and well in today’s America.

I hope you pray for our country regularly. I’m still trying to learn how to do that myself. The needs seem to get deeper and darker the older I become. The Kingdom of Jesus has it’s work cut out if it’s to heal the wounds still festering in a nation divided by race and class. Pray for my learning. If it was true of me that I talked too much when I weighed 48 lbs and was 45 inches tall, I’m sure it’s true I still have a lot of listening and learning to do before God is finished with me.

Oh, yeah, the second class. Can’t go into a lot of details just yet, but I have been getting requests to officiate weddings! The marriage counseling course is so I can be an official Prepare and Enrich facilitator and administer their assessment tool with engaged couples. And exactly which engaged couples am I referring to? Stay tuned.

So how can you keep harping on Ruth, Tim, when it’s such a humble plot? Plot has to sizzle! Once you realize this is a story about a widow who has had everything taken away from her, displaced from her homeland, with an extremely grumpy attitude… what’s left?

Let me know your support plans for 2021

Click here to be taken to Tim’s donation page

Here at the end of perhaps the suckiest year I’ve ever survived I give you Linson Daniel, our retreat speaker from Regional staff conference, preaching Ruth chapter 2 and 3. Go where God is at work. Do the work that is there. Watch what God does.

So, Tim, I’m not exactly in the market for another sermon, Thank you…

I’m so glad you pointed that out. But trust me. You need to listen to what Linson has to say in this message. If Covid has unraveled your sense of God’s presence and mission in your life, you need to follow Ruth’s example of GOING. “Get Going!” is what Ruth would tell you if you’re stuck, displaced, and throbbing from losses. God is already present. God’s word has already created a context of safety for the risks you feel you need to take. God is there and working himself. Go!

Click here to watch Linson’s talk! Do it!

So one last reminder here if you’re waiting to the bitter end to either send a gift or let me know what your 2021 plans are. The links are above. Hope that you are enjoying the last few days of the year with loved ones you can safely gather with. Let’s hope and pray for a better 2021! Thanks so much for your prayers and support this year!

Before I get into this post, I want to encourage you to take a minute to fill out my Ministry Partnership form at the following link. Thank you to those who have. Please keep them coming! It’s super important for me to hear from all my ministry partners at this time of the year. Please let me know how you plan to partner with me in 2021.

Click here to be taken to the response form.

Follow this link to be taken to Tim’s donation page at InterVarsity.

I’m coming to you on the second day of a joint Graduate and Undergraduate staff conference happening via zoom sessions. This is a first for our two ministry streams since I’ve been back on staff with InterVarsity. I’ve attended the undergrad Regional staff events in the past two years. But this year we’re actually sharing the event. Here’s a quick look at our theme and speakers.

Grief, Providence and Habits of Hope – GFM/UFM Combined Central Staff Conference

It’s been terrific! The idea for a combined staff conference was in the pipeline for three years. When my undergrad Staff Director counterpart and I talked about it, we were envisioning an in-person event at a retreat center. Lot’s of time for our teams to mingle. Shared plenary sessions and meals. In our own spaces for some of the schedule. As our target date drew near, however, we realized that this event was either going to get post-poned OR re-invented. It’s actually been sooo good to be together even in a virtual format.

This year like never before staff need refreshment and perspective on ministry and personal hardship. We’ve worked pretty hard this semester to virtualize ministry in digital spaces and sustain momentum where possible. Staff are fatigued from all the displacement, loss and improvisation. Our planning team landed on the book of Ruth as a message we could all use!

Themes that have come out of our time so far:

• God’s profound presence in the midst of hardship and scarcity
• Experiencing God’s goodness through the people he brings along side us
• Risk-taking in seasons of transition and displacement
• Doing what can be done when we show up even if its “just gleaning”
• God’s incredible ordering of events when we see nothing but loss
• Steps of obedience still need to be taken – work still needs to be done
• The hardest work and biggest risks happen in the safety of God’s rule

As we came together yesterday, Ruth chapter 1 met us on a note of lamentable loss. Things go from bad to worse so fast for Naomi – you wonder “Is there’s really any story here at all?” I got to lead virtual bible study with 55 of my colleagues. They tore into the text with a vengeance – just like InterVarsity staff are wired to do.

This morning the tone changed quite a bit as we moved into chapters 2-3 in Ruth. Naomi is overshadowed in the narrative by Ruth who twice responds to the invitation to GO… Go to the fields to glean. And GO to the threshing floor to propose to Boaz! Ruth is as missional and risk-taking as Naomi was depleted and hapless. Our staff teams need the example of both women to stay healthy and focused. Honesty about our pain and losses with a willingness to let go of our idealism. And… an energetic drive that says yes to new possibilities God is engineering beyond our imagination.

A positive shared experience like this has been a big step forward but we need to keep taking steps. This afternoon we spent time thinking about how our teams can more effectively collaborate in our four state region. Building awareness and trust is a must, as is follow-up. Pray for GFM and Undergrad InterVarsity as we move forward into what God has for us. Pray for our last session tonight in Ruth chapter 4 where we see Naomi’s impossible dream come true for her family. Pray for our teams to learn to dream together and experience a fuller harvest of God’s kingdom on campuses in the coming months.

Thanks so much for your partnership!