::COUPLES RETREAT 2011

Married and engaged couples: join us for an in-town retreat on Friday and Saturday January 28th and 29th.  We'll be welcoming Jason Dukes, a pastor from the Orlando area, as we take part in teaching and discussion about marriage, families, and everything in between following our Jack and Jill: It's Complicated series.  Childcare will be provided in Well Kids, and registration is open here for only $20 per person.

::MID WEEK PREVIEW
Check out this week's Mid Week Preview, featuring our Director of Excitement James Parsons and our Lead Pastor Dean Inserra here.

For the record, I am not an expert on any topic.  Most of you folks reading this eWell are supremely more educated than I am, and you won't be fooled by verbose, digressive and nontangential language. You've heard of that guy who talks a lot, but doesn't really say anything?... well that could be me, right here, right now.  So if you still feel compelled to read-on, then do so at your own risk knowing that you will never get the next 5 minutes of your life back.  I will attempt to make this as captivating as possible, and you may even find a helpful point or two in here somewhere.  And if you can't apply it to yourself, then feel free to point at others, grinning and laughing, and introspectively appreciate how good life is.  However, if you find that they are grinning back at you, then know that this could be a circumstance of mutual misinterpretation.  Are you still with me?  Uh-oh.

If you're like me, the day-to-day grind often gets in the way and it's easy to lose focus of the details.  It's certainly helpful for me to get a kick-in-the-pants every now and then.   Before you think that I'm trying to convict you about what you should or should not be doing differently, please understand that I'm actually writing this for myself.  I invite you come along for the ride.

Not too long ago during a message, (Pastor) Dean flashed up the quote: "How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it." - Chesterton

Knowing Dean, there was a wealth of magnanimous points being made scripturally.  But I don't remember the entire sermon, or his point, because frankly, I was checking out the cute redhead a couple rows over.  For some reason this particular quote stuck with me.  After church I went home and looked it up again.  Chesterton goes on to write, "If you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference!  You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you.  You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers."

Chesterton is quite the cynic, but I believe there is some candid truth here that I must accept, and allow the morbid reality of how sin and selfish nature affect me and the people in this world around us.  We all were created to serve God, in part by serving each other, through Christ... yet my basic instinct makes me oblivious at times to ongoings outside my own little plot (that I always seem to think is thicker than anyone else's).  And I fight the arrogant thought that people in this world actually care more about me than themselves.  So I have a choice.  I can still make my life all about me, and be disappointed when others don't follow suit.  Or, I can defer to the needs of others.   When I am able to posture my mind and my priorities God's way, I am able to serve people without any expectation of return.  I can quietly go about His business, and not be frustrated by lack of recognition.  If I am able to put others first, then I begin to see my life the way God intended me to see it... including the acceptance that I am in fact, small.

Christ modeled this during his 33 ½ years on Earth.  He never blew his own horn, nor did he put himself on a pedestal for being perfect.  Instead, his love and leadership was servant-natured.  Although I will fail at times, I know I will do well to follow his example.

"Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." - Philippians 2:3-4

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the Earth." - Matthew 5:5