I was talking to Nate on the phone the other day, and I asked him if I could ramble on about thoughts I have had during the 3 years of planting a church here in Iowa City. He said it was fine, but if I got boring than he was going to break my thumb.
My time in IC has felt like trudging up the side of mountain in fog, can't see much, it's wet, and I'm grumpy. But every once and a while the fog parts and I lose my breath at the view and also realizing how perilously close I am to the brink.
I found myself welling up with eye moisture the other day. Women call this crying, but I call crying being curled up in a ball with a fountain running from your eyes and nose and trying to catch your breath. I digress. I was watching Saving Private Ryan with our church, and the soldiers had just got off the boats at Normandy. If you have seen this movie, I'm sure your remember the graphic imagery of people getting the blown to pieces everywhere. I first saw this movie with my Grandpa who had fought in the front lines doing WWII primarily later in the war in South France (The Battle of the Bulge). We watched it in the theater together in Ames, he was in his last year of life, and on a resperator. Yet as the scenes happened I remember hearing him take a deep breath and sigh as he remembered. As the men croutched on the beach, he leaned towards me and said "Most bullets didn't sound like the ones in the movies when they go past you, they more sound like rubber bands. " While I can tell myself the movie is just acting, my Grandpa had lived this. He had been places I can't imagine.
Many of us may never see war like that...yet war is all around us. 1 Peter 2:11, 2 Corth 10:1-6
I and others had hit the beach here in IC, and spiritual forces here have raining down attacks on us ever since we have arrived. This may be difficult for some of you to really buy into. When I first moved here, people would talk about what a dark city is was--pastors who where leaving warned us not to even try. The town was too hostile, too angry, too numb to even listen anymore. I often shudder when alone at night. I don't know why...I can just say it's very dark here. I'll go into more detail of what this means another time...I need to get to my point.
I feel like I've the medic on the beach these 1st three years. Desperately running from person to person, trying to encourage, trying to stop the bleeding, trying to keep them functioning on the beach. And I have been losing person after person. There is a seen in SPR where the medic is franticly trying to save a man. He works as bullets fly all around him, he pulls the body of a dead soldier in the way to shelter him and his patient. Just as he stablizes the man, a bullet flies through the head of the man he just saved. All for nothing. I was nearly sobbing by now. Faces of people who had come with me from Ames, who where no longer following Christ were flashing through my head. I loved them. I still do. The medic throws his equipment and turns and screams profanity at the German lines. I've done the same thing. Our ememy is cruel and hurts you in barbaric ways. He intends to stop at nothing.
I write all this to make a point. Church planing in Madison is not a light undertaking. It is a notoriously dark place. And the forces there don't want us there. If you go, you will have times in which you will feel like you have had your guts ripped out. And you will wonder why you came in the 1st place. And that is my question to you. Why are you thinking of going in the 1st place?
