Jesus-Life Integration

As I was working this week on making reservations for the Passion Conference in Atlanta, I realized how incredibly difficult it can be to track everyone down. Our lives are so busy, and the ways that people used to handle things don't really work in the current day. Our lives used to be so compartmentalized: work was handled at work, home life was handled at home, the weekends were for family and church obligations. Where people once looked for a work-live balance, that is almost no longer possible. Today the working professional (and the college student) seem to strive more for work-life integration. This concept means that instead of trying to balance the two lives that compete for our attention, work and home, we simply integrate them. We send emails in the evening while spending time with our family. We work on homework while watching a favorite tv program together.
Last week during Spring Break, I had to attend a conference for work in North Carolina. Alisha was off from teaching school, so I took her with me. Voila, work-life integration. I couldn't put business on hold, so I integrated a vacation with a work trip. This got me thinking on whether or not we make the same efforts to integrate Jesus into our lives. Although this integration is significantly more important (and benficial) than mixing work with family, I'm not so sure it happens as often. Our lives as Christ-followers tend to be relegated to the same comfortable compartments where we have always kept them. It makes since to integrate our christian activities into our daily lives for the sake of schedule, but how much more of an impact would it have on the other aspects of our lives. Do we integrate blessing of meals into business luncheons? Do we integrate daily bible reading into our to-do list at work? Do we integrate witnessing into our business meetings? That last one hits me hard because the answer is usually no. Make an effort to integrate your faith in God into your daily and hourly activities, after all, we want to make sure that God integrates our prayers on his to-d list, right?

-Patrick

Class Meetings

I would like to ask everyone to be in prayer for this group. Our next planned meeting is Sunday night after evening worship service. We'll be going to share a meal together and talk about the service opportunities for this group. This is a very transient group, as most of them travel between home and school, but my hope is that we can build the attendance and make a noticable difference in our community. I have been praying for a class attendance of 15 at any given meeting. I hope that we can find a schedule that will allow this to happen. Please pray that God will work in a mighty way to meet the needs of this group's members and bless us to his service.

-Patrick