Powerful Incentive to Resume Jogging...and a Favor or Two
An advance warning that this post is remarkably chatty and newsy and not the usual Deep Content, so feel free to skip to our regularly scheduled Deep Content, such as it is, tomorrow. For the intrepid few who will read on, herewith the chatty, newsy stuff.
So the 700 Club mini-feature on me (I'm not sure what to call a 5 minute video...and evidently there was an additional 5 minutes of chat about it afterward) did air Friday. Here's the link. It's a brief take on my conversion story and seems perfectly fair to me. They got a young man to play me ramming crosses...and, man, does the present-day me look a little jowly compared to the faux-19-year-old me. I'm telling you--they filmed me from an unflattering angle! It's the camera angle! But I have gotten some good jogging in since Friday, so this is clearly all part of God's plan.
Grace and I head to Bath, England on Thursday for what could be a very encouraging trip. I got a kind invitation to speak at a large church's "Weekend Away" for their members. I try to bring a kid with me when I travel to speak, and I'd planned that for this trip as well. But Grace's hangdog expression as she reminisced about two really wonderful trips to Britain that we took before we had kids made me wonder if maybe she could make it work, despite our kids still having a bit more school before summer hits. We'll take three-ish days there after the Weekend Away. We were trying to add up how many days we've had together sans kids since our first child was born twelve and a half years ago. The total--a whopping 3 days. So we'll lap the field with this, and I'm very much looking forward to it.
But, apart from that little window into my upcoming week, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts for me. On the one hand, the church (Christian City Church Bath and Bristol) kindly invited me to speak on "whatever was on my heart." Earlier on, the pastor (the awesome Andrew de Thierry) had mentioned interest in having me speak about having grown a church in a secular setting, as they are in process of doing.
No doubt I'll touch on stage theory and bounded/centered set (note the short videos on these topics in the multimedia button, above). I'll probably talk about various approaches to connecting with God, as that seems like a fundamentally centered-set thing. And I'm kicking around talking about the hero's journey (sadly only explored in my book, not yet on this blog) and how that can motivate us towards bold endeavors on God's behalf. Yet I'm worried that the English cultural context might be different enough than I've experienced here that I'll be tone deaf.
So, the favor. For those of you familiar both with this material and with England (Bath in particular), do you have any advice about things I should especially focus on or avoid? Any sense of the needs for people trying to follow Jesus in that context?
And a mini-second favor. Grace and I have enjoyed traveling to interesting places that perhaps aren't large metropolises, but are pretty places with the occasional interesting thing to drop by. For those of you familiar with Bath and the surrounding area, any thoughts on where we should travel for our three days of travel time?
