Spiritual Practices

at our last Eikon sunday night gathering, we discussed some actions that anyone can take to explore and develop their faith. stealing completely without permission from the practicingourfaith.org website, we listed honoring the body, hospitality, household economics, saying yes and saying no, keeping Sabbath, testimony, discernment, shaping communities, forgiveness, healing, dying well, and singing our lives. we chatted about ways to keep our “yes” and “no”strong and singing our lives. you may view the suggestions by clicking the links. what did you think? should we continue to cover these ideas in the immediate future?

cheers!

prayer letter 07FEB09

 

Dear Samurais of Stealthy Supplication,

I wanted to check in and let you know what all is going on down here in Texas in crazy lives of joseph and Michelle. january was a hectic month in all the ways that sound so much cooler than they really are. i’ve been reading and conversing a lot lately about a certain topic that’s come to light–perhaps it’s a theme for me this year. perhaps there’s something i should take away from the persistence of the darn thing. it’s this: that it seems like a good idea to be busy. having spare time on your hands isn’t the worst thing socially, but it certainly garners appreciative nods to complain or even mention how busy one’s life truly is. and i’m realizing more and more that there’s something wrong with this world view. it’s no fun not having plans on a weekend night for the 3rd time in a month. but having the next “thing” or event looming on your horizon no matter which direction you turn can cause migraines, yes? do what you will with that thought…

i agreed several months back to lead a music team for the local Presbytery’s senior high school student convention. at the time, i wasn’t overwhelmed in life, and i thought that anything i could do to get in good with the folks at Ridglea would allow me to make some good impressions, even build some relational capital. i also agreed to do it for free. oops. there was never an offer of compensation, but for all the time and effort and driving and calling and emailing and responding, i should have demanded some. regardless, i was fortunate enough to assemble a great group of kids who love and are actually good at music. five rehearsals later, we were on our way to Austin College in Sherman, TX for a weekend of good thick rock and roll. with all due respect, Presbyterian folks in this part of Texas are a few (dozen) years behind in music, and the sheer wide-eyed awe was evidence that yes, we were blowing their minds. we only introduced 2 new songs that hadn’t been done before, but one student’s comment at the end of the night capped it up for me. we had consistently been finishing a few minutes early, taking 5 or 6 minutes less than we had been allotted, so i asked the previous year’s music leader if the kids would know the song “did you feel the mountains tremble,” which is a song by Delirious that helped usher in the current era of modern worship music. he said he wished that they did. i asked for an alternate suggestion, and he suggested the even more widely over-played song “in the secret.” so i grabbed my acoustic guitar and killed the song, after which, a girl approached me and proudly announced that she knew all the words to that song, even though no one else around her did. this song is from 1995, and it’s still cutting edge to them. ugh.

on a related note, i had chatted with the music director at Ridglea Presbyterian, where Eikon meets for worship services, about stepping down. i was deeply influenced by my consistent run-downedness recently and by a short book by Seth Godin called the Dip. i recommend it. the book, i mean. the gist of the conversations prior to this was that my time and effort spent on staff with Ridglea wasn’t an endeavour leading to the success of Eikon. no one cares how well Michael Jordan plays baseball–it’s his finesse with a basketball that made the “45″ immortal. it’s not the deft expertise of Johnny Depp in the kitchen that makes him one of the best actors alive–it’s his acting ability. Vince Lombardi was kinda wrong when he said that winners never quit and quitters never win. the winners of the world quit–all the time. it’s what they choose to throw themselves into completely that sets them apart from the rest of the world. Eikon is my dream and michelle’s dream. it deserves our very best shot, not a scattered effort that holds only part of our time and energy. so as of last monday, i amicably split ways with Ridglea. we still have a good relationship with the staff and leaders and they have been generous enough to allow us to continue using their chapel.

Michelle is working hard with her painting, now determined that 2009 is a tipping point and that any hopes of getting her Master’s in painting should be realized sooner rather than later. as such, she has the support and the encouragement of her professors as she seeks to complete her portfolio as a single body of work. the 2-3 paintings she has completed this year look phenomenal, and i’m always more impressed with her eyes, hands, and heart with each painting she finishes. her goal is 20 for this year. we’ll get some scans on her blog by the next prayer email… remind me about it! based on how things go this year, there will be some college visits and applications going out at the end of this year.

Eikon itself is moving forward…

-our website is almost ready to go. you can see the progress for yourself. we’ll be investing a bit in a listing on Relevant magazine’s website once the site is complete, and we’ll see what comes of that.

-we have some events and service projects coming up this first quarter, including a polar bear party (i know, right? what the heck is that?) at our house, a benefit walk for Lupus research (which Christina has been living through for years now. there have been no medical advances in research for Lupus in more than 20 years), and 2 work days in Lake Como, one which is a citywide clean-up day, the other is a community center repair, repaint, etc day where Eikon will be manning the grills to feed more than 200 workers and community center staff.

-the three Eikon babies are doing well.

-a couple of Ekonites are searching for new jobs to replace current ones.

we always covet your prayers. we’re also always honored to pray for you also. regardless, drop us a line and let us know what’s going on in your life!

 

all our best,

joseph and michelle

prayer/Daddykins email update

hello, and merry christmas to all…

i had emailed many of you back recently, but i wanted to follow up with everyone and thank you for your prayers. my dad is back home recovering, and doctors believe they’ve got this pancreatitis licked, so to speak. he’s been using a walker to get around, which is a stark reality check. i just heard from a good friend about how she still views her father as being “stuck” in his early 50’s, although his age matched her residual image a decade ago. i’m in the same boat. the clearest memories i have of my dad are of us doing something outside… walking Cannery Row in Monterrey, playing baseball in the street (he had wicked fast reactions, surprising for a mathematics PhD/computer programmer, much to the delight of my school friends once when he reached out in what must have been less than one hundredth of a second to snag a line drive screaming by the pitchers’ mound), and hiking in the mountains of California. and now he needs help walking.

if you’ve met him, he’s pretty tall and skinny. in the hospital, he had had so little to eat in the past month that his skin hung off him everywhere and his face was bony. (!) it wasn’t normal, and it fractured my heart in what i can only describe as a novel way. i have much to be thankful for this Christmas, as with every Christmas, but i certainly appreciate my family with a new depth. i am eager to make it out to san jose come january for a late Christmas, around my dad’s birthday. i can’t wait to be with my sister and her new husband and see my parents with the beeping of IV pumps and the smell of Clorox on old linoleum conspicuously absent from the background.

michelle and i are both grateful for your prayers and support through all this and for Eikon over the last year. may your holidays be wrapped with the hope that comes only from the presence of Jesus Christ.

peace,
joseph

daddykins update

i just got this from my sister…

“just wanted to let you know that mom called me this morning, dad went back to ICU because of internal bleeding.  CAT scan didn’t reveal where the bleeding is occurring.  this time, it wasn’t pain that clued them in to internal bleeding — it was mainly light-headedness (and mom said red in his b.m.’s)  I think he’s just being monitored more closely in ICU.  he actually sounds very good on the phone, maybe less on drugs now.  his surgical wounds are healing up well and he hasn’t had too much of a fever, so that’s good.  the doctor said it was too soon to go poking around and inflaming his stomach or doing an angio-gram…. so he got 3 pts of blood to offset what blood he was losing, and I think he feels okay for now.  mom said he’s still eating food.”

when i arrived in san jose last friday evening, my dad look really bad… pale and super skinny. he’s lost so much weight and he didn’t have much excess to begin with. he had an NG tube (nasogastic intubation–there’s your medical term for the day, all you hypochondriacs), was on oxygen, and hadn’t eaten or drank anything for the previous three or four days. i imagine any of us would look bad if it were us. he continued healing up and my persistent (if not bothersome) mum finally got the doctors to allow him some jello and juice, which he devoured. we took his many IVs for walks every day, slowly hobbling around the nurses stations. by the time i left (and 3 pints of blood later), he had regained some of his color and seemed to be in better spirits, even smiling a bit. he didn’t talk much at first, but was quite conversational during the Auburn football game (his alma mater) on saturday. i got to shave him on sunday morning before i left. it’s awkward enough shaving oneself for the first time, but having to work on someone who couldn’t even lean back in his chair very far because of all those cuts in his stomach, who also had a bit of loose skin, that was a slow process. kind of an odd bonding experience, perhaps. or perhaps not. i did a decent job, although i’m certain there were a few patches under his chin that i just couldn’t get. i was as scared of me as he probably was!

anyway, this brings us to 2 points: 1) donate blood. donate platelets. donate your plasma. you’ll be saving someone’s life. my dad is A negative, which is quite rare. (i’m not a match, either, or i would have rolled up my sleeves right away.) the hospital had to order blood from different counties twice over that weekend. that could have been avoided if folks were donating in that part of san jose.  2) whether they actually want you to or not, visit people in hospitals. if they are friends or family or anyone who is remotely connected to you and you’re in the area, visit them. bring cards and balloons and flowers and books and magazines. and pray with them while you’re there. even if you’re not a praying person.
more later as it becomes available…

daddykins and thanksgiving dinner discussion

i figured i’d write a bit while i’m in Sky Harbor (quite possibly the coolest name ever for an airport) waiting my Southwest flight to board in terminal D. wait, you say. Southwest, is it? since when do you fly Southwest?

since my father-in-law used 25000 of his Morgan Stanley points to get me a flight from Phoenix to San Jose to see my family. my dad has been in and out of the hospital for the past few weeks, getting treatment for pancreatitis, which was likely brought on by problems with his gallbladder. they finally removed the gallbladder, which would have helped things more if it had been caught earlier in the game. as it is, daddykins has pseudocysts filled with all manner of foul nastiness. some have burst, some have been burst, which left a bit of dead tissue and fluid in his stomach area, which isn’t conducive to living a happy, pain-free life. so they cut open daddykins again (this is 3 times now, i think, with more than 7 incisions totaling more than a foot) to mend this and fix that, and when my mum saw him fresh out of surgery, he was looking quite bad, as one might expect, and although she’s been very brave mostly on her own throughout the 2 month ordeal (my sister came down one weekend, and there’s been an occasional church friend visiting), she’s had quite enough and has called in the cavalry… being me, of course.

so, i’m going back back to Cali Cali for the first time in a year. i’ve tried to ring a few friends, but no one’s picking up, so rather than renting a car, i’m going to drudge up memories of college and take the train from the airport station to where the hospital is and meet up with me mum there. michelle suggested that i not rent a car, and mum probably is in no shape to drive to the airport, which isn’t too far away, but she’s been sleeping erratically and eating poorly, or so it sounds. any prayers for my family are truly appreciated.

on an unrelated note, the in-laws, several generations of them, made it out for Thanksgiving last night. michelle’s niece, Taylor, who is about 6 or 7 months old, is as cute as a button, and is fish-flopping about and smiling the whole time. it’s supposed to be progress toward crawling, then sprinting, then walking, i think in that order. when Grandpa Carl and Max, the aforementioned father-in-law, were sitting and chatting, the big 3 automakers came up in conversation. Max remarked that he understood that whatever financial consequence befalls them is deserved, but he couldn’t believe the audacity (the ‘vocab-lessons-come-in-useful-finally’ word of the year) of the congressman who had suggested that the multibillion dollar corporation presidents should have bought coach fare tickets to fly to Washington to deliver their demands for cash in person. i agree. i couldn’t believe the audacity, either. Max then proceeded to note that there’s no way the big 3 CEOs could have made equally snide comments that senators and congresspeople and governing officials use the public’s money to fly in private jets. that’s a good point. but i think that rebuttal breaks down quickly. granted, there’s a lot of inefficiency within our governments, local and federal, and it’s not hard to find. but these people are operating within some semblance of a budget, with varying degrees of success, and their jobs depend directly on the public’s perception of their successes and failures. these CEOs, much like any random individual, may make good or bad choices with the money they are in charge of, whether it’s an individual income or running an automobile company. so for a CEO to make or allow devastatingly stupid decision after numbingly foolish decision, then have the audacity to say that our country cannot afford to allow them to reap what they have sown is quite different. that’s the foolish, prodigal son, blowing his net worth on obsolete and frivolous expenditures, then demanding to regain his place in his father’s household, not humbly begging to be hired back as a servant. and of course, if you’ve been around me at all, Uncle Sam ≠ the Father. not hardly!

it’s important to look at the entirety of the conversation to know exactly what the Congressman’s point was—namely, the little bit about jumping out of a limo with a tin cup.

i’m curious to know what you think. for anyone who’s been around long enough, what where the horse and buggy companies saying when Henry Ford brought out that blasted internal combustion engine? just a thought…

prayer email

welcome back, everybody! everybody!

hopefully you’ve enjoyed your break from my nonsensical ramblings about my life and why you should care, cause the break is over, and i fully intend to give you no good excuses why you shouldn’t be bathing michelle and i in prayer. but i’m not going to beg you or anything… i have my dignity.

ok, i lied. i have no dignity. i’m begging you-please pray for us. pretty please.

anyway, allow me to do a bit of catch up…

meeting place-through a friend of a friend, we ran into Krin. he’s the pastor of Ridglea Presbyterian Church on Camp Bowie. he’s a native Californian also. his church is a bit of a has-been church that was flourishing many years ago and has since dwindled in size and influence. he’s been leading the charge to bring life back into the church and is a huge ambassador for the Kingdom, challenging his denomination and his church family to move beyond the walls of a building and get their hands and feet dirty whilst serving the poor and underprivileged in Fort Worth and south of the border also. they have a 40,000 square foot building that includes a 120 seat chapel (the original church building) that is used for 75 minutes a week. as a friend of Eikon, Ridglea is renting it to us at a ridiculous price (no mortgage=good things) for worship gatherings, which we’re having the last sunday of the month currently. 2 services in, we’ve had a few new families and couples and young-uns check things out. our next service is next sunday night the 27^th. we’ll have pictures of stuff up soon so you can peer at us suspiciously through your looking glass (read: computer monitor). ‘how can i see these pictures,’ you ask? read on, my preciouses…

website-michelle and i are taking some of the material we have compiled and revamping and editing what currently exists at eikonchurch.com. if you look now, you’ll see something that resembles something useful, but really isn’t. we want something that catches your eye and that has functionality and is informative. just like a normal site. keep your eyes peeled for that soon. by the way, we developed business cards, too. they’re pretty generic except for a little logo that a friend developed on them… it’s a wing with “Eikon” written in some awesome font. we also are having sample shirts, hats (i know, right???), car magnets, window decals, postcards, posters, etc. drawn up. we have a preliminary theme for our stuff, although our first look has yet to be finalized. on the website, i’ll post some options we’re considering for logos and themes and open them up to your critiques if you’re interested. i certainly am. i’m designing them. anyway, i’m looking a lot at something you may have heard of from the Center for Church Communication, called churchmarketingsucks.com and yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. it’s a place for designers and marketers and artists can come and open up their work to comment and to vent about how utterly terrible church sites, designs, and marketing all are. if you shake your head at the status quo, you should take a gander. since i know nothing about advertising, it’s been a real head scratcher that’s making me ask good questions. like does anyone actually use the phone book anymore? in related news, we’re 3 in the googlesphere for the search “Eikon church” and 3 on yahoo for “Eikon Fort Worth.” sidebar: a few months after we decided on a name and purchased our domain for the website, a local megachurch decided that their new young adult doohickey (that’s a real word!) should be called Eikon. funny how brilliance inspires the uninspired, yes?

Eikon itself-Christina still has lupus, but has been so much better since Mark dropped in on us (he’s a big baby!). she’s lost some weight and is getting out and about like normal. we borrowed Autumn last saturday to run her ragged around town and give her parental units a break. we visited the water gardens. here’s proof that Fort Worth is a beautiful city. Rachel, Kris, and the twins are doing ok also. we’re actually on a kickball team with the older half of their family on wednesday nights. it’s been nice to see them get out a bit more. i know Kris is starting to look for an additional part time gig at night to help financially, so that’s something to be praying for. John and Becky are on the kickball team also. John is out captain and is doing a dandy job of captaining us. sidebar: you know the rep that Texas has, right? everything is bigger and better here? well, i’ve never played with a more wussy group of kickballers since grade school. these guys bunt so much it’s like lawn bowling. anyway, we’ve gotten to meet a bunch of new people the past few wednesday nights, so there has been some “cross-pollenization” of friends, which is great. we’ve been purposefully running with, dancing with, watching movies with, and dining with all sorts of people while introducing to the Kingdom. and i don’t think it’s even enough of a rumble to register on their sensors. discipling unaware disciples.

one last bit about marketing-a few years back before one of the most influential movies of all time came out, a viral campaign was started. the movie’s website was www.whatisthematrix.com. it still exists, but the matrix itself (not the movie) couldn’t be explained in a 90 second trailer without sounding incredibly confusing and dull. and so it started popping up everywhere: billboards, 15 second black screened TV spots, internet pop-ups. (more specifics here.) there was no mention of the fact that it was a movie, there were no shots of a trench-coat clad Keaunu waving his arms around in slow motion. just a simple rhetorical question. i’m thinking a lot about this. in the way that the Matrix trilogy redefined special effects and soundtracks and allowed philosophy to permeate mainstream media and even religion, perhaps what we’re up to here with Eikon is a bit of the same. not nearly as commercialized, which may grind on the fact that i keep mentioning ads, marketing, and the like. and i certainly have no guarantee that we will have a blockbuster church on our hands months from now. but i think that at the very core of who we are, who we will be, and how we will do it is fundamentally upstream, counterintuitive, insert idealistic adjective here, that perhaps a similar introduction to Fort Worth is fitting. not in a self-promoting manner, but if our vision becomes reality, even just a fraction, this city, perhaps even the church in America, will not look the same. we want to expose the world that has been pulled over our eyes for the lie that it is.

perhaps you’ve seen the Robert Kennedy quote, “some men see things as they are and ask why. others dream things that never were and ask why not.” it we’re up to what it is we THINK we’re up to here, it’s truly nothing new, but it is something different than what currently exists.

we remain very truly yours,
joseph and michelle