When traditions fail us.
Over Thanksgiving we went to my families house and spent some time with them which was good, but we came back with a special gift called the stomach flu -- last week was a full week of extreme grossness. We have never bleached our house more than we did last week. Everything stunk -- literally, but it also gave Kris and I a chance to stop and look at life in a different way. We both like traditions of going to see family, but many times we come back exhausted, missing something, feeling like there should have been more of something. Sometimes traditions can fail us maybe because we have bad expectations, maybe because we don't have a clue what we are doing, but we are doing things out of obligation or habit.

I have spent some time that last couple of weeks wrestling with the thought that as a church we may be leading people in traditions that lead people away from Jesus. Do the traditions we have help people see Jesus or are we inadvertently leading them towards us, or towards the church as an organization. I came upon this quote this week that I have been thinking about, helping me to shape my perspective.

Tradition is the living faith of those now dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of those still living

It is time to jump into the fight for reality, to fight against the deadness of our world, of our church to live life the way Jesus wants us to, not the way we want to.