Wednesday, May 26, 2004
I was thinking today that this graduation was significant in a lot of ways, but one of them is that the class of 2004 is the last class to remember ECM before Rockwell House.

Their freshman year was when we were involved in buying, rezoning and renovating the house. The next year's freshman class -- starting with Rory showing up at an early workday -- has never known an ECM without a home.

I think we lose something there ... something we need to try to remember. First off, we must never take our home for granted. There are plenty of people and ministries that don't have homes. A home is a gift and we need to take care of it and be thankful for it. But the other thing is what we lost when we got the house.

We got a sense of permanance when we moved into Rockwell House -- and that's a very good thing. But we also now have to spend a certain amount of our energy maintaining it and raising money to pay it off and caring for it in other ways. We do this because it is our sacred job to be good stewards of what God has given us ... but I hope we will never lose that sense of freedom of mission that we most definitely had before Rockwell House ever was.

This house is a gift if it encourages ministry -- not if it becomes an albatross around our necks that inhibits ministry. Rockwell House is a gift if we take the challenge of loving caring for a space that is at once individual space, community space and sacred space be a doorway into caring for our own lives -- which are at once individual space, community space and sacred space.

One of my hopes for the years ahead is that we can do some hard and prayerful and joyful thinking about what Rockwell House means to us, how we are being called to use it and how we can best care for it. One of my hopes for every year is that we never get bogged down by it, and that having it as our home encourages us to be MORE wildly creative with our life and ministry, not less.;
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Mike at 5/26/2004 04:30:00 PM