This afternoon, Allison is coming home from 17 days with a team from Parkcrest in Africa. I’ve had the kids alone during that time. Before this, the longest I’d ever had them alone that was 2 nights. Here’s a few things I learned from those extra 15 days with the kids alone…

1. Single parents are incredible. Seriously…I already had a huge amount of respect for single parents, but it went way up
2. There is a special bond that happens with your kids when it’s just you and them for this long together. I didn’t realize what a gift these two weeks would be for us
3. Something smells like feet in the fridge and I can’t figure out what it is…hurry home Allison! Speaks for itself
4. I’m really grateful for some friends who were able to take the kids when I had to preach, come over to hang out with me for a bit after they went to bed, and take them for a few hours so I could do other things. I’m not good at having to rely on other people…this was a good reminder of the significance of community for me
5. I’m so proud of Allison for going on this trip for several reasons, but one of them was that it was hard for her to leave our kids for that long. In retrospect, the two weeks she was gone won’t feel like very long for our kids, but it will be an important example to them of obedience and sacrifice on her part.

I’m so proud of the almost 100 people from Parkcrest who went (and are still going) on mission trips this summer…but really excited to see one in particular later today

Last week was one of those weeks where we saw the generosity of God show up in our lives several times in really tangible ways. It started with getting a large check that was totally unexpected from our mortgage company explaining that they had miscalculated something over 1 year ago and they needed to give us a refund. Then, someone in the church anonymously gave us money to get tires on our car replaced. And then a friend found out about a kind of bike I wanted to get, happened to have one laying around and brought it over and gave it to me.

All this was crazy, and honestly a bit overwhelming, but I had a hard time with it. When I think about generosity, I tend to like to be the one who’s generous. I like to be the one who anonymously gives a gift, or who gives up something that I have to help someone. I like to be the one who gives, but it’s hard for me to be the one who receives. When I get something, I want to have done something for it…I want to earn it, or deserve it. To simply receive something makes me feel a bit off kilter.

But really, a part of generosity is learning to receive. There can be no generosity without a recipient.

I’m learning that generosity isn’t always about what you give, but it’s about living with a certain posture. A posture that says everything belongs to the Lord. That sort of posture should make it easy to give, but really, that sort of posture should also make it easy to receive. Because just as I am generous with what I have because I believe that it really belongs to the Lord anyways, I should be able to receive it well also because it wasn’t theirs either…it was the Lords.

So, maybe in a culture where we are conditioned to feel good about ourselves by what we do for others and where we see generosity as an action that we do for someone else, maybe we need to learn instead to see generosity as a fundamental posture of how we live. A posture that lives with open hands that says everything is the Lords, and so all that I have is the Lords and all that I receive is the Lords.

Maybe for some of us, a part of learning to live generously will happen as we learn to receive well.

I was just looking back and saw that I started this blog almost 6 years ago.  For quite a while I actually kept it a secret. Didn’t even tell Allison that I had it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted anyone reading this and for whatever reason I felt a little funny telling people that I owned mikegoldsworthy.com

Then as I slowly let it out more and more, it became a great place for me to write out random thoughts, wrestle with some ideas that it seemed like others might find helpful, include more people in on what was going on in my life, and to be a general public journal of sorts.

As of a year or two ago, quite a few people were reading this. I wasn’t always great at checking my stats and figuring all that stuff out, but I when I would, I was shocked by how many people were reading this a day.

And that’s when I started feeling the pressure. The pressure to make sure to regularly write things that were thoughtful and engaging. 6 years ago, when no one was reading this, I never felt that pressure. But now that a number of people were taking time out of their day to read what I wrote, it seemed like it needed to be better than my strange obsession with Peter Fernandez. The truth is that it didn’t need to be better than that, but that’s how I felt.

On top of that, I had to have something thoughtful and interesting to say each weekend at Parkcrest as well as at regular staff trainings, and other speaking and teaching engagements. I needed to releave the pressure that I felt somewhere, so I just stopped the blog.

But lately I’ve been wanting to start this back up. So, I’ve decided to give it a try again, but this time without the pressure.

So, I can’t promise it’ll be interesting or thoughtful (or even regular postings), but there will be stuff here again.

For the handful of you that are left, thanks for sticking around, and maybe we’ll finally get to meet Peter Fernandez.