Praying, planning, and an interesting film

Latest update: Yesterday was a great day for praying about the new church and reading through the gospel of Luke (that's one long gospel!). I also met with one of the people who came to our open house and talked about the new church with some other people I know in town.

I'm making plans to meet this weekend with those from our open house who have said they're "in" and ready to go. We'll be making plans for future open house kind of things as well as spending time on some of practicalities of what the new church will be like.

Completely unrelated thoughts: we went to see Mongol the other night at our local art house theatre, The Myrna Loy Center. It’s an entertaining tale covering the early life of Genghis Khan, and certainly the first film I’ve seen in Mongolian.

While it has been criticized for taking historical liberties (I know, a shocking thing in a movie), I was struck by its portrayal of a completely different culture. In particular, how Temudjin (Genghis Khan’s name prior to becoming Khan) was taken by his father to choose a wife. He was only nine years old. They visited a neighboring clan and his father discussed with him what to look for in a mate. And then they had the girls of the clan line up and young Temudjin looked them over and made his choice. Not exactly an arranged marriage, but a far cry from anything in our culture.

Sometimes it’s good to see something completely foreign and see that the world doesn’t revolve around our culture, our assumptions, our view of things. Mongol gave me a glimpse of the life of people with different commitments and different expectations of the world. The world is bigger than America.

I’m also reminded that God is bigger than all of our issues and problems. Every day we can hear about an endless litany of dire circumstances, from rising gas prices and the latest dead in Iraq, to murder and corruption, to fires in California and pine beetles on Mt. Helena, and on and on.

But as I watched a film about a people who lived a thousand years ago on the other side of the world, fighting their enemies and fighting to stay alive, I see that our problems are not the end of the world. Time marches on. People live and die. Empires rise and fall. And still, God is at work. God is in the midst of it all. He is not overwhelmed by gas prices or wars or any other troubles. I can take comfort in that.