I'm not sure which is more of an appropriate indicator of the way the past year has unfolded for me: that I'm getting to my annual writeup six days late, or that I'm watching Wednesday's service tonight as I type this out.

Suffice it to say, the past year has been something of a different period of time compared to the first three at Lakewood. For starters, I've opted to shift my seating arrangement around, so I'm less wedded to getting the loudest possible intake of worship as well as a proximate enough view of whoever's preaching. The workload has grown and grown and I've yet to fight that off. It's not just the timed amount of work, but the type of work that's changing. Adding to the list, there's this nagging feeling that I'm running out of useful reading material at the bookstore - I can't tell you how much time I've lost to unfruitful Amazon searches for something that may not have been on my radar.

So, in short, it's been a year of change. Changes in the way God's word is celebrated, studied, and read. Changes in the way community is sought, cultivated ... and probably even defined for my sake. I'd love to say it's all gone smooth as silk, but I'd be lying. And that'd be wrong of me to do ;-) It has, to say the least, been a great year of learning, though. And I suppose that's the point God would prefer to drill into my head.

In some ways, I guess I've taken the message to get out of our comfort zone and stretch out in some new directions. So that's how your introverted blogger who would just as soon point out some nifty wordsmithing from a book or highlight some brief moment of the worship service to remember fondly ... is now facilitating a more-or-less regular movie night for Koinonia, giving a decent rookie try at teaching a brief 5-minute lesson for Koinonia, and probably doing a few other assorted things of that sort that really aren't in my DNA.

In other ways, it definitely feels a little as if I'm clawing my way back to my comfort zone. More often then not recently, it seems I'm taking in service upstairs in the Loft, via ye olde internet and a few big screen projectors. Amazingly, there's a small community of folks who now look forward to that. It's a lot of fun and the legroom is terrific. If I really feel led to do some attentive reading along with some of the music, I don't feel like I'm cheating. And during sermons, I don't close my eyes in order to replicate my usual sermon podcast listening routine. Even during Koinonia, there seems to be a terrific community of people who just seem to find me wherever I'm hiding behind the video gear.

Two challenges from the past year that warrant a few words are these:

One, I definitely still feel like I'm on a bit of a reading slump. My bookshelf has gotten a bit more academic (the NT Wright procurement here is symptomatic of that). I'm making my way through less and less of books, but more and more of the news material that the dayjob demands. It used to be that I did so much online at the office, I didn't want to spend a lot of time online while at home. Now that dichotomy seems to be at work in my reading habits. It's a struggle. It's definitely not the change in content that's keeping me away, though I did swim right through Greg Boyd's latest book, plus a handful other work-related books. But those are definitely exceptions.

Two, I had the distinct "pleasure" of going through my first presidential election campaign during the past year. I tell ya ... you just haven't lived until you've done that. I've generally limited my own commentary in this blog to matters of church and state distinctions and have made no secret that I share quite a bit of the views Greg Boyd expresses in "Myth of a Christian Nation." Generally speaking, I don't confuse my opinion of worldly matters with the truth of God's word. Nor do I try and fit the infinite depth of His love onto the head of the needle that is our own worldview. Not surprisingly, there are those at church who believe it to be their mission to do quite the opposite. That includes several people that I dearly love in my warped little Lakewood community. It can be irritating, it can be maddening, and it's exactly the sort of thing that kept me in a state of unease about finding a church home for many years. But there's a reason why God puts you in those type of situations. And roughly half of the time, I seem to appreciate it on precisely that level.

I don't know that it's entirely appropriate to suggest that these challenges are ever really placed behind me. There will always be a search to find some new way to absorb God's word in a way that breaks the tedium of repetition and soundbites. I've gone back to read several books for a second or third time and rarely found them as enjoyable as the first. But so far, I go back to Isaiah 55 every once in a while and it's still as refreshing a read as I recall the first time. I may find myself getting a bit sluggish listening to Greg Boyd going section by section with Luke and read the entire thing in full ... only to realize that as fun a read as it was, that I really couldn't wait for the next Boyd sermon to take a passage even deeper. So far, so good.

And there will probably always be differences of opinion of just about everything under the sun (political or otherwise) at Lakewood and other churches. All a simple reminder that we're merely human and that our call is to recognize our own failings when we think we see the failings in others. I'm grateful enough to have friends and co-workers who take me for what I am - an occasionally obnoxious know-it-all who fails to go through life dispassionately or quietly while I recognize there is so much repair work to be done on myself as well as the world around me (and believe me, that's the order I prefer to work). So far, so good.

One very annoying sidenote to add, though. And I add this simply to scold myself and hopefully shame myself into doing better for the remainder of this calendar year. I mentioned in my Year Three, that I had a habit of keeping a notebook for scribbing sermon notes from whatever batch of sermons I listen to in a given week. I have to say that the first half of this calendar year has been nothing short of a disaster in keeping that routine going. On a good day, I'm catching up by just logging sermon titles from weeks past in order to give some semblance to being "caught up."

But it's not just the notebook. It's the fact that it's Thursday as I write and I still haven't listened to the Greg Boyd sermon I downloaded on Monday. Used to be, that was an automatic for listening to on Monday night. I've also not listened to the latest podcast of Rob Bell, Rich Nathan, Joel Hunter and ... jeesh, I don't even remember the last Ken Wilson sermon I listened to. The routine is a disaster. Let's just leave it at that for now.

It really goes part and parcel along with being in a reading funk. There's just more on my agenda and that's the task God has put before me. I don't really want to complain about it, but I do feel obliged to lament things, somewhat. It has the cumulative effect of making me long for the day a gazillion dollars lands in my lap and I can go buy a nice home out in the woods and raise a handful of basset hounds who are capable of entertaining themselves for hours on end while I catch up on everything else I want to do in life. Instead, God has his own plan at work.

Lamentation over. Time to get back to the job at hand.

Sometimes, it's easy to think of our "spiritual growth" in terms of the things we do around church ... the Bible reading, the occasional book from the Christian book store, saying all the proper Christian buzzwords around all of our good Christian friends. I'm pretty sure that's not my mission in life. I'm fairly sure things are meant to be a little messier than that. So far, so good.