Well, at least the Canucks showed me SOMETHING in Game 4…

Fair warning.  This blog is about the Vancouver Canucks.  Sort of.

My “playoff beard” is just starting to get it’s legs, and this past week it has been pushed to edge of elimination/shaving, one game away from being banished for another year (Melissa can hardly wait.)

As I sat on a tour bus watching game 4 between Chicago and Vancouver instead of singing along with Michael W. Smith inside (I much prefer the early 90s concert memories I have of Smitty to today anyway), I found myself muttering the same thing over and over.

“What the heck happened!?!”

See, I could show you the newspaper articles, and the video clips, and TSN reports, and all the notes from before the game (trust me, I read them. All of them.)  To a man, every player on my beloved Canuck team spoke of how they knew what they needed to do.  How they needed to have more discipline.  Make smarter plays.  Be tougher during the play, and not between the whistles.  The said all the right things.  They sounded united. Focused.  They used the right words with the right inflections, and said it with enough conviction to have you believe that they understood what was at stake, and we’re prepared to go do whatever it took to make sure that what they knew they needed to do happened.

Then they went and laid a giant collective egg.

That was definitely not how this was supposed to go.

And yet, hours later while I was laying awake in bed replaying the sobering game in my head, an even more sobering thought hit me:

Am I the same way?  Are Melissa and I, as a couple the same way?  How about as a church?  As Christians?

Now I really didn’t like the outcome of the game.

I’ve wrestled with this over the last few days.  All I can do is speak for myself, and from what I see in our culture around me, but far too often, I wonder if we as Christians know the right things to say.  We sound sincere, like we get it.  We sound repentant, even passionate about being “missional”, and “community-focused”.  We say the right things, have the right slogans, and, even, perhaps even most disheartening, the right intentions.  We actually want to do the right thing.

But then we take a hit.  We discover that it’s gonna cost.  That there is work involved.  And so we back off.

I’m so passionately frustrated when I see this pattern in my hockey team, and so quick to judge others for the same thing, but just as quick to rationalise and create excuses when it happens in my own life.  It a trait I’ve been working hard to change.

So my question is this:  What if we, as Cornerstone Church, were a place where when Christians said something, they followed through?  Where when we say we believe in the grace, faithfulness, and goodness of God, our lived reflected that trust? Or when we say we believe that mentoring and coming alongside young adults, or serving the poor, or giving our time is important, we actually DID exactly those things? Or when we said that everything we have belongs to God, and then reflected that when we set our own budgets?  What if we were a place that DID what we SAID? (wait, that sounds familiar…).

I want to be a part of that kind of Church.  I think we’re moving in that direction.  But we’ve got some more ground to cover.  We’re we jump to action, and where we have an abundance of people who just simply want to follow through on what God is calling them to.

Because this is so much more important than a hockey game, or a shiny tin cup we can dance around with.  It’s about eternity, and faithfulness, and fully grasping and joining the Adventure Jesus invites us to be a part of.  It’s about obedience, and follow through, and Jesus doesn’t just ask politely for that, like a “good idea, but only if you really feel like it”.  He commands it if we want to follow him (James 4:17).

I know some of you may already be great at doing this.  Awesome!  Please, continue to show us and teach us how.  But for the rest of us, we need to show up.  After Watoto last Sunday, I leaned over to Melissa and said “We can do more.  We HAVE to do more.”

Let’s just start with doing what we say.  (for a good example, google Vancouver Canucks, game 5.)