by wendell berry

What hard travail God does in death!
He strives in sleep, in our despair,
And all flesh shudders underneath
The nightmare of His sepulcher.

The earth shakes, grinding its deep stone;
All night the cold wind heaves and pries;
Creation strains sinew and bone
Against the dark door where He lies.

The stem bent, pent in seed, grows straight
And stands. Pain break in song. Surprising
The merely dead, graves fill with light
Like opened eyes. He rests in rising.

(from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p. 25)

Thanks to Church and PoMo Culture for the Wendell Berry poem.

A few weeks ago we hosted a youth worker training night for the Middle School and High School shepherds at our church. Mike King was gracious enough to come facilitate the training for us. Mike is the President of YouthFront, an interdenominational youth ministry assisting organization. They put on a lot of concerts, community service events, camps, prayer retreats and the like to be a service to youth ministries in the Kansas City area. But another focus of YouthFront is training youth workers and that happens all over North America, primarily through their branch called SonLife. Both Mike and the President of SonLife, Chris Folmsbee, have recently written some amazing books for youth ministry, Presence Centered Youth Ministry and A New Kind of Youth Ministry respectively.

What’s funny is that I didn’t meet Mike during some big youth event or camp while I was in Kansas City, I met him at Seminary. Mike’s in his 50’s, he’s the President and CEO of an incredibly successful youth ministry organization but he still has a passion for learning and thinking theologically about ministry. If you pick up his book you’ll see what I mean. So it was a pleasure to have Mike come and do some training with our youth shepherds. He was very encouraging and affirming about the work that’s happening in our church. It’s always good to be with friends. Later Mike had breakfast with some of our staff at the Princetonian Diner and after that he and I went to Small World Coffeehouse to hang out until he got picked up on his way to visit Ian Cron and the youth workers at Trinity in Greenwich, CT.

What a great week.