Cascade Church Portland

Safe To Be, Safe to Grow:: Prayer

"I'll be praying for you"

I used to say these words a lot. It was my automatic response to any difficult or painful experience I heard someone talk about. My entire adult life has been spent working at different churches so I've assumed that anybody telling me about something painful is looking for some kind of response. Prayer always felt like the thing that could offer hope and it was a way of doing SOMETHING. 

So what do we mean when we offer prayer to people? Is it kind of like saying, I'll think about you and your issue this week? Is it the offering of positive thoughts and hopes? Is it interceding on behalf of other people and getting these issues pushed to the front of God's priorities? Is it the religious equivalent of contacting your state representative?

This Sunday we are going to be talking about prayer as one of the core values at Cascade. We all interact with prayer differently. Some of us see it as a powerful force for change and healing in our world. Some of us barely engage in prayer anymore after feeling like it hasn't "worked" in past. 

We define prayer as; We engage our hopes and fears by directing them to God and allowing space for the responses. There is something powerful about creating space in our lives for moving the biggest hopes and fears in our life out of our hands and into the hands of God. My hope is that we can talk about the power of this act and give you one or two new ways of engaging with prayer. Whether you're a prayer pro, a complete novice or someone who has given up on prayer, I encourage you to take a listen.  

Safe To Be, Safe to Grow:: Curiosity

When I was a very young child I was certain that there was much of the world that I didn't understand. How did plugging in a TV send me a picture of something that is going on hundreds of miles away? How did pouring a stinky liquid in our car make it go? Why was sleep necessary?

As I got older they forced me to ignore all of these awesome questions and focus on boring stuff like numbers, letters, words and sentences. This process kept building and laying claim to the majority of my life until I was 18 and graduating high school. At that stage I was fairly certain I didn't have much else to learn. I had given most of my time, effort and energy for 13 out of my 18 years on Earth to education. How much more could there be?

But as education continued something funny started to happen. I became more and more convinced that I didn't know anything. Any field of study that you're introduced to has so much depth and complexity. When you look at the number of fields of study that exist you start to realize that you know close to 0% of the information the world has to offer.

I was sure I knew nothing. I was sure I knew it all. Then I'm certain I don't know anything. (To prove that point, I just spent the last 2 minutes debating if the "i" in I'm should be capitalized and had to ask Sarah)

So, how do we react to a world where there is far more that we don't know than what we do know?

Curiosity feels like a good first step and I love this quote from S. Leonard Rubinstein.

"Curiosity is a willing, a proud, an eager confession of ignorance."

How great is that?! We get to drop out of the "know-it-all" game and embrace our ignorance as the engine to growth and maturity. This week we are looking at the third of our five core values in curiosity. We describe it as; We recognize there is more that we don't know about God and the world than what we do know. We lean into mystery with questions and openness to grow.

Safe to Be, Safe to Grow :: Diversity

If you want to feel like you are right about any opinion, it is possible in the world we live in today. And so our world becomes a swirling pool of disagreement and polarization. We are inventing things to disagree on at a staggering level. It creates an incredibly unsafe environment where we don't feel safe to bring up almost any topic for fear of ending a relationship over it. 

What if we surrendered "right"? 
What if we stopped looking at the world through that kind of lens?

This week we are exploring that very question as we have a conversation about Cascade's core value of Diversity. We define it as; We better understand God when we live in a community of people who are different from each other. 

You see if we let go of being "right" we can grab hold of being in relationship. I can hear your voice and perspective because it doesn't threaten my reality. It's not a game that I could lose, but another viewpoint that I could understand. 

To help us in this conversation we are privileged to have Pastor Jonathan Brooks join us from Chicago. Our mutual friend Leroy Barber connected us and Pastor Brooks has great insights to share as a person who has lived his life in diverse communities that are often overlooked and discovered an aspect of God that is also overlooked. 

Safe To Be, Safe to Grow:: Intentionality

Whenever I say goodbye I usually have some idea of what kind of goodbye it is. 

There's generally a couple of different options. 

1) The See You Later - This is the goodbye that doesn't linger because there is a certainty that you will see each other again. When I leave the house in the morning I turn 3 words into one. "Loveyoubye". It's usually delivered in the midst of movement towards the door because I'm certain a few hours is all that separates us. 

2) The See You Soon-ish - This is the least certain of all the goodbyes because its not backed with a reconnection date or time. You don't have anything in either of your schedules that means that you'll definitely see each other soon, but history dictates that it won't be years until you see each other again. This goodbye usually ends with a promise to not let so much time pass until you see each other again. 

3) The See You Never - This is the goodbye that feels most urgent and intense. It can either be that you really don't know if you'll ever see this person again or it's the absence that you will feel most acutely. These goodbyes are both hard to start and finish. There may be tears, there may be uncomfortable joking to ease the tension. This goodbye feels most like a loss. 

One of the saddest moments for me is when I look back at a mis-applied goodbye. When I moved too quickly or lingered too long on a goodbye. It's a missed opportunity to honor the relationship with the intention that it is due. 

This week at Cascade we're going to be looking at how our 5 Core Values inform our vision of being Safe to Be, Safe to Grow. The first value is Intentionality:: We engage in relationships a step beyond what is known or comfortable.

Safe To Be, Safe to Grow

I grew up in the country. 

How country was it??

It was so country that all of our pets came as the result of people releasing them into the "wild" at the end of our road. 

One of the big perks of growing up in the country is the kinds of things that would randomly grow where we lived. One time we threw watermelon remains out into the pasture for the cows to eat and a watermelon vine popped up. I loved watermelon and was so excited at this bit of unplanned agriculture. 

I remember watching it grow and waiting for the day I got to taste the sweet, sweet fruit of surprise homegrown watermelon. I was positive that it would taste much better than any other watermelon I had ever had because of it's miraculous growth. 

I'd love for this to be the part of the story where I regale you with the flavor and texture of the watermelon in too much detail. I cannot because the not-so-unexpected happened. The cows ate it. 

I wasn't the only one watching that watermelon grow. I wasn't the only one celebrating this miracle of good soil, sun and water converging. I was, unfortunately, the only one waiting one day too long to partake in the fruit. 

The story illustrates that while that field was a safe place for growth, it wasn't a safe place to be. It would have been much safer for the watermelon to be in an isolated desert without the greedy eyes of cattle and children planing its delicious demise. That's not possible, however, because the desert isn't a safe place for growth.

The combination of safety in being and growth is vital for success, and at Cascade this best captures our hope for church.

David Gallagher::Taking the Lid Off

Road in Between:: The Road You're On

I hope you are getting ready for Advent. If you're unfamiliar with the term, it's a description of the time leading up to the church's celebration of Christmas. It's a version of the Latin word for "coming" and while the origins are hazy, it's easily been observed since 500. 

This year our observance of Advent is centered around the idea of journey. The Christmas story features the journey of a very pregnant Mary and her husband-to-be Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem. There's a journey of the shepherds from the hillside with their flocks to see the newborn Jesus. There's a journey from a group of astronomers from the east to go and celebrate a very special child with expensive gifts.  

Every journey is different, but they all are made up of similar sections. 

1) Departure - For a journey to begin you have to leave somewhere. Sometimes this is a difficult place and there is a lot of hope tied to traveling to a better place. Sometimes you are leaving the most comfortable spot you know on earth and you're heading towards the unknown and unfamiliar. Whether you are filled with hope or anxiety in the departure, there's a movement from something that is known to something that is unknown or uncertain. This is easily one of the most courageous steps that any of us ever take. 
2) The In-Between - Here's where the journey get's real. You're not where you've been, but you're not where you're going. This is the space where our doubts and uncertainties can run wild.  Sometimes this is a very brief place, but sometimes it can it can stretch over days, weeks and even years. Some of us feel like we spend most of our lives in the in-between. 
3) Arrival - This is the conclusion of it all. This is the moment where our work, planning and travel are behind us and a whole new scope of questions and realities flood over us. It can feel like an end or it can feel like a beginning. Oftentimes it feels like both at the exact same time. 

So, where are you right now? Are you getting ready to depart on some new adventure in life? Some of our greatest departures don't necessarily involve a change in zip code, but everything we've known is ending for a new journey ahead. 

Are you in-between? Do you feel stuck between where or who you've been and who or where you're going to be? Many times we know what it means to be the person before we depart and we can picture who we'll be after arrival, but knowing how to be in-between feels impossible. 

Are you at your new destination? Do you feel like you are at a place you've been working hard to get to? Often we've placed so much emphasis on arriving that we don't realize once we get there that there's more to be done. 

I hope you'll be part of Cascade during Advent. Christ is coming. The world is playing out this reality even today. The question is how we engage the coming of Jesus all through the stages of our own journeys. 

Thankful::Gratitude to Generosity

Thankful::Seeing the Everyday Miracles

Thankful:: Gratitude with a Lot or a Little