Songs For a Revolution of Hope, Vol. 1 Intro

Commitment to Sexual Purity

This Thursday night, I will be leading a seminar/discussion for parents sponsored by KV Youth about living a commitment to sexual purity.  Sex is a beautiful and powerful gift from God designed and reserved for marriage.  It's pull on us all is intense and alive with desire.  Our young men and women are the stewards of this fire and we need to show them a healthy way to surrender their sexuality to the Creator who designed sex from the beginning.  I am so humbled to be sharing about this subject in Thursday's seminar.  But, I feel like Isaiah when he confessed his own unclean lips and that he belonged to a people of unclean lips in Isaiah 6.  As a generation of parents, we haven't done a very good job of living in joyful surrender to God with our sexuality.  Often times we don't make the connection between God's blessing of an amazing life (including sex) and our obedience to him.  In other words we live as if following Jesus is hard work and serious while sex is fun and sort of just the thing we do. There are children living with us that are counting on us to show them a better way... the way of Jesus kingdom.  We can do this by His grace.  But, it is gonna take honesty, humility and an authentic surrender to Him.  Will you fight for a new generation of young men and women?  Will you fight for your kids?       

update for family & friends

The past several months have been an important season of growth for me as I have been waiting on the Lord and doing what He has been putting in front of me to do.  During that time, I have been reconnecting with a friend of mine, Dwight Robertson, president of Kingdom Building Ministries located in Denver, Colorado.  As our families spent a very short visit together here in Quispamsis at the beginning of July, we began to discuss the possibility of me serving God's purposes with KBM in some fashion.  The doors have opened and I am very happy to let you know that I will be joining the staff of KBM as of November 1, 2010.  You can learn more about KBM at http://www.kbm.org/  As an equipping and empowering ministry, coaching/mentoring is a high priority with this organization.  I will be serving as a "Plan A Coach" and I will continue to be located here in Quispamsis as a representative for KBM in Canada.  My focus will be to help Jesus followers to embrace their design as God's "Plan A" laborers (Matt. 9:37-38) and especially to help pastors and churches activate these laborers into lives of service to Jesus' kingdom in these chaotic times. I am so grateful for all of the love, friendship, prayer and support that I and my family have received during this time of transition.  I will continue to keep you up to date as things develop. 

Ne Cede Malis

I dug around a bit today looking for the "Lamos family motto" It is found on our family crest. I discovered that it is the Latin phrase "Ne Cede Malis". The translation is "yield not to adversity". It's funny how a motto like that has a way of challenging me at a deep level of my identity. I would love it if at the end of my earthly life my children would be able to say that I didn't yield or give up in the face of trouble or adversity.


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Don't say you are only...

When Jeremiah the prophet was a boy, he had a life altering encounter with God. You can read about it in Jeremiah 1. At one point God tells him that he is going to speak through him to challenge leaders in powerful positions of authority. Jeremiah raises the objection that he is only a boy. The Spirit quickly confronts him says "Don't say I am only a boy". The thought comes to mind that I say all kinds of things that limit what God wants to do through me. It usually sounds a lot like... "but I'm only...". Oh Creative God teach me to fill my head with your thoughts about me and learn to echo what you say about my potential in your hands".

A towel and basin revolution

I was thinking about What God 's plan might be to bring about change in this world. I read that as a Jesus follower I should do all that I do in His name... to do things in the way he would do them... with the same attitude. Jesus showed his way of doing things by grabbing a towel and basin washing his friends feet. Behavior like that could cause a revolution where I am from. If I want to change the world I need to live everyday looking for chances to serve just the way Jesus would... "God, help me to see my towel and basin every day as the best gift you have given me to change the world."


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Book suggestion

If you are looking for a great book to remind you of what really matters, I suggest that you get a copy if "You Are Gods Plan A" by Dwight Robertson. I read it over the Summer. The main message if the book is that God has deigned each of us with a unique ministry thumbprint. Gods 2000 year old plan is laborers for His harvest. Great book to get reactivated in your life mission.


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How dare you question my love?

In ancient times, God tested His people's love for Him.  It is recorded that "The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul." (Deut. 13:3)  It is a pretty typical human response to feel threatened by this, unless of course we are actually passionately in love with our God!  What if the only way to avoid sin and deception is to be deeply in love with Jesus?  In reality it still is... It is only deep and real love for Jesus that will draw His people together and send us out to usher in His kingdom. (John 17:23)  So, allow Him to test us today and may it drive us closer in to His embrace.  

The next chapter for me

On Sunday, March 28 I announced to our church family that I will be stepping aside from my role as Associate Pastor with Kings Valley Wesleyan Church.  Here is the text of that announcement with a few changes (marked in italics).  

Two years ago, Jim and Diane Agrell joined us as Jim became our lead pastor.  It has been a great experience serving him as his Associate.  I along with this church family gave Jim a strong affirmation in the Lord recently and he has agreed to continue leading us for years to come as God directs him.

In the process of many conversations over the past few months, Jim and I began to realize that my role as Associate Pastor needed to change.  At the same time God has been stirring up renewed vision in me for what He is doing here in our region.  He has been prompting me through my own prayer times and several conversations with other people that He has something additional for me to do helping with other ministry initiatives in our community.  These initiatives include KVWC but also extend beyond us to His broader church.  This has been a challenging process for Linda and me and also for Jim and Diane.  But, in response to the way we feel the Lord is leading, I will be stepping aside from my formal position on the pastoral staff of KVWC as of July 1, 2010.   The Lord will give wisdom to Pastor Jim and our LBA as they continue to build our staff for the future. 

It has been a huge personal blessing to watch the Lord bless my wife Linda with our Kidzworld ministry and I am proud to say that she will continue to serve on the pastoral staff as Children’s Pastor here at KV.  Pastors Jim, Dave and Brent have loved on me and shown great support for both Linda and me as we have shared with them about my transition.  I am grateful for each of them in my life.  I have loved serving with all of our staff, the pastoral team and the LBA as Associate Pastor.    

My family and I will continue to live and serve as part of the KVWC family as our church releases the grace of God in our community.  My primary focus will be to take some time to renew my own life with God and to get a firmer grip on what He wants me to do with the next chapter in my life.  I want to throw my energy in with helping Linda with Kidzworld as well as the family life of KVWC.  I am also excited about helping Kirk and Cheryl Smith establish the Eastgate House of Prayer.  In the spirit of this morning’s message, we want to minister to the Lord by praying for His will to be done fully in our region.      

It was our desire to include you our church family in on this new direction for our lives as early on in the process as possible.  Because it is early in the process there are some important details that the Lord is helping us to discern.  Your love and prayers are very precious to me and I love hearing from you concerning what you feel God is saying and doing and about what you feel is on His heart. 

I will be taking some time for personal development as well and making myself available for writing projects, speaking and worship leading engagements as the Lord opens the doors.   

This is not about that...

What does it mean when we say things like, "This is not about me" or "I'm really thinking about what is best for you in this..."?  Are we a good judge about whether or not our actions are selfish or selfless?  The other day I read something about a selflessness that is born out of a deep awareness of who one is and what they are supposed to do.  I found that idea very intriguing as it seems that in many of our relationships, we often misunderstand someone who is secure about those issues as arrogance.  I John 4:18 says, "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love."  It is actually "self centered-ness" and pride that leads us to fear.  When you and I are completely full of God's perfect love, we are free to fully embrace who we are and we can live securely in the life mission He has designed for us to accomplish.  We can then actually bring our best to our relationships and the mission we have been given.  

What do you want?

Lately, I have been thinking alot about the question, "What does God want?"  By that I mean; "What would cause Him to feel amazing today?".  God is still the God we read about in The Bible.  He is also the God that we know and experience by the Holy Spirit.  And He is Jesus who revealed who God really is by becoming a human being and who revealed to us how to live as human beings in a deep friendship with God.  He has been calling to me and pulling me into a renewed awareness that He is with us and that he longs intensely to meet with us and lead us in ways that we can release His grace in our world.  But the secret is found in Isaiah 30:18   "Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!".  

I want us to wait on Him and allow Him to be gracious toward us.  I want Him to show us what matters to Him and to seek His grace in aligning my desires and motivations with His.  What do you want?            

"What Happened on the Breezy Sea"? Report on the engine fire aboard Haiti boat

What Happened on the Breezy Sea:

Yesterday was a tough day but it started like the rest.  PT and I got up at about six to pray quickly, make coffee, grab a stale biscuit and meet Butch.  The plan was for the two of us to run the lobster boat without Butch for the first time.  Every pound of food we bring to the island comes by small boat, either the lobster boat Breezy Sea or the sailboat with outboards, the Wesleyana.  The latter is run by an all Haitian crew but the Breezy Sea is required by local law and preferred by base leadership to be in the command of a North American.  So, PT and I had done some training and were off on our first run alone.

I took the helm for the way over, figuring PT could have it on the return when it was loaded and required more skill.  Pete Thompson, aka “PT”, is my uncle and wingman down here since Josh and Andy are gone.  He and his church have contributed enormously to this ministry.  (They funded the second container alone, among other things.)  PT is also a former Navy Commander so running a lobster boat is well inside his ability.

The sea on the way over was the worst I have driven in myself, maybe five foot swells consistently with six or seven footers occasionally.  One seeks to drive into waves or to follow them, of course, but the difficulty yesterday morning was that the length of the waves ran parallel our course.  This forced me to drive thirty degrees off course, making a long trip with a lot of steering much longer.  The crew complained often that we were so far off course but PT reassured me that I was quite correct to drive a big triangle to avoid taking the waves broadside.  At last, within a bit under a mile from shore the waves calmed enough for us to change course and drive following them, roughly toward our destination.  No more wash over the front deck and spray onto the windshield, no more way up on the crest and crash!  down into the trough; almost there and glad for it.

Suddenly, without warning, the noise of the engine surged in our ears.  We had been at a constant 2300 rpm’s, constant temperature, constant oil pressure.  In a heartbeat the engine roared to maybe 3000 with load clanging and a great plume of black smoke.  Before my mind realized what was happening I cut the throttle and a second later cut power.  Turning around, it’s frozen in my mind, there were knee high flames roaring out of the engine compartment into our cabin.  This was a fire of intensity, burning fuel with plenty of air, not the soft crackle of kindling or campfire.

Immediately in front of me were two fire extinguishers laying on a pile of tarps and boxes.  I yelled to PT, “Fire!” and tossed him one of them.  The cabin was already filled with thick black smoke.  I jumped out the port door to the rear, PT the starboard.  Now 5 seconds have passed.  We both struggled for another second to get the stupid pins pulled, then wheeled back in simultaneously and fired at the base of the flames where they came out of the deck.  White, vile soot, billows of smoke.

“Where’s that woman?!”  I was referring to a passenger.  PT yelled back that she was at the stern.  He yelled again into the smoke if anyone was in the cabin below the bow.  The noise of flames sounded back, but everyone was out and the crew was staying out of our way.  Now maybe 10 seconds had passed.  I asked out loud for the Lord to help us and ran back in.  It was probably pointless to shoot at the deck where the flames were coming out of the gaps around the hatch but I did one more time.  I ran out to grab a breath then crawled back in to try to open the hatch.  No good, choked and had to leave.  PT shot some more, I think.  I asked God for help again, “God, please, give us a hand here!”  (Not the most eloquent prayer, I suppose.)

And here’s where God really showed His presence.  I crawled back in.  PT had thrown the tarp and garbage out of the way.  Good move because now I could see a one inch hole in the deck right above the fire and the engine.  I laid on my stomach and shot my entire extinguisher into it.  I learned later that PT did the same thing.  We’re not sure who shot there first but we are sure from examination later that the hole in the deck was in the perfect place over the spraying fuel and source of the fire.  No more flames, anywhere.

I can’t say at this point how many minutes had passed, probably only a couple but it doesn’t feel like it in my memory.  I asked Bernard, one of the Haitians and a good man, to grab some buckets of water in case of a flare up.  Our extinguishers were all but spent, only PT thought to save any at all.  (I guess I should only get how many bullets people want me to shoot.)  I did not communicate my thought very well and they opened the engine hatch and poured the buckets straight in.  In hindsight they were right to do so, a little corrosion is a small price to pay for the last few embers out.

The smoke started to clear a little so I held my breath and grabbed our packs out of the cabin.  God saved us.  The fire was put out.  PT called us all into a circle, hands on shoulders.  I was so smoked and sweated up that I couldn’t stand as the boat rolled and drifted, only the people in the circle next to me made it so I could stand.  What we prayed there was a real prayer.  I don’t remember exactly what PT started with or if I prayed out loud myself but we meant it.  Thank you, Lord, for saving us and our boat.  Praise God for His deliverance.  Praise our God who hears us.  (Even when we pray things like, “God, give us a hand.”)  Praise God for making every second count.  Thank you Lord that you never let anything happen to us that isn’t in your control.  We see your hand in this Lord.  We see how you are with us.

Pretty soon after, the Wesleyana came to tow us the last half mile to the wharf on the mainland.  I don’t know, but I imagine that they saw our smoke.  For me, at this point, the smoke and “purple K” as PT calls the extinguisher fog, was making me pretty sick.  I’d breathed in a good bunch of lungfulls by accident in the fight.  PT said the same for him.  Honestly, I felt like wet pasta for about an hour, just kind of hanging on the sail boom as we plodded toward docking.  A few hours and a coca-cola fixed me up, though, so no harm done.  PT was better after a couple three hours later, as well.  We even went to spend the night in St Marc so that we could throw 36 tons of rice with Ywam.

The afterword on the boat, as we know it so far, is that the boat is not too badly damaged by fire and engine is not destroyed.  It looks as if tomorrow we, being us but especially Butch, will just need to replace some wiring and tubing.  At the same time, we could see just how close that fire really came to destroying the boat and forcing us to swim.  It was the return fuel line that had been broken somehow and sprayed fuel onto the super heated exhaust pipe.  If the supply line had only a few more degrees, it too would have bled into the fire and from there we would have had no recourse as if fed the fire bigger and bigger.  Once again, see God’s awesome mercy.

I hope, in writing this, even if I have conveyed the excitement of the moment, I have made the only point I wanted to make.    That point is how trustworthy our Lord is, that we can cry out to Him and He will save us.  He has shown this to us yet again.  I praise Him for that.

HS.
Caleb Thompson

Missionary Doctor's perspective "Now the real dying starts"

This was written by my new doctor friend from Kenya. He came all the way from Africa to volunteer.  He's really from Philadelphia, but he and his wife are missionarys in Kenya right now.  It paints a pretty good picture of at least one of my many experiences while in Haiti. Its a little choppy, but you will get the picture. Rob Picard, do you agree?

Alan
 

---

Now the real dying starts.  From the red cage we sit in, the ten of us can see there will be some real dying soon.  We ride by in the caged back of a pick up truck.  The cage serves several purposes.  One is to keep us from falling out and the other to keep people from reaching in and getting our goodies (clean water and snack food).  It also interferes with getting good pictures of these same desperate people.  It fails to keep out the dust.  Welcome to Haiti.  Take good pictures.

To define a good picture is easy.  A good pictures will relate how heavy the death toll will be after the 230,000 have been buried.  That was the estimated death toll as of my arrival.  World Health Organization expects that once the rains start, the clean water runs out, the septic systems overflow and the tents fall down into the mud, the real dying will start. Take good pictures.  Some of these people won’t be here.

Who will die?  The good pictures tell the story.  Many of them will be those we see in the ‘one item only’ line.  You know the kind of line we complain about when someone has the audacity to get in the express line with five items.  Fortunately, everyone is in the one item only line as it is the only kind of line in town.
This line wraps around the corners of the communities we pass.  Only women and young children are in line.  The men have been kept away by the soldiers.  That is because many of the men will fight for the food and then sell it instead of feeding their families.  One item only is what the women carry away.  They will carry on their heads, a 40 pound bag of meal, or rice, or maybe beans.  It is rationed out by uniformed troops, men and women from many nations, with various complexions.

One item only is all they are allowed.  There is no hurry to get to the cash register, but there is a hurry to get into the next line of one item only.  That one will have water.  We push on.  We have enough pictures.
We arrived at our clinic site just about 3 hours after our departure from Port Au Prince.  The crowds had gathered long before and the doctors and nurses who were just completing their stay were glad to see us arrive.  They were exhausted, emotionally and physically.  We gave them relief.

It is hard to talk to anyone about the pain in their chest from the piece of cement that hit them, when there is also a pain in their heart from knowing their daughters were killed by those same pieces of cement.
You get only one item.  Now the real dying starts.

"Holding out on God hanging on to me" & Brent's "Thirsty" prayer...

At "Thirsty Wednesday" last night, Brent Ingersoll prayed that God would "show us a vision of our calling and grant us the courage to walk into it without fear and insecurity".  As he poured out that prayer I immediately felt the power of seeing myself and our congregation at KVWC moving in freedom and courage into all that God has called us to be and do.  Then I quickly recognized that this would truly be miraculous and would not happen without God's grace and without Him bringing a change in me and in us as a church.  

I enjoy listening to people as they talk about what God wants them to be and do.  Their dreams, struggles, successes and failures all help me to stay in the game and to find hope for my journey.  Lately a friend of mine said to me that he feels that the biggest barrier standing in the path of living out our calling is "getting over" ourselves.  He's right!!  I'd love to experience everyday life with a strong allegiance to the rights of the kingdom of God as a higher value than my so called personal/individual "rights".  What if we lived each day with a focus on His will being done on earth as it is in heaven?  What if I were not so sympathetic with myself and others when we hold out on God because of fear and insecurity and leave His mission unaccomplished?  What if it wasn't considered normal amongst us any more to hang back and take our time in making the courageous sacrifices  necessary to show our world that Jesus cares and is here to rescue them no matter what they are going through or no matter what it might cost us?  Getting over myself and my wants is a heartbreaking experience sometimes... sad as I am to admit it...  But, I do believe the answer still lies in finding my contentment and fulfillment in allowing God to completely fill me with His perfect love.  I John 4:18...     


 ¹⁸There is no fear in love [dread does not exist], but full-grown (complete, perfect) love ^[g]turns fear out of doors and expels every trace of terror! For fear ^[h]brings with it the thought of punishment, and [so] he who is afraid has not reached the full maturity of love [is not yet grown into love's complete perfection].        


If we turn back or grind to a halt on the path of following Jesus because of fear of any kind than we are holding out on God.  How can we be satisfied with that?   I am becoming increasingly discontent with myself over this issue and sometimes I even get angry about it and I am sharing here because I feel many of us are stuck and would love to break through these barriers of fear and insecurity.

A new decade... gulp!

There is a foundational reality that we all live in the midst of...

Acts 17:26 (New International Version)

²⁶From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.

God knew that we would be alive in these times.  It seems from what I am reading that the coming decade is going to be very challenging and likely our paradigms are going to be shaken to the extreme.  Are you up for that?

I am praying for myself, my family and friends that we will be more aware of what really matters to God concerning our lives and have more integrity toward what He values.  If by His grace we do that, we will be ready to face the "shake ups" and dilemmas of this new decade.

Happy New Year!