The Tree of Life

2009 was a great year for our church!

For starters, we relocated to an actual church building. We went from meeting in the "upper room" of the Win-Jeff Plaza to an amazing facility with sound, lights, chairs, children's ministry rooms all set-up...it was like we missed the rapture and walked in to take over an empty church. This was greatly due to the kindness of Mosaic Faith Community and their willingness to lease it to us.

We also started 2009 with a name change; from the Church @ Rochester to LifeTree Fellowship. We continue with the vision God has given us: Relationship. Community. Our World. The Tree of Life is such an interesting study in the Bible.

Check out these scriptures:

Proverbs 3:18 Wisdom is a tree of life for those who take firm hold of it. Those who cling to it are blessed.

Proverbs 11:30 The fruit of a righteous person is a tree of life, and a winner of souls is wise.

Proverbs 13:12 Delayed hope makes one sick at heart, but a fulfilled longing is a tree of life.

Proverbs 15:4 A soothing (healing) tongue is a tree of life, but a deceitful tongue breaks the spirit.

It is our desire to be the Church that reaches people in our culture, healing broken hearts and loving all God brings to us. The Tree of Life is not only metaphorical, but a real literal tree. it was first seen in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, but those who put their faith in Christ will one day see it again.

Revelation 22:1-3 And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. 2 In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him:

Senior Chorus Concert

This past Friday was my daughter's Senior Chorus Concert. As a special tradition, the seniors are allowed to do a duet or trio with a friend or two choosing any song they like. Brittany, or as her friends at school call her, Alex, and 2 friends chose Dust in the Wind. She asked me to accompany them on my guitar.

I was a bit nervous as I'm not big on performing. Leading worship at church is a totally different thing. Performing asks for greater scrutiny. Nonetheless, I was so privileged to play for the big crescendo of her high school singing career.

Take a listen:


There was an unexpected surprise at the end of the concert. First you must know the background. Last year, their beloved music director, Mr. Brown, had resigned and moved away. It was a crushing blow for the students whom he had deeply impacted. Mrs. Rice had very large shoes to fill coming in this year as the new director.

At the end of the concert the seniors would sing their final song. She said, "I have a surprise for you. Directing the final piece will be...Mr. Brown." The whole choir gasped as he came running in from the side. They were incredulous. He was so moved by the opportunity he was crying and shaking. As the song began, you could not even hear the first 3 lines as they were so moved by his return.

Everyone was touched by this selfless act of Mrs. Rice. Her moment to shine, the big finish, validation, vindication...she chose Love.

Amazing Skies

We just spent Christmas and the New Year with my parents and 5 siblings and families in a log cabin in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee. The cabin had a large balcony/porch overlooking a forested valley with mountains in the background. One day we watched the sun traverse the sky somehow creating 2 hot-spots with rainbows crossing them.

There was also a 3rd rainbow straight up above us in the clear sky. Unbelievable.

This is a pic of Sunrise off Interstate 90 between Rochester and Syracuse January 8th, 2008.

My Daughter

The following is a Personal Mission Statement my daughter wrote in health class. It really touches my heart.

I will remain an intangible constant
A stone
Ever-weathering
Changing
Becoming
Remaining
Rooted into the richest, deepest places of the Earth
Always facing the Son
Reflecting His light
Deciding
Mending
Dividing to find the Only One
Living a Ferocity
A passion untapped
The reservoir of Life inside of myself
A loyalty falling and unfailing
Two nail-pierced hands lift every wound and fight just to stand between
No one else but the Only One can fulfill to entirety
I am nothing, nothing without Him
A void less empty but still untaken
Surrounded but ignorant until That Day
The Day I stepped from complacency and self
To His embrace
To feel the rush and take part in its Fury
Fueling its ardor to conceal a Greater Plan
It’s all I’ll breathe for
A choice I make
I’ll stand behind so He can stand between
The choice He made
I won’t be insulting
I give in to His tides
His love like the ocean shore
I feel it recede but it’s really only me
It’s my push-away gravity
I clutch at the foam to see it dissolve in my hands
It fills me up
I ask for His fullness so I can pour out where my feet fall
Where they touch the ground
When they touch the Earth
They fall into it to try to find their Maker
When He’s always just beside them.

Summer Vacation

This past August I took my family up to the Alexandria Bay area for a little vacation. We stayed about 15 minutes inland in a newer cabin on a small lake. It was quite private.

We caught fish.

We visited Boldt Castle on the St. Lawrence River in Alex Bay. Quite a place.

We even saw and heard the loons that live on the lake. I caught one on film making its call for almost a minute. Click to hear the audio. Quite beautiful.
A few hundred yards from the cabin was a rock formation that hung over the water about 16 feet high. The water below is said to be about 40 feet deep. Standing up there the first evening we arrived, we made plans to do some cliff diving the next day.
Morning came...late morning that is. I put on my bathing and headed out with Andrew. Now that is was time, as I stood up there it seemed a bit more intimidating. My son watched on as I was working up my nerve to jump. Finally after about 15 minutes of questioning why anyone would jump off a perfectly good rock, with a shout and splash I made the plunge.

Seconds after I hit the water I looked up to see Andy had left and was running back to the cabin to put his bathing suit on. This spoke to me about the influence we have on our children. He went from, “I’ll do it later,” to sprinting to the cabin to suit up just because he saw me do it while shouting, “I’ll be right back!”

When he returned I had already climbed back to the top and was drying off in the sun. Now it was his turn. He pretty much had to go through the same process I did. Lots of posturing to jump, rocking back and forth, countdowns from 10, the whole deal.

I took the opportunity as a teaching moment. Andy wants to be a Marine when he finishes high school. I talked to him about all the difficult things he’ll have to force himself to do in training and his time in service. I explained to him the difference between making an emotional decision versus choosing to do what you know is right, (not that jumping off cliffs is always the right thing to do but he got the point).

He was ready, as long as I went first. My concern was that I’d jump, and find that he still didn’t. So I told him, “when you see me leave the rock, don’t think about it, don’t wait for your feelings to say ‘I’m ready,’ just do it because you already decided to do it.” I explained that when I jumped, the feelings never came to say it was a good idea. I jumped because I decided to.
Finally I made the leap. As I surfaced, I looked up to see if he did it. He wasn’t there but a few feet away from me was a 3 foot diameter circle of white bubbles. Hoorah!

Memorial Day

I have to share this story from church yesterday. After worship when the kids were being dismissed for their class, Noah asked if he could say a prayer for Memorial Day. Of course we were all too happy to let him. I wish we recorded it. It was so beautiful, especially coming from this bold youngster.

He prayed for our soldiers giving their lives for our freedom just like Jesus did when he died on the cross for us. It was very moving.

This is a pic of him at Rochester's Clean Sweep last year. Awesome Job Noah!

A Look Into Spiritual Warfare

This is an exerpt from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. It is a conversation between 2 Demons. Just so you understand the conversation, they refer to God as the Enemy.

My dear Wormwood,

The most alarming thing in your last account of the patient is that he is making none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of an endowment of 'grace' for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation! This is very bad.
I see only one thing to do at the moment. Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, 'By jove! I'm being humble', and almost immediately pride – pride at his own humility – will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt – and so on, through as many stages as you please. But don't try this too long, for fear you awake his sense of humour and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.
But there are other profitable ways of fixing his attention on the virtue of Humility. By this virtue, as by all the others, our Enemy wants to turn the man's attention away from self to Him, and to the man's neighbours. All the abjection and self-hatred are designed, in the long run, solely for this end; unless they attain this end they do us little harm; and they may even do us good if they keep the man concerned with himself, and, above all, if self-contempt can be made the starting-point for contempt of other selves, and thus for gloom, cynicism, and cruelty.
You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly
revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy's strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another.

The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents – or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. He wants to kill their animal self-love as soon as possible; but it is His long-term policy, I fear, to restore to them a new kind of self-love – a charity and gratitude for all selves, ncluding their own; when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left.
His whole effort, therefore, will be to get the man's mind off the subject of his own value altogether. He would rather the man thought himself a great architect or a great poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spend much time and pains trying to think himself a bad one. Your efforts to instill either vainglory or false modesty into the patient will therefore be met from the Enemy's side with the obvious reminder that a man is not usually called upon to have an opinion of his own talents at all, since he can very well go on improving them to the best of his ability without deciding on his own precise niche in the temple of Fame. You must try to exclude this reminder from the patient's consciousness at all costs.

The Enemy will also try to render real in the patient's mind a doctrine which they all profess but find it difficult to bring home to their feelings – the doctrine that they did not create themselves, that their talents were given them, and that they might as well be proud of the colour of their hair. But always and by all methods the Enemy's aim will be to get the patient's mind off such questions, and yours will be to fix it on them. Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased.

Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE