Month: August 2024

Well. Sort of 🙂

We are hosting our first project this week, the barista training program for at-risk youth, then we will officially open sometime next month before the university students return on the first of October.

We have also launched our social media channels, so please follow us if you are interested in watching this place grow, mature, and navigate the coming seasons.

In December of 2023, we assumed leadership of the space and the 5-year lease. Since that time, we’ve seen God provide the materials, and people to rally around this new kingdom, missional space.

When I say kingdom, I mean the loving reign of Jesus’ reality, “as it is in heaven.” Sometimes the word kingdom solicits ideas of the kingdoms of this world, ruled by iron fists and domination systems. Jesus said his kingdom was not of this world.. and he spent his time trying to unpack and help his followers grasp the values and virtues of what he called his Father’s kingdom… Only after Jesus divested his earthly life, in sacrificial loving surrender, did his followers then truly begin to grasp just how different Jesus’ world is from this one.

What kind of a king, what kind of a kingdom could this be where the Ultimate becomes intentionally weak by taking on our nature and laying down his life? Surely this is an upside-down way of being in the world we know as dog-eat-dog and each one out for themselves!

We follow a king who pours his power out upon the believing heart, awakening, and even resurrecting us from the darkness of blind death. We follow a Shepherd who lays down his life for the good of the wandering and wayward sheep. We serve a God that is found most truly in the perfect Life of the Son.

So, when we launch Lighthouse, a missional creative platform in smack in the center of our city in Cluj-Napoca, Romania’s second largest and youngest city… we are embarking on embodying this historical kingdom of love embodied in people of Jesus known as his church.. we are to be community focused on divesting our power and resources, creating opportunity for the culture to experience the welcoming invitation of the Savior of the world to discover who they REALLY are, as they discover who God in Jesus REALLY is.

Jesus kingdom, after all, will know no end – so let’s keep growing into it now!

We are kingdom ambassadors, as we follow Jesus’ example and experience His love toward us.

This week, our first project, investing in the lives of 10 young adults, ages 15-21yrs, from Ukraine and Romania. God provided Justin and his team from Filtered Hope to provide 6 full days of training in the art of Coffee and self-discovery. Many of the youth come from difficult situations, and our team is coming alongside them in an effort to empower them with practical skills for their future, and spiritual truths that we hope will germinate as seeds in their souls.

Thank you everyone that has given to the project! We are now sort of open, and testing out the space. We have many practical decisions to make, from our schedule, which partners will use the space on which days and nights. God is providing us with friends and like-minded believers who are also excited to have this ‘3rd space’ – a neutral, welcoming place to connect with neighbors, co-workers, and cultivate deeper relationships.

We are looking forward to how this place will impact culture, and change lives in Jesus name…. and for his growing Kingdom.

For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God – Romans 8:14

According to Thomas Merton¹ (1915-1968), humanity’s purpose in life is to discover meaning and live according to it. We’re each wrestling with the dissonance between what our lives project, and what our inner longings tell us are true.

“The first responsibility of a person of faith is to make their faith really a part of their life, not by rationalizing it but by living it” (1978, XIV). This living into our faith, materializing it in the world, is a participatory experience within God’s own Trinitarian Personhood. The Father, Son, and Spirit united perfectly in holy, divesting love, have created us for fellowship. In this way, says Merton, “We do not exist for ourselves alone”… and by understanding this reality, we can love ourselves and others properly.

Love, as a grand theme, is the key to resolving our inner conflicts. To experience God’s inner realities of perfect acceptance and affirmation invites us into God’s reality, a reality that supersedes the present. “Infinite sharing is the law of god’s inner life,” he says. But he challenges our concepts of love by insisting that the giving of God’s kind of love, is where true liberty and humanity’s contentment are found.

“Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy…. true happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases as it’s shared.“

In sharing in God’s love, we ultimately satisfy our deepest longings. Many of us love for the results of love, the effects of love that reverberate back to us. This, according to Merton, is a kind of “hidden moral tyranny” and an ultimately self-centered act. This sort of charity for the sake of the giver is far from God’s love. It may look like we’ve performed a loving act, and even be characterized as a loving person, but if we are seeking the effects of the love we’ve given rather than simply expressing the beauty of love from which we have been loved, according to Merton, we’ve failed to participate in God’s inner life.

“In disinterested activity, we best fulfill our capacities to act and be.”

To be disinterested is to have no alternative motives for loving rather than the beautiful expression of love itself. This is the love that God has experienced from all of eternity within His own Personhood and conveyed on Calvary two millennia ago.

God’s love is intended to awaken the recipient’s capacity to think and be. Sometimes people don’t receive God’s love, and therefore can’t truly receive ours. If the reaction toward God’s love isn’t met with an open reception to God’s love, that doesn’t mean the love was a waste, but that the reciprocating nature of God’s inner loving life has been stopped short of its intended purpose.

We love because God has first loved us in Christ, through the Spirit. As we experience this eternal, enduring, and present reality, we, by faith move out into the world of our neighbor and enter the suffering love of God. A love that is often rejected, but doesn’t give up. A love that knocks on the dormant, cold heart of humanity and smiles with an invitation to gather ’round the warm hearth of fellowship. If accepted, if received, the invited are forever changed and begin sharing in the love of God, through the Spirit.

In this way, love is perfected, and the world is healed, one heart, one soul at a time. We are filled with God’s Spirit to participate in God’s love and inner Life.

If you enjoyed this devotion, visit https://sacredformation.com/blog/ for more