Life Change

Since the start of the New Year, Madison Park has been discussing ‘life change’, not just for the individual, but what that looks like for our ‘church’, and the Church as a whole.

Specifically, Madison Park has 3 main objectives: Encounter, Connect, Serve.

Here’s a bit more insight into the terms (these are either summaries or verbatim from MP’s website).

ENCOUNTER: Basically, this means encountering God…coming together to meet him, recognizing that it’s about him and not us.

CONNECT: Connect occurs when study and discussion of God’s Word and a group of people are intentionally brought together for life change. We encourage everyone to find a “Connect Group” that will help you grow in your relationship with God and others.

SERVE: Service occurs when people present their lives as an expression of God’s love. Service happens when we discover and address needs in our world, in our community and inside His church.

We’ve been talking about how as we do these things, get a bit deeper in our connections, our actions, we begin to somewhat “get” it, what the purpose of this life is, and how as we do these things it creates life change.

MP has created a symbol or logo of sorts to represent these 3 ideas and help us remember them, reflect on them when we see it. They provided a supply of vinyl window clings so we can put them in our car windows. When we see the symbol when we’re out and about we can further be reminded of life change, and others who are experiencing it, “getting” it.

Now, all that being said, my two-year old daughter Janna was sitting at the table this morning while we were eating breakfast. There was a piece of paper laying beside her with the MP logo on it. She picked it up and said, “Daddy, church.” Flipped it over, where there was another logo, pointed to it, and repeated, “Daddy, church.”

I thought, hmmm, how interesting, how cool that she can already identify the symbol that way.  I know she doesn’t “know” the concept of the terms encounter, connect, serve, but she experiences them just like we do. I know she’s two and one might say, you’re reading too much into that, but I just found it extremely cool to think that at two, maybe she was already beginning to “get” it. :)