"W" #3: Surviving the Mess

Contributed by:
Eric Dunaway
small groups pastor

I'm not sure if she was the first person to make this statement, but Heather Zempel told several thousand people who tuned-in to Willow Creek's Group Life conference a couple of years ago that small groups are messy. In fact, she spent a good amount of time talking about "poo" to make her point. It's true, groups are messy because people are messy. You can't throw a bunch of flawed people into a group and expect it to be anything but messy from time to time. I may have been naive enough at one point to believe that my groups would escape this reality. I'm not anymore.

Wisdom to Put Things Together

Contributed by:
Becky Johnson
women's life director

From the earliest of ages, my 17 year old son has always loved to take things apart. Any gadget or appliance in our house that no longer worked reached the same fate in EJ’s hands…it was taken apart to see what it contained. We even made trips to vacuum cleaner stores to salvage disposed vacuums so that he could take them apart piece by piece. Now, at the age of 17 and through the training he’s receiving, he’s learning how to put things back together and to make things work again. My son is no longer little but growing up…he’s maturing.

The Power of Our Words

Contributed by:
Staci Overbeck
ministry assistant

“We all stumble in many ways. Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check.” James 3:2

Ouch. Did you feel that? Probably not…but I’ll bet you have in the past…that little jab as you listened to someone who carelessly spoke without regard to the feelings of others. It may have been intentional or purely accidental, as we never know the path that someone else has travelled.