A New Appreciation

I haven't posted anything for the last two weeks because I was in North Carolina with 40 guys playing golf all last week. It was totally awesome. We played 36 holes each day. I have never played that much golf in one week in my entire life. I think I played more golf last week than I did all of last year.

So I returned this week and I have been trying to "catch up" after being gone all of the week before.

I am experiencing something that is very different for me this weekend. I am usually the one in my family that travels, whether it is for business or pleasure. My wife, Kelli, rarely goes any where for an extended period of time. However, she is on holiday with her college roommates at Lake Placid, New York for four days. Yikes!

She has been gone for 24 hours and I already have a new appreciation for what she does to make our family what it is. Let me just say, she rocks!

Here's something else that I have a new appreciation for - seekers. In the last 24 hours there has been a void in my life and in the lives of my two kids. There is obviously someone missing from our lives. I can feel it very clearly, and I know my kids can as well.

This has created in me a realization of how people who don't have a relationship with Jesus walk around every day of their lives. There is someone obviously missing. The way I have compensated for this person missing in our lives is to fill our time with busyness. We have a very full weekend planned. I think the same is true for people who don't know Jesus or who have, for whatever reason, walked away from a relationship with Jesus. They fill their time with so much busyness and so much other stuff that they don't have the time or the energy to realize that void in them is because Jesus isn't there.

When I sat down this morning with my kids before school to pray for the day and for Kelli, we had the time to think about the void in our lives because she isn't here. All three of us began to cry. It hurts to have that void. If we hurt because of the void left because Kelli isn't here, then the pain in people's lives because the void they have is because Jesus isn't there is huge.

There are 31,000 unchurched people around Charter Oak Church. 31,000 people who are going through their ordinary, everyday life with a void. We need to let people in this region know that they matter to God and can have a relationship with Jesus that will fill the void that they have right now.