It’s been over a week since my last post -- I've been at Annual Conference… Time away allows each of us to think about things in different ways -- to “re-think.” A different setting can help us assess things with less emotional attachment. We may notice things we have never seen before. Or there might be a natural/spiritual moment that welcomes a new sense of revelation.

What’s the bottom line? Pressing pause offers clarity.

All kinds of junk can stand in the way of progress and clarity, whether such things rest on emotional or physical links. Walking around in this world today creates all kinds of cloudy images, so taking time to really look and think can be a valuable priority.

For me, I am always trying to understand how we understand. My fascination with human behavior and how we define “relational” activities in our culture today continue to drive my discernment when it comes to communicating a message of hope. Today we can post our status on Facebook or Tweet about what we are doing, waiting for someone to update, comment, or say if they like it or not, all the while without thinking about forging a virtual relationship with people we may or may not actually know.

Is a virtual relationship relational?

Questions like this may seem a bit off center because we may not be taking time to see where we are aiming. How do we acknowledge that we are communicating in new and radical ways while also naming what is relational and what is not? We can exist however we desire in a cyber setting, editing out the parts of our image we don’t like, and adding in the parts we think others expect.

As a communicator, evaluating such things has become a part of life. It’s not about the how anymore; it’s about effectiveness… And effective communication has never been more important. I’m not talking about inter-communication within our organizations (this is often based on specific leadership strategies). I am talking about the exchange of ideas and messages within our culture today.

Building time into our schedules to reset, restart, and regroup is far more important than we may realize. In order to continue to embrace the new ways we are communicating and naming relational activities we have to do some pretty serious observing.

Sometimes, like our computers, we lock up and stop responding… Are we willing to restart or push the reset button?

What’s freakin’ me out right now is that I just finished reading the introduction to Leonard Sweet’s new book So Beautiful: Divine Design for Life and the Church. On page 20 he writes, “It is time to push the reset button on Christianity -- the original operating system -- not just back to Acts 2, which was another rebooting accomplished by the incarnation, but back to the original Genesis 1 and 2 operating system.”

The way God communicates to me continues to catch me off guard. As we seek and discover on our journey, God has a way of revealing exactly what we are looking for. That still freaks me out, in a really cool way.

The Introduction alone of Len’s book is worth purchasing it! I can’t wait to see where God is headed with this…