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Centurions Weekend: Dinner, First Session and Dessert

When we arrived at the conference center, after a long day of sightseeing, we were greeted by old friends and met some new friends. We began, as we always should, by breaking bread with one another. The conference center food always reminds me of college where I ate like a king.

Over dinner we discussed how everyone has been since the last time we gathered in June. It had been more than six months and we had all been so busy with our teaching projects. My mom had also arrived and I introduced her to many of my Centurion colleagues.

Before long, we were ready to begin our first session of the evening with Ken Boa. He was speaking on "Life as a Growth Process, Not an Event". Boa talks a mile a minute and his presentations are so dense that you can barely keep up. I think I always need half a day after he talks to decompress. Unfortunately, that is not possible during this weekend conference.

The points that he made that really stuck with me were as follows:

1. All you have is this moment.

If we constantly are living in the future and the past, we can miss days, months, years and decades.

"Wherever you are, be all there" - Jim Elliot

Live and savor the present moment

Manage time loosely to enhance relationships

2. Faith in the "not yet" and the "not seen" is risky and counter-cultural

Any dead fish can float downstream. You gotta be alive to go against the flow

3. Things esteemed among men are despised by God (Luke 16:15)

Most middle-class Americans worship their work, work at their play and play at their worship.

4. Causes vs. Christ

"The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him." - Oswald Chambers

Our best acts of service are merely refrigerator magnets to God


5. Eschatology drives our everyday actions

Paul’s eschatology was a belief in two days
- This day (Today)
- That Day (Day of the Lord)

This talk was so packed with wisdom. I needed to hear the "live in the present" message. I want to be able to savor each moment of each day rather than living in the past or the future. The eschatological connection that Boa drew here was profound. I talked with him at the dessert reception afterwards. His understanding of the eschatological reality that Paul lived in was spot on.

I knew one thing at the end of the evening. I needed to live in each moment during my life but particularly at this conference or I would miss something. Shortly after the dessert reception, I went to bed and prepared for another long day on Saturday.

Posted by B.A. on January 27, 2006 06:32 AM | Permalink