It's That Time of Year Again...

It's back! The start of the 2008 Iditarod was yesterday. A high school classmate of mine is running again this year. He had an impressive showing at the Yukon Quest this year, so who knows what he's up for this year. His website can be found here. If you've ever tracked the race you know how exciting it can be. It was amazing to get to live in Nome for a year and watch the finish. It is an impressive event.

For those of you who check this blog out looking for "churchy" things, let me share a lesson I learned from the Iditarod that I've shared a number of times. One of the things they've found with these sled dogs is that they run faster when there are twists and turns in the course, when there are exciting new things around the corner. The dogs run a lot slower when it the course never changes, when it's long and straight. Might this be a lesson for leading the church? Especially, when you combine it with the notion that this is something these dogs were born to do. The year I lived in Alaska PETA put a big stink about the cruelty of the event. So the Iditarod leaders invited to come watch. The people PETA left with their proverbial tails between their legs. They learned that these dogs were born to run and to not run them in this way would be cruel. I think it's time we unleash our church folks in the same way. Set them lose to do what they were born to do (serving Christ and neighbor) on trail full of twists and turns.... I don't know about you, but that sounds like a radically different picture than what typically operates in the church.