This weekend we went to visit with Trish's Brother-In-Law who just got back from Iraq. He is a captain in the 101st in charge of a battalion of cannons. He won a bronze star for "doing his duty". That means he pulled a family of civilians out of a burning ammo dump that exploded while they were looting it for the metal. Listening to him talk about his experience, and seeing the pictures from over there was really interesting. It becomes really obvious that the news reports a slanted story. The bottom line is death, blood, destruction and sex sells, humanitarian aid and construction just don't make the news. While I think the US Govt. has other motives for being over there, it was cool to get another point of view.

We also had dinner with the folks from our worship team. It was nice just to hang out, share, learn some songs and talk about spiritual things. Knowing a little bit about the stages of faith is helping me to be more patient with people. Seeing them on the same journey, but in a different place is allowing me to see people in our city from a different perspective. These are good people who haven't had the experiences that I've had. Not that I'm better, or more advanced, but just in a different place. I used to just get pissed-off because people weren't "serious" about their faith, but the truth is that they have had a flawed model of what faith looks like.

While I still desire to have some "like-minded" people to journey with, maybe surrounding myself with like-minded people is a form of isolation. Maybe not so different from institutional church's isolation from the rest of the culture.