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    Kate: When our daughter was three years old, we had a second child. She was our wished-for baby and the child we never thought we'd be able to have. Our daughter's name was Lydia, and she was born with a heart defect. We had her scheduled for her heart surgery, and the night before she was supposed to go to the hospital, she died at home in her bed. We don't know why, except that her heart didn't work anymore. I didn't wrestle with God immediately after Lydia died. My wrestling came later; when I had time to think, when I had time to process. Then my prayers were painful. There's no easy way to say, "How could you not be there for me, God? How could you let this happen in our lives?" I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I didn't understand why, if I had been a good mother, God had taken my baby away.

    Andy: I was raised to believe that we are supposed to care about things on a worldly level and that we are citizens of the world, rather than just citizens of Troy or Ohio or the United States. It seems like a lot of the answers that we typically rely on as Christians feel simple and not as thought out or as practical as I'd like them to be. It's hard to understand how there could be so many conflicts in the world, in the Middle East, in Iraq, in the inner cities of our country, and sometimes don't understand how God lets that happen. How is God a loving, caring God when there are people dying and starving all over the world? It's hard for me to understand that pain and how those people are taken care of.

    Luke: My dad was diagnosed with ALS about two years ago and it's been a deteriorating situation. Understanding that my dad was going to be taken from me in two to five years was terrible and from that, it has gotten even worse. Because not only is he going to be taken from me, it's hard to watch the way he's going. When I was about five or six, he would grab me by the ankles and hold me upside down and kind of dangle me. Just looking back on that and all the stuff that we used to do, it's sad to think that that's never going to happen again.

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    This Easter to me has been kind of funky. It just doesn't feel like Easter. Is anyone else dealing with this same thing? This week has been a lot like the changing weather. We spoke Tuesday night at the University of Dayton; and when Sidney and I went into the building at 6, it was 80 degrees; when we came out at 8, it was about 56 degrees. I've tried to get in touch with why I'm emotionally disconnected from you all, and it's because my week began with a painful funeral. Many of you have been following on the news the untimely death of Sarah Merritt, who was All American soccer player right here in Tipp City. Her family always sits over here, including last Sunday before the funeral at the middle worship celebration. On Palm Sunday is where it began. Her dad Tom and I were speaking between worship celebrations about how he received the call while he was driving on Interstate 75 from a detective that she had had this tragic fall. A call that no parent should ever, ever have to hear about their child. I believe that I've been more emotionally hanging with the Merritts this week than I have been preparing for this "celebration." There are some times that you have experienced the power of Jesus and you just don't feel like celebrating. Sometimes you know Jesus is in the house, but you don't feel like Jesus is in the house. This week has reminded me that Easter is really about a tragic, untimely death. We forget that. Somehow we overlook that part, but most of the week is an incredibly painful experience. Do you ever have challenges to your faith? These big challenges to the faith for the most part don't come from the critics and skeptics. That doesn't bother me as much as these big, unanswered questions, these inconsistencies. Like, "Come on, God, you're an all-powerful, loving God; we need you to have our children's back! When our children do something that children do or when they mess up, we need you to be there. Where are you, God?" Often, the challenges of faith come in these life and death issues.

    Even, in basic life crises. If you've been in the Dayton community the last couple of years, you know the number of people who've been laid off or lost their jobs, especially people in their fifties and sixties who've been with companies for years. I was talking to a 53-year-old guy the other day who had worked with an area company for 28 years - and was let go. In two more years, he could have retired. For eight months, he has been trying to find employment. This is a hard-working, faithful guy. He's burning through his retirement resources and his youngest child is about to go to college in the fall. Resurrection faith is lived in this tension. Here's the part on this Easter that I relate to. I'm reading this from the Gospel of Matthew, after the resurrection, "Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted." I can relate to that one! They had experienced the resurrected Christ. Some of the disciples have become well-known, like Doubting Thomas. There's a painting from 1597 that depicts a scene of Thomas saying, "I won't believe until I can touch the wound with my own hand."

    I've been a follower of Jesus for 30-some years now and I'm one of his challenging children, because things don't come easy for me. The scripture story that I have best related to in my years as a Jesus-follower is in Mark 9. A dad came to Jesus because his son was suffering from life-threatening strokes. This dad said, "Jesus, I don't know if you can help, but if you can do anything, can you heal my son?" Jesus said, "What do you mean, 'If I can do anything?' Everything is possible to the one who believes." That part tells me that the quality of my life and the outcome of my life are directly proportioned to the amount of faith or trust that I can have in God. So I would say faith on my part is a pretty important thing for me to maximize my life potential. It is the man's response that I can best relate to: "I believe. Help my unbelief."  Resurrection faith is lived in this tension between belief and unbelief, but it's acting on your belief, not being paralyzed by your unbelief. Jesus talked about something called mustard-seed faith. His disciples came to him and said, "Lord, increase our faith." Isn't that why we are all here? We want the Lord to increase our faith. Here's what Jesus said, "Truly, I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed…"

    I wanted to know how little that was, so Wednesday I got the brilliant idea to order 10,000 mustard seeds and for the last three days, bless your hearts, an army of you have been taping these things to the message maps in your bulletins. Take out those message maps so you can see. That's a real mustard seed. It's not a fake, it's the real deal. When Jesus used this illustration, I wanted to know how much faith I needed for miracles to come in my life. Isn't that mustard seed little? "If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." A lot of you feel like you don't have much faith. Jesus said it doesn't take much! Don't worry about what you don't have, act on what you do have.

    I read a great book this year, the book for skeptics that was written by one of the top scientists in America. Are there any skeptics here? His name is Francis Collins and he is the number one gene expert in America. He heads the Genome project and he was the one who discovered the defective gene for cystic fibrosis. What I love about Collins is that he is a scientist - and a believer. Isn't it amazing how those two things don't have to be mutually exclusive of one another, that you can be both? He wrote this great book called "God Language" and he believes in evolution. So many times Christians say, "Well, here's a list of all of these things you can't believe in if you want to be a Christian. No, you have to believe in only one thing: the Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected. You can disagree on everything else. In this book, Collins says, that your brain is literally wired to believe, to have faith. It is scientific, it is in our DNA. And it backs up what the Bible says that to each one of us is given a measure of faith. It was on CNN this week and is on CNN's website right now. So you're sitting there thinking that you don't have much faith, but it doesn't take much. Just use what you have.

    Not only did Jesus talk about mustard seed faith, he talked about childlike faith. "Truly I tell you anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." It doesn't say that you won't go to heaven, but the kingdom of God is where the activity of God and the miracles of God are coming forth. You can live all of your life, die, go to heaven, and still miss the power of God, the miracles of God in your life on earth. So unless you become like a little child, you will miss the power of God or the fruitfulness of God in your life. The teacher asked a class, '"What's faith?" A child raised her hand and said, "Faith is believing something you know isn't true." That's not faith. Faith is not naiveté or believing in fairytales. Every child knows that faith is based in relationships. Faith is based in trust. A child has faith in a person they trust. Faith is based on the credibility of the person making a promise.

    Years ago, when my daughter was about two or three years old, I was teaching on Sunday morning and talking about how, when I was a kid, I liked to go horseback riding. My uncle had some horses and lived on a farm around Wilmington. I'd go there in the summer, spend a few days and ride horses. Someone in our church came to me later and said, "We have quarter horses. Why don't you bring your kids over after church today and we'll grill out." So I grabbed the kids and went over. The dad saddled this beautiful chestnut quarter horse and let it out into the yard in front of his house. Kristen immediately, probably had never seen anything this big in her life, clung to Carolyn's leg. Carolyn had to pick her up. I grabbed the saddle horn and hopped up on the horse. Immediately, Kristen's expression changed. It had nothing to do with her ability to comprehend. I think she sensed that this was a potentially dangerous, powerful beast. All she could understand was the trust she had that daddy was on this horse. She reached out for me, I put her up between my legs and we rode through the cornfields and the woods. It was a day I'll never forget. Here's childlike faith. She was able to embrace the life adventure knowing all she had to do was keep hold of her daddy.
   
    Trust is based on the credibility of the person making the promise. Childlike faith continually nurtures what I call ageless spirit. You are created for eternity - did you know that? Some of you are getting old. Some of you are 28 years old. I'm 55, and at 28, some of you are a lot older than I am. A child has a light in their eyes. Did you ever notice that? You ask a little kid what they want to be when they grow up, I've never hear one of them say, "I want to shovel horse poop." Little kids tell you all kinds of things. They are going to be president, they are going to be a doctor - they shoot for the moon. The older we get we tend to not nurture that childlike spirit and enthusiasm and we begin to downsize our dreams. I see it in a lot of young folks. You are in high school or college and I ask you what you want to be, and you say, "I want to be a neurosurgeon." "I'm going to be a schoolteacher and I'm going to change the world." You have a light in your eyes and you know you are created for greatness. You have this destiny. You then graduate and head out to teach in a public school system and you deal with the demons and children for about three years. You begin to meet with the skeptics and resistance and you begin to lose the light in your eyes. You begin to quit believing in miracles. Here's what I love, this is what it says about Moses in Deuteronomy, "Moses was 120 years old when he died, yet his eye grew not dim nor his strength gone." Moses had an ageless spirit. At 120 years old, he had the light of a child in his eye. He had a passionate enthusiasm. I don't care how little faith you have, you have it! You have been wired to believe. Activate your faith. Exercise the faith you have.

    There are three dimensions to your personality that make you uniquely human - mind, body and spirit. To maximize your human potential, who God has created you to be, you have to continually exercise your mind, body and spirit. I have been reading that since I'm 55 years old and I want to maximize my life potential, it is important for me to continually learn new things. By learning new things in your seventies and eighties, like taking a class at Sinclair College, you can delay or even miss entirely dementia. By exercising your mind and learning new things, you create new mind patterns. Physically, as we age, we lose muscle strength and bone density. I'm using resistance to my advantage. Resistance is another word for exercise. I've learned that by using resistance (in the spirit world that's called doubt); I'm stronger at 55 than I was at 35. I'm going to beat a lot of you 20 somethings in this 5K run coming up in a few weeks.

    Here's the third dimension, which is the most overlooked dimension in human personality, it is your spirit. Most people are missing their God experience because their spirit is the most atrophied part of your human personality. Say, this is a person who is in church every week. Can you imagine if that one hour a week is the only time you are exercising your spirit, how incapacitated you are to communicate with God? With your mind, you can't experience God, you can know about God. With your physical body you can't see God or see the resurrected Christ. It's through your spirit that you experience the resurrected Christ.

    Here's my question and it's the most important question. We know how to exercise our minds and bodies, but how do I exercise my spirit? There are two clues that Jesus gave us after the resurrection. Here's the first one. After the resurrection, he was having this conversation with Peter and here was the question that he asked Peter, "Peter, do you love me?" To varying degrees, obviously we wouldn't be here if we didn't love Jesus - we know what our answer is. Here's Jesus' response. He said three times, "Feed my sheep, tend my lambs." He meant for Peter to exercise his spirit. He said, "I'm going to leave, go away, but exercise your spirit and continue to be able to be sensitive to me, in my resurrected presence." You have to serve God's purpose. You are never closer to the presence of Christ than when you are serving the poor, the broken, the widow and the orphan. I'm going back to Sudan on June 14 and I'm taking my son. I've got to exercise my faith. I've got to exercise my spirit. It is in the poor and serving God's purpose that I best experience the risen Christ.

    The second way we exercise our spirit is to connect to a community of belonging. When Jesus was on Planet Earth after the resurrection, he was with the disciples 40 days. On the fortieth day, he ascended into heaven. Before he left, he made sure that his disciples and followers were closely connected in a belonging community. We read that 10 days later, 50 days after the resurrection, after Jesus left the planet in the ascension, he returned in the presence of the Holy Spirit. That's called the Day of Pentecost. We read, "On the Day of Pentecost, when the Spirit fell, all of the disciples were together in one place." That's the way we experience the risen Christ. He appears in community. Jesus said, "Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am in your midst." Connecting to a belonging community is more than just attending church. A healthy church is made up of many smaller communities. One of the communities that I belong to in this church is the biker group called Broken Chains. Bikers have a pretty unique identity. We share a common passion and experience. I've discovered why it's so important to be a part of this biker group. As busy as my life is, if I'm not connected to this biker group, my bike spends too much time in the garage. On Sunday afternoons, we can leave here after church, take sack lunches, drive around Grand Lake Saint Mary's, get back and have 120 miles on our bike. But if the group doesn't do it, I go home and mulch. Bikes aren't made to spend time in a garage. Life is a highway. We are made for adventure. I won't do it without the community.

    Another thing I've discovered about biking (I'm talking about Harley biking, not pedal biking), is that it is safer to do it in a group. This is a scary time of year for bikers and you read about all of these accidents. There was one kid in the church that while I spoke last weekend, we didn't know if he was going to be alive today. Every day he has been improving a little bit. People don't see bikers this time of year. "They just pull out in front of us," say the people talking on cell phones. They see us when we are in a group of thirty. What's more, when we are in a group of thirty, not only do they see us, but they hear us coming from a long way off. It's a lot safer riding in a group.

    Because I'm in this group, they encourage me in this tension place between belief and unbelief? I didn't know how to ride a bike until two years ago. I started being attracted to some of these bikers in here and the adventure that they were living. I decided I was going to learn how to ride a bike. They told me to enroll in the Honda safety course. I enrolled in the Honda safety course and learned to ride on the smaller Honda 250. I came back and had my license and these bikers were telling me I needed to get a big bike, like the Road King. I was thinking, "I don't know if I can do the big bike. A Road King loaded is 800 pounds and I learned on a 250 pound bike. I think I'm going to get a little bike." "No, you don't want a little bike! Life is a highway! You don't want a little bike!" "I can't handle a big bike!" "You can handle a big bike! If you get a little bike, you'll sell it in six months. Get a big bike!" Well I didn't want to look like a wimp, so I got a big bike. How was I going to get it home from the Harley Davidson dealer? Do you know what the bikers did? They drove to the dealership and rode it back. I told them to park it in the garage. They said, "We're not going to park it in the garage! We're taking you to the church parking lot and we're going to stay there with you until you feel comfortable riding that bike and then we're going out on the road." "I could die!" "You're going to die anyway! Enjoy the adventure!" So they rode it to the church parking lot and then they told me to ride it. I rode around the parking lot for three hours and then they said, "Let's go!" Now it's 14 months and 5,000 miles later on the bike. But, you have to connect to a community of belonging. You cannot do it by yourself. Resurrection faith is lived in this tension between belief and unbelief, but it's acting on your belief, not being paralyzed by your unbelief.

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    Kate: I found out that I had a very shallow understanding of God. My understanding was that if I was a good person, God would do good things in my life. I found out that God is bigger than that and he is alive and active. He had given us Lydia for a short time, but we had learned so much through her life and through her death. We found out that our faith was much deeper, much stronger. God knew what we were made of.

    Andy: I still wrestle with some of those issues today, that negative imagery from all over the globe, but I'm a lot clearer on where I stand as far as God's role in my life. I know now that God uses things in the world to his greater good, and I believe that God is working in people's lives in ways that I don't see.

    Luke: My entire family has been blessed with a peace that surpasses all understanding. I've felt God's hand in this situation and I know that my family has felt it too. Though we don't know what's going on or what's going to happen, we know that God is here with us.