LifePoint and Bob Dylan

It seems only fitting that music - which Donavon and I share a deep love of - is how I attempt to convey my thoughts and love of LifePoint Church.

Let's get something straight really quickly - I am not a big Bob Dylan fan, but I can appreciate his role in our American music culture. Some of his songs I dig, others I don't. So it seemed somewhat out of place for me to fall so in love with a song he wrote two years before I was born - "Shelter From the Storm."

When my family and I came to LifePoint just under a year ago, there were maybe 35 give or take, on Sunday mornings. Studs were up, but no insulation or sheetrock. A/C was spotty and I've sweated through some services. The heart, though... the heart was so strong. Donavon's vision of what a church should be - its mission, its function, and its role - was something the Manuel family could share and follow. I think it was the third service we attended where his sermon included references to both Spock and circumcision - I knew that we were onto something special. :-)

And so we became LifePointers (I always liked "Lifers" but I was never able to sell it). Valerie, Caleb, Lizzie, and Alexander, Phil and Misty and their family, the Callenders, Russell, Kellye and Wesley, Bunner, Carrie, Preston and Monique and Lacey, Aaron, Josh, and the wild boys, JMill, Bill and Linda, DJ and Wendy and Madison, Dewaine and Stephanie and family...these people and so many more - I couldn't wait to see each week. We shared the same heart - the same vision of Donavon's - that this church, vintage and still relevant, could turn the world absolutely upside down. Check your hang-ups and judgements at the door folks, cause the people in this place have nothing but love for God's children, found, lost, and those many of us somewhere in-between.

So getting back to Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm"

My favorite three stanzas are:

'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said,"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured
I'll always do my best for her, on that I give my word
In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm.
"Come in," she said,"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail,
Poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail,
Hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn.
"Come in," she said,"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

LifePoint has been my shelter, my refuge from the storm. I abhor that the word "church" is used so often to mean "building." I think of church as the people, the body of believers, the bride to Jesus' bridegroom. LifePoint is not a building. That building could be flattened, shattered, smashed, obliterated, wiped from the face of the earth - and we would still be a church. We would still praise and worship and rejoice amid the rubble for God is good, all the time. The point is - LifePoint would still exist. It is infinitely more than a building.

When I, and others, enter into this body of believers, the toil and mud of the world is washed away - my church says, with a warm, loving voice, "Come in. I'll give you shelter from the storm."

When the world of men has strangled me and my spirit, when I am beaten down, hardened, cold and lost, there's an altar made up of my brothers and sisters who say, "Come in, Bryan. We'll give you shelter from the storm."

I have been burned and hunted down. I am laid low and there is nothing of worth left in me, body and soul... and my pastor finds me and prays with me and loves on me - and with his whole heart and being - filled with the Holy Ghost, he says, "Come in, my brother, my son. I'll give you shelter from the storm."

It is a hard world. It is full of traps and snares, so cunning and sly that I don't see them for what they are until I am in their midst. My spirit struggles with my carnality on a minute-by-minute basis at times. I get so lost and twisted in my thinking and in my spirit. It's not a storm. It's a cataclysm of Biblical proportions these days.

Lifepoint, my church, my refuge, is my shelter from the storm. There is a body of believers: some the heart, others the hands, some the mouth, some the mind, some the feet - but all are welcome and all have a place. Come in, she said, I'll give you shelter from the storm.

God brought my family to LifePoint for a reason. So that when we moved many months later more than a thousand miles away, we wouldn't get lost. I know with absolute certainty, we would have gotten lost. Maybe not for too long, but for a time. Words cannot express my heart or how I feel about these people. My words fall utterly short.

I conclude this, a parting letter of sorts, the only way I know how to:

my friends, I love you.

Bryan