Good morning High Places!

Thank you Kady Marcotte and children for a wonderful time together this past Sunday! It was nice to see so many of our children there and participating. Hopefully, as we each move through the rest of this week, we are being mindful in our prayer and putting all the things we learned last month into practice.

This Sunday, we begin a new theme that will carry us through October. “Antifragile” is both the name of the book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and the title we will organize our Sunday’s by for the next few weeks.

Consider this Scripture as a baseline for the month:

“Therefore, the Egyptians put taskmasters over the children of Israel to afflict them with their burdens…. but the more the Egyptians afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew. And Egypt lived in dread of the children of Israel.”
(Exodus 1:11-12)

It’s a strange for us to think, “The more they afflicted them…. the more they multiplied.” It is almost as though the people of God benefited from all the stressors placed on them by their task-masters; and it is definitely true that the Bible is full of examples of how hardship produces something irreplaceable and unbreakable in our lives.

Ours is a culture that goes to great lengths to avoid discomfort. We often run the other way when stressors hit us rather than embracing them as opportunities to grow. James writes, “Count it all joy brothers and sisters when you fall into various trials…” and still we work to avoid that joy by trying to make our lives as easy as possible.

Over the next several weeks, we will unpack many Scriptures around this idea as well as examine a few things from Taleb’s book. What does it mean to be “antifragile?” It is more than just being resilient in hardship, more than simply being “strong.” Antifragility is the state in which we actually benefit from stress or disorder, like the children of Israel in Egypt.

I hope you’ll make every effort to join us on this journey because I believe its important for understanding our role as Christian believers in our increasingly “fragile” Western Culture. I also believe that our response to the Covid-19 pandemic as a church family is ripe with opportunities to experience and develop antifragility, provided we are willing to embrace the power of the Holy Spirit in our community’s struggles.

I look forward to seeing you and hearing back from you as we move through this topic this month.

Important Note: Since we are between themes, there will not be Bible study this Wednesday (October 6) at the Grove. We will resume next Wednesday (October 13) at 7:00 PM.

Much love,

David