Where I've Been & Where I'm Going

What a journey I have been on since I graduated from Butler University last spring! I just recently started working part time for Young Life Carmel and I am also embarking on a journey with my Church that I will explain later. 

My senior year at Butler was a season of transition as I wrestled with what would come after graduation. I was accepted into a graduate program in theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City but was also feeling God tug on my heart to stay in Indianapolis for one more year. As I prayed and had conversations with friends, family, and mentors I felt that it was not the right time to take the financial leap into graduate school. 

Above is Union. It sits on on the upper east side of Manhattan right next to Columbia and Harlem. 

This summer I spent a month volunteering at Timberwolf Lake in Michigan as a Work Crew Boss. The Work Crew is comprised of around forty high school kids that have volunteered a month of their lives to live and serve at a Young Life camp. As a work crew boss, my role was to lead a group of six Work Crew kids in our daily physical labor but also (and more importantly) I was leading the group in all spiritual matters. In other words, I was disciplining, mentoring the high school kids that had come to serve for a month. The experience afforded me amazing opportunities to grow as a leader and in my individual relationship with Christ. 

One of the best jobs the Work Crew has is to welcome the busses that are dropping of hundreds of high school kids about ready to have the best week of their life and maybe here the Gospel for the first time. 

I was the Outdoor Crew Boss and these were the six guys and girls I worked with daily. I learned so much from their willingness to serve and dig deeper in their relationships with Christ. 

This is us on one of our nights off. We threw the junk in our lives that was holding us back from following Jesus into the fire, sang songs, and drank root beer. 

While graduate school seemed to be the most prestigious option for my life, I felt God pulling me towards a different path for the year ahead. After many conversations I decided to commit to a year long journey with Common Ground Christian Church called the Kingdom Living Training School. 

Do not be deceived by the title. It is not really a school, and I am not really being “trained” in anything. It is a journey with a group of 15 other people that have committed to intentionally walking with Jesus for the next year.

 Practically this looks like three classes a week from 9am to 12 where we sit in a classroom and are lead in conversation by our teacher and guide Larry Mitchell. We also take five or six vision trips to places like Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Tijuana. There is no curriculum only our guide and the direction the spirit leads the community in conversation with each other, with questions, with people we run into on our long walks through the city, with books, and with God.

It is so clear to me now that God lead me to the Training School for so many different reasons. In fact, God reveals something new to me every day. The best way I know how to describe the training school is a very intentional time in your life where you make space for God to really get into the cracks and crevices of your life that you have kept hidden from yourself and God. It is a period of refining that is sparked by the intentionally of the group and the community we are trying to live into. 

This is the group on top of the hostel we stayed in overlooking the Toronto. Which is the 5th largest city in North America and one of (if not the most) diverse cities in the world. 

We walk everywhere! And because we walk every where we are constantly in communication with each other, with the city, and with the people that line the streets of the city. 

We ate like this for the whole week. On the ground, in the middle of the city, sharing, tearing bread with our hands, and always sitting in a circle. 

The whole group! 

 

Outside of the Training School I was hoping to find someway to make money to pay bills, eat, pay for the training school, and save a little for graduate school. I was really hoping to do this by finding a job that I am passionate about and that would provide good experience in ministry and non-for profit work.  

I was blessed to be offered a part time Young Life staff position with Carmel (the area I have been leading at the past four years.) It has been such a blessing to work on staff in Carmel. I get to work alongside my best friends and already have a solid base of relationships with high school kids to work from. 

Part time Young life staff means I am doing all of the same things I did as a volunteer leader but also taking on administrative, organizational, and non-profit management roles to create space for other volunteer leaders to build relationships with high school students. 

So far my time on Young Life staff has been an absolute blast! There is some really amazing momentum and excitement right now stirring in Carmel Young Life. God is doing some amazing things in kids lives and setting this leadership team up to meet hundreds of new kids that maybe have never heard the good and true news of the Gospel.

 

Every month we have a Thanksgiving dinner potluck style. We probably had close to sixty kids show up to eat and have community with us. 

This was "Double Dog Dare you Club" Jake was Moonrock and I was Danger. 

Campaigners so far this year has been amazing! It reminds me of how badly kids want to dig deep, ask hard questions, and wrestle with stuff that matters. Nothing gets me more excited than sitting in a circle with young people and wrestling with matters of the heart. 

Wow. This is a lot. I hope you made it all the way through to the end or at least looked at all of the pictures! In the future my updates wont be near as long, there has just been a ton of transition these past couple of months that I wanted people to be updated on. 

I am looking for financial support for Young Life so if you are interested in partnering with me in my mission in Carmel you can email me at brodsky.david.peace@gmail.com. If nothing else, please partner with me in praying for me. Here are some specific areas that need prayer: 

1. My time in the Training School. 

2. Carmel Young Life- that we would be a ministry that is both wide and deep! 

3. That God would provide a part time job outside of YL so I could have more money to save up for school. 

Shalom 

Whose Song are you Singing?

Monday night at Campaigners we talked about being YOURself. We wrestled with questions like: whose song are we singing? Who wrote the script we are playing?

In the Training School we have been discussing what it means to be apart of God's sweeping story. I do not want to sing a song I selfishly desire up and I definitely don't want to sing a song just because people have gone before me and achieved some sort of "success" by singing some generic song. I want to sing the song the creator of the universe that loves me relentlessly has specifically and uniquely for me.

I waited patiently for the LORD; 

   he turned to me and heard my cry. 

He lifted me out of the slimy pit, 

   out of the mud and mire; 

he set my feet on a rock 

   and gave me a firm place to stand. 

He put a new song in my mouth, 

   a hymn of praise to our God. 

Many will see and fear the LORD 

   and put their trust in him.

-Psalm 40 

Are you a Trader?

I am a trader!

Kirk Cousins Big Ten Kickoff Speech

Rooting for Michigan State to win the Big Ten because of this speech:

Jesus is a Friend of Mine

Any words of mine would diminish the amazingness of this video. so just enjoy.

The Parable of the Sower

I have recently been contemplating and wrestling with my understanding of Christ centered community. Today, I read the parable of the sower in Mark 4. It goes like this:

Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.

This time reading through the story I couldn't help but think about how much stock, time, and effort the Church and Christianity at large puts into "planting seeds" or telling people about the good news of the Gospel. This is no doubt something that should be pursued relentlessly by Christ followers. But if this story teaches us anything, isn't it that you can plant the seed (or the good news) in the hearts of people but if the soil (community) they live in is not a rich soil prepared for the seed, it will never grow or temporarily sprout up only to wither and die. 

I propose that the Church needs to be spending equal time relentlessly creating a community (rich soil) as we do the spreading and planting seeds in the hearts of people who have yet to hear or accept the good news of the Gospel. In so many ways the Church always does this. But a bible study, Church service, or a quiet time is not really the full extent of community Christ calls us to. No, a rich soil that a seed can take root in, grow, and flourish in is something much more than those things. I am not sure exactly how to describe this sort of rich soil, I am only suggesting that we need to spend equal time creating space and community for people to be invited into as we do planting seeds of the good news in people. 

A Story

Today a fellow pilgrim in the Training School told us that the skin doctor has found some conspicous spots on her back that ended up being cancerous. She is in the process of waiting to hear how seriousness this cancer will be. It could very well be nothing at all but it also could be a serious game changer in her life. 

I told her this story about when I was in a similar situation: 

Four years ago when I was a Freshmen at Butler I went to the orthopedic doctor that I had grown close to over the years of ACL injuries, broken collarbones, pinkys, toes, etc. For a about a year I had had an aching pain in my knee that I thought must have been something like a torn meniscus. I ignored it for a really long time and the pain would come and go. Eventually it hurt too bad to ignore and I went to see the Doc. He took and x-ray and saw that a pretty good size tumor was making its home on my lower femur bone in the knee the knee joint. Being a good orthopedic doctor and realizing that I was 19 and at the prime age for osteosarcoma he started to bombard me with a ton of questions and worries. I had no idea and my mom (a nurse) wasn't there to explain to me the magnitude of what could possibly be growing in my knee. I felt fine and therefore thought there couldn't be anything significantly wrong with me. I told my mom and played down the seriousness of it but the Doctor said the next step was for me to go to get an MRI. 

A few days later, my mom called me and told me that various radiologist and my doctor believed that the tumor was in fact ostersarcoma and that I needed to move fast to see a specialist, get it removes, and get a biopsy to find out for sure if it was malignant or just a random tumor. Either way, they dropped the bomb on me.... Cancer. I immediately began to realize that if this was cancer that life would be drastically different. That I would probably not be going back to school, that I would go through kemo, lose my hair, maybe lose my leg, and worse case scenario maybe even die. 

There was five days in between this news and going to see a specialist that would give me a better idea of what was going on in my knee. Needless to say it was some of the craziest most bizarre five days of my life. I was scared and didn't want to lose my the grand life I had been living. Yet, I knew that more than anything God was putting this in my life for some divine reason, even though I had no freaking idea what that may be. 

At that point, I had read the scriptures enough to know what Paul's perspective on suffering was. I began to live into this scripture and ponder that maybe instead of dreading this I should be looking forward to the opportunity to grow into a more Christ like person, to suffer like Christ, to show others how much God has done  in me, to the point that I would rejoice and be joyful in my potential sufferings. 

Five days later I went to the doctor with my girlfriend, parents, and uncle with a very bizarre perception. I had become excited and was looking forward to the opportunity to follow Christ more deeply and to become more like Christ through the suffering's that lied ahead. My parents, girlfriend, and uncle were terrified and I was stoic ready to walk down this road the Lord and laid in front of me. 

The specialist looked at the x-ray and MRI and (metahporically) lit the prior report on fire and told me that those other Doctor's were silly and that he was 98 percent sure all that was growing in me was a benign cyst. Everyone else wept tears of joy while I felt extremely disappointed. The only way I could describe the feeling would be similar to what one feels when you have to miss out on a ridiculously awesome part all your best friends will be at. The Lord seriously did so much to me those five days that I couldn't help but look forward to this time of trial and suffering that I would come to know the Lord better. And now I would be getting this experience that would ignite all of these changes. 

For many years, I had no idea why God had done this to me. Then one day, as I was telling this story, it hit me and I realized that I could never have been excited about such immense suffering if I was not connected to God through Jesus. It doesn't make and worldly sense that one would be excited for cancer. Therefore, I was given a sense that God was putting this in my life to reaffirm his connection with me, for him and I to know that I was no longer wandering lost, no longer half way in following Christ, but all the way in and fully committed to his will and narrative for me.