I page through the conference brochure we just got in the mail at work. It feels pretty. It looks pretty. It shouts names like Louie Giglio and Andy Stanley and Francis Chan. It has a cool cut out in the centerfold, a X marking the spot where you, I, all of us belong at this year's conference. I look over my monitor at my pretty co-worker and said (as I am expected to say after paging through such prettiness) "I want to go."

Instead I open the InDesign project I'm working on and adjust character styles and justifications. Because I'm learning to reframe things.

There's been a lot of talk about moving to China and Philadelphia and Korea and Rochester and Somewhere Else in the past few weeks. Anywhere else for a change of scenery, circumstance and chore. He called the office the other day and asked if I had more vision for here. I said no. He asked if there was more vision for Somewhere Else and I also said no. There isn't a lot of vision for anything much right now. That's what I like to hear he said. And I know it wasn't the lack of vision that he referred to, but the fact that until God speaks something clearly, I'm not dumb enough get waylaid by pretty brochures and historic downtowns and a good Thai restaurant within walking distance.

And even though God didn't speak clearly, I've learned from experience that God not speaking at all is nearly the same as hearing an audible voice from the Heavens. Or hearing a slew of good teaching from reliable sources like a friend's journal, the front of a Sunday School classroom, or the front of a church sanctuary. In each I hear this repeated: circumstances don't determine one's ability to be effective in the kingdom.

And here I thought they did.

I'm held captive by the thought that I'm only as good as my circumstances, only as effective as my immediate vision, and only as mobile as my county line.

I stare at success, even what seems like Kingdom Success (pretty conference brochures and designs and ministries and missionaries in Indonesia) and I get mesmerized by it all. I belong there! Not here! I belong in a community like that! I belong in a church like that! I belong in an atmosphere like that.

When really, I'm just looking at the wrong things. So this week I'm learning to reframe things:

Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself.
He had equal status with God but didn't think so much of himself
that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what.
Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity
and took on the status of a slave, became human!
Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process.
He didn't claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life
and then died a selfless, obedient death. Philippians 2.5-8