Every once in a while someone in our culture wakes up! They seem to rise above the joint aspirations of all humanity in the western world and they see over the top of our frantic quest for material goods and they call a time out. Then they make some announcement about change and everyone is stunned, especially if their cultural position is one most envied-big salary, multiple properties, in a word-one of those "have it all" people. Annika woke up this Spring, but that is getting ahead of the story.

Annika Sorenstam is the most successful professional women's golfer who has ever played the game. This sweet Sweed grew up in Skandanvia and developed a passion for golf. She went to college at the University of Arizona and has had a storied career. The girl won just about all of the major college titles. In 1994 she was the rookie of the year on the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour (LPGA). Fourteen years later, it is more than ten major tournament victories, over seventy regular tournament wins and as of the end of last year $20,837,280 dollars down the road. Those numbers put you in stead for amazing opportunities with endorsements and advertising checks you can cash as well.

What red-blooded America male does not yearn for those numbers and those opportunities? Those are the numbers of dreams for most. Her lifestyle is the envy of the masses in this headlong quest to get all you can and grab for such financial gusto. Is not that the pinnacle? Is not that what is best? Is not that the ultimate? Is not that the good life?

"No, it is not!" That was her answer at a stunning press conference where she announced her retirement from professional golf. She is walking away from it all...at full stride in the midst of an incredible run. Time magazine's May 26th edition quoted her as saying, "I have a lot of dreams. I want to live and I'm getting married." The article later went onto to say that she wants to have a family. What? She is trading it all in for a family life that makes sense and children. What's wrong with Annika? Or is it what is right with Annika?

How many families do you know have been ruined with debt and obligation way over their head? How many families do you know that have mortgaged their children on the altar of building their portfolio and moving up the corporate ladder with mind bending and family wrecking hours? Annika has "been there and done that" and now offers a piece of advice, "Family life is worth more than it all!"

It seems counter-intuitive to what we are taught and how we live. Yet, we can see that personal tragedies abound as folk wreck, relationally and financially, on their way to the mountain peak of fiscal nirvana. It takes someone who has gone before us, someone with the courage to say what is true and someone with a will to swim against the culture of unquenchable financial appetites. It takes a high profile success story to stab us awake.

By God's design, the family is life's great treasure. Knowing God through Jesus Christ and being in his family stands at the head of the list. Then relating to your own family is next. Loving your spouse and children and celebrating the blessing of God in relating. Now not everyone has the privilege to be married. But we all have the privilege of celebrating our relatedness to our friends. People matter. They are life's great treasures. Relationships are the spoils of the good life, not assets and accumulated wealth.

Sometimes it takes an oddity like Annika and her decision to step away from golf to experience family life to wake us up to what has been embedded in God's book and God's mind all along.

"How blessed is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in His ways. When you shall eat of the fruit of your hands, you will be happy and it will be well with you. Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine, within your house, your children like olive plants around your table. Behold, for thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord." Psalm 128:1-4

I think Annika's next great announcement after the wedding will be a birth announcement. She is coming back to what God had designed all along.

March of 2008 is over and its passing was a bit significant for Andi and me. It marked thirty years. Yes, thirty years...a thirty year association with Southgate Baptist Church. How that association has enriched our lives!

In March of 1978 we came to our first service...a half-hour late. We arrived at 11:00, when the service had started at 10:30 A.M. We were shuttled to the then "overflow room" (now the kitchen area). We sat down, as Dr. Franklin Logsden got up. He had been a former pastor of the Moody Church in Chicago, Illinois. He preached on God coming to Hagar and Ishmael and revealing Himself as Beer-Lahai-roi. It means "You God see me". It became a place-name for God coming to Hagar and sustaining her with His promise and presence. I will always remember that first message that I heard. In the middle of the message, Dr. Logsden unfurled an accordion like mesh of strung together letters cut out of colored construction paper. It was secreted in his Bible. As he spoke about this name for God, "You God see me", he pulled it out and held it up. I said to myself at the time, "I'll never do that". And I have not. But I have never forgot that first message and that name for God has come home to mean a great deal to me as I have been with God's people through the years.

I was eighteen and a freshman in my third quarter at Cedarville College (now university). Early on I tried out a Spring clean-up the grounds and tree planting meeting. I connected to the Johnson family that day and had an inkling of a thought that maybe I could belong here. Shirley was clearly the CEO on the project. Bucky and I loyally followed. Paul Ware was the brains but became demure before the organizational skills of Shirley Johnson. The only dissenter was Everett Wipert who pushed back all morning as we planted trees. The banter was classic, neither one of them gave ground and we all laughed and left and went home. After that, I knew a couple of people. That was the beginning.

Thirty years later everything is different and the same all at once. Shirley is still organizing. The clothes pantry is organized better than most major department store clothes' warehouses. Everett's wisdom is still in vogue (he always maintained that it was not done snowing flaking until the Forsythia bush had bloomed. I saw one blooming today. Yes, Everett we'll wait on Spring until we see the last flakes). Colby Goodrich, Jr. is still without a mom on earth. Ruth died at thirty-nine in those days. Colby is still here in worship. God be praised...for our hope and more! Whole bunches of people have moved on. Stable jobs in our area and the chance for vocational promotion have not been plentiful. We no sooner get to know great families and God moves them on. Staffs have changed and lay leadership has changed. We are in the midst of the second wave of lay leaders who have taken the baton and are moving forward.

It is difficult to describe what this body means to Andi and me. You supported me and followed my basketball games while I was in college. We were married here in June of 1982. We birthed our boys here. An OB/GYN who cares for your wife is worth his weight in gold. We will always live in Dave and Vangie's debt. Your affirmation and generosity helped us through seminary. Your belief in our gifts helped us get our legs in ministry. You let me fail and still loved me and helped to shape me. I was ordained here in May of 1987. And to top it off, in 1995, you entrusted me with the care of the flock. It is a great honor and privilege and a joy of my heart. I covet your prayer.

Ok, there were some missteps. What was that 40th year birthday surprise? ? I also do not want to leave the impression that it has been some thirty year uninterrupted love-fest. I have made some people mad and am not on other folk's favorite list. Because I am proud that used to bother me more. It stills bothers me. But my heart now yearns more than ever to be on God's pleasure list. I want Him to take pleasure in me. If that takes place, it doesn't matter how it sorts out with others. If we would all but live for the great day! Let's us live to please Him! Then when we please Him, he makes even our enemies to be at peace with us (Proverbs 16:7).

But I have many more friends here and brothers and sisters who have meant the world to me in these last thirty years. Thank you Southgate for the pleasure of your company along this good way following Jesus Christ. There is nothing like a great family to accompany you on the way. Thank you, I will always live grateful for your affection and support. You mean a great deal to us.

Any parent yearning for the right thing dies to have great folks involved with their children. The aspirations of our hearts are informed by 3 John 4 where John says, "I have no greater joy than to see my children walking in the truth." Because of that joy, we break ourselves to get these people around our kids who can influence them for Christ's sake. We love to have them around models that are following hard after the One who loved us and gave Himself for us.

Our Abbey has several older young married gals who are interested in her. These ladies love Jesus and it rubs off on Abbey and wets her desire as she is with them and they pour their lives into her. They are worth their weight in gold to Andi and me. We relish every time that Abbey has to be with them. We relish Caleb spending time with this one older young leader in our church.

Ben had a neat thing happen in his life. He is a sophomore at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We knew they were in a search for a new president, but we are way out of that information loop. Then eight days ago, I received word that they were announcing their new president over the weekend-a guy you would die to have influence your children.

When I was in college at Cedarville in the late seventies, it was chapel and what some Cedarville then Dallas Theological Seminary graduate preachers modeled in chapel that stuck home to my heart. I began to ponder my vocational future as I experienced yearnings in my heart to dig deep into the Word of God and communicate it to others. Leading in that provocation was young man in his thirties named Joseph M. Stowell III. He had been the founding pastor at the church where I was attending and now serve, the Southgate Baptist Church. When he opened the Bible, God filleted my heart and exposed my unbelief and my fear and self-centeredness. I majored in Business Administration with an emphasis in management and was headed to Navistar to follow my dad into management there building trucks. But God intercepted that pass and ran beside me in another direction.

That change of course was particularly mediated in one hour I spent with Joe in the Spring of 1980 when he was preaching a week of meetings at Cedarville. I took my spirit, which was wrestling with my future and trying to identify what I now know as desires for ministry involvement, into that office and laid it out in front of Joe. He kindly indulged me and encouraged me to not consider why I should not go into ministry with such aspirations, but to think, why shouldn't I (given these yearnings) go into ministry. He gave me permission to think that God could use me. He then talked about an important threshold moment of decision that he had in being counseled years before by our mutual friend, Wendell Kempton. That discussion with Wendell proved decisive for Joe, as did that March of 1980 discussion with Joe proved for me. He encouraged me to pray a prayer that I have utilized these last twenty seven years. "Lord, make me to be your kind of man (a prayer for godliness) and make me to be in your place of ministry." That prayer covers all the bases. Be godly! Be in God's place! What more is there?

Joe ended that discussion with a line I was foolish enough to believe, "Eric, let's stay in touch. I am interested in you." And he was serious. And I have. And one of the great blessings of my life has been the times, however infrequent, that Joe has taken me into his circle and we would grab a personal hour here and there. He is one of those guys who gives you his undivided attention when you are with him. I was with him one day with a professor from Wheaton with a great wit who I had just met. He leaned over to me as we were eating lunch and said, "Isn't it great to be one of Joe's five thousand close friends?" We both laughed heartily and gratefully unto the Lord.

Joe spoke at my ordination service in 1987. Psalm 11, I will always remember the message. He spoke at my installation service in Grand Ledge, Michigan in January of 1990. That was a surprise gift to me by the leadership of the Church. But it was super bowl night. I felt a little bad...we had a great preacher there...but Joe Montana drew a larger crowd than Joe Stowell. Those kinds of friends in ministry are invaluable. I stand on their shoulders and serve our Lord. I will always live in his debt.

So, you could understand our joy in receiving the news last Thursday that Joe was to be announced as president. I immediately emailed Ben the line, "I just feel like something good is about to happen". I told Ben he was going to have a good weekend. He phoned back and said the tease was too much...but we held out.

On Monday Ben went to chapel as Joe spoke and was introduced as the new president of Cornerstone University. He waited in line and at his turn, introduced himself as Benjamin Warfield Mounts. Ben is named after a famous Princeton Seminary prof from the 19th and early 20th centuries who loved the Bible and loved his wife all of his days. Years ago when Ben was a boy, I introduced Ben to Joe with his full name. Characteristically, Joe celebrated the introduction and enveloped Ben in a big bear hug and gave a focused few minutes to a college sophomore. Ben walked away and immediately phoned us. His world was just enlarged. God had delivered a grace gift to the university and Ben will benefit from the bounty. And we who yearn to have godly folks around our kids to build into their lives...could not be more pleased! Praise God from whom all blessings flow!