Letter from Logan: A People of Living Invitation

WOW!  SO… it’s been awhile since any of us have written much on here huh?  Truly, we wanted to spend time evaluating and re-evaluating the Allume blog and our goals for it, and figured the best way to do that was to quit doing whatever we were doing to really focus on it all.  We did that for awhile, and now we’re back!

And we are excited!

Don’t you know though that Sarah Mae had to email me to remind me that today was my day?! Oh Mylanta ya’ll….it crept up on me! Even after these months!

You got a run down this past week to know a bit about what to expect from the blog, but today I just want to share a bit about what you can expect from Allume in general.  I guess that’s going to be sort of the point of you all hearing from me monthly as well…just to keep you up to speed on not just logistics and whatnot, but really our hearts behind Allume.

One day I’ll tell the longer version of the story, but for now what I want you to know is that about this time last year I was bawling my eyes out trying to plan a conference and had no clue what I was doing, only trying to follow what I was hearing from the Lord.  And about this time last year, while I was fully committed to walking out to completion what the Lord had told me to do, I was pretty sure that He was never going to ask me to do it again…or at least that’s what I was kinda begging of Him.

Last I checked though, God’s plans are usually not the same as my own.

And that’s also usually a good thing.

So, amidst the following and bawling, and bawling and following, I had a conversation with the Lord where I told him (oh yes…I told Him…like I had any real in-chargness at all) that unless He told me what He had planned for 2014, BEFORE, the 2013 Allume Conference, I wasn’t going to do it.

This stuff isn’t for the faint of heart…I’m not gonna lie.

And don’t you just know it, that the Lord actually told me….BEFORE the 2013 conference?!

So now I’m up a creek and just got handed the paddle I’d practically demanded.  But the thing is, it’s a paddle that I’m really excited about too.  I’m so excited about it in fact, that our whole team wants to invite you into this boat… to ride this creek all the way to the river, because we are pretty certain that it’s a river of life beyond what we can even see now!

I’m not much for theme-y things.  As in, too much planned or too matchy-matchy in a room even…but I am a fan of a thread, and that’s what I think we’re gonna get this year.  And as I’ve been praying and listening and making decisions with the team about where we think this thing is going, one thing I keep hearing is that we are to be a people of “living invitation.”

If I can be so bold as to share the very sentence that I have heard over and over for the Allume community, it’s this…

As bloggers we are often a people of windows…but as believers we are called to be a people of doors.

As writers and bloggers it seems that we often offer a view of the inside of our lives to a person standing on the lawn outside.  They see bits and pieces, but don’t know what happens between those windows, or amidst the hallways.  But as believers in Jesus Christ, I believe we are called to be a people of doors…of living invitation…of opening our hearts and our doors to others, whether online or in real life.  True Biblical hospitality is a posture of the heart towards others… of living invitation for the purpose of loving others the way that Jesus loved.  And that’s what we’re gonna journey together this year to figure out.

I don’t know what that’s gonna look like exactly, but I know that there is life and abundance when 2 or more gather and seek the face of God…and we’re gathering 450.  You couldn’t dare God not to show up with that many of us hungering after Him!

Content is king in my opinion only because Jesus is King.  And a life well lived, and lessons well learned, and wisdom gained and shared from full and intentional living in whatever area you’re called to share…that’s the kind of content we’re most interested in encouraging you to work out!

So yes…we want to be a space that encourages and equips you all well in this online space.  We desire to each steward the influence we have been given and to curate the spaces we manage with wisdom too.  But our heart here in this space is that we walk together into living well and full, and from that place we write and blog and make a difference in the world in which we live.

Heaps of Love to you all,

Logan

#livinginvitation

*Photo Credit: Esther Havens from a trip I took with Food for the Hungry to Bangladesh