4 Reasons Why I Love to Get Up Early in the Morning

I have been reflecting on this for a week now. Why do I love getting up early in the morning. I rarely set an alarm clock. When I wake, I am wide awake. I cannot get back to sleep. 

1. All my childhood years I remember my dad getting up very early and working long, hard hours. I understood, growing up, that this is what responsible adults do.

2. The early morning hours are quiet. No one interrupts me. I found that if I get up two hours early, and rest one hour after lunch, this is much more effective then trying to work straight through the afternoon.

3. I love the early morning quiet, and the strong, black coffee. My actual devotional exercises vary. I always read the Bible through each year, praying first for God to give me the wisdom to understand His word to me today. After my reading I pray for a few of my most important relationships. My most recent “discipline” involves Facebook and Twitter. I tested the waters by picking a few authors. I started following John Maxwell, Donald Miller, and Rick Warren. They post short videos, and blogs, and they Retweet the best of their friend’s writings. So now I follow some of their friends. I find the whole 15 minute exercise provides me with encouraging thoughts for the day.

4. THE MAIN REASON I LOVE TO GET UP EARLY: I think it boils down to this…I honestly love my job, and my life, and I cannot wait to get started with it. I love our work. I love Monday mornings. I love being tired from working hard. The reason I love it so much is because I honestly sense we are making a difference in where people will spend eternity. We have a few years of harvest. Maybe 70. Hopefully 90 or 100. Maybe a few more or less. Then we have eternity, billions upon billions of years. I love building structures and systems where people can be transformed, where they can learn to get off that wide, shallow, meaningless life to the high road, where life is full of purpose and joy. I just love it. It is early Monday morning, and I am eagerly anticipating all we are going to get done this week.

I hope you are looking forward to your day and week too.

Sincerely,

Rick Bergen.

We are building about 150 meters of wall, so we can have a church yard. This will enable us to close the rest of our property occasionally, in order to have week-end retreats and events. As part of this upgrade we are also securing our property better. A harder group of young people, who are involved with drugs and stealing, have started using our property. While we want to befriend especially these people, the wall will help up.

Brazilian humor…do you think it is the same or different than ours? The night before the baptism Ivanildo and some of the guys went spear fishing at night. While they were in the river Zezym got a bit of poisenous foam on his lip. All the Brazilians thought his fat lip was hilarious. Zyzym thought so too. He soaked up the attention. Later I heard that the day before one of the girls had an insect bite on her face and he kept trying to get the “perfect” photo of it with his cell phone.

Baptism Sunday starts with a “family” breakfast. Everyone brings some breakfast food such as bread, butter, hot chocolate, pop, and coffee. After eating and hanging out together for awhile the baptism candidates meet to go over once again the significance of what they are about to do. Then everyone treks down to the river. I wish you could participate in one of these. It makes you want to do it again.

Jesus told us to make disciples and to baptize people. One of these commands takes our whole lifetime, and the other takes a few minutes. There is always a lot of joy in a baptism Sunday. May God protect these young people even more now that they have made this public declaration that “Yes, I am doing this act of obedience because I am becoming a disciple of Jesus.”

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Matthew 28:18-20

Here is the next generation’s worship team. This is still a practice. These kids all come from tough backgrounds. We wrestle with what are minimum standards to be in this group, as far as lifestyle. If our only standard is whether they are heading towards Jesus or in some other direction, they all qualify. But what about other minimum standards? May God give us wisdom, and may His presence be strongly felt among us.

“Oh Lord, please let Your healing water flow through our church.” This is my main prayer every Sunday, during our worship service. We just cannot heal ourselves or fix ourselves up. I see many who come to this gathering with filthy, infected wounds, coming to the hospital for help and encouragement. When the wounds are physical, in some ways it is easier to show compassion and help people in practical ways. I don’t know how to help people who have been abused emotionally and spiritually except to ask God for more healing and grace. I see God’s river running in crystal clean through the west wall of our church, and flowing out the muddy color of the Amazon out the east wall. It flows in clean, swirls through us and carries out lots of junk. I see people’s wounds getting cleaned out, and some healing happening. Our hope and prayer is that people will leave in better shape than they came.

In preparation for our sending church’s annual Mission’s Sunday they asked for some photos of me ministering. I am usually the one taking photos, so I am in very few. I found it kind of strange to give two of the guys in our church each a camera in order to capture some idea of how I look in a Sunday service.

Here are the photos that Izak took last Sunday during our main service.