Timothy Gracen Edwards was born at 3:30pm. He is healthy and weighs 6lbs 3oz.
Praise the Lord!!!
(Thanks to all who have been praying. She had a fairly smooth delivery. I heard she was in labor for something like 4 hours, maybe.)
IHOP-KC has its first night watch baby!!! Woo hoo!!!
Clay and Sarah Edwards just bought a house. Talk about growing up–married… homeowners… baby on the way. Anyway, a bunch of people from the night watch (mostly Clay’s team) were over at the house to help them paint and clean yesterday (Thursday) after they closed on the house. 10 Hours of bug-sucking, window-scrubbing, wall-painting, and PB-watching.
While we painted, I kept thinking about how unusual our community really is. For one… there’s the simple fact that we were intentionally painting between 6pm and 4am. But the real usual thing is the conversations that were happening around the wet paint.
We had our weekly night watch meeting last night and something that Stuart said really hit me. (That guy can be a genius sometimes. He’s an INTJ, you know. INTJ’s are like… brilliant. They call us them “Masterminds”.)
Stuart was talking about joy. He said that true joy only comes with the presence of God. We can’t conjure it up. We can’t fake it. True joy is the result of the Holy Spirit… God’s nearness… His delight in us… and so on.
As I sat there considering the things he was saying, I realized something about the last two and a half months of my life.
Since my mother passed away, I have discovered a peace and a joy unlike anything I have ever known before. It seems odd. Almost sick, actually. How can I have such an amazing joy when something so unbelievably heartbreaking has just happened? How can I be so at peace when it feels like everything around me (circumstantially) has been violently shaken, leaving only broken shards of what once seemed so solid, stable, and constant?
So, the day after I was fired, we had our weekly night watch community meeting. At the end of the meeting, Stuart gave an exhortation to the night watch staff. He called us to a season of thankfulness, hilarious giving, and speaking well of one another.
The exhortation could not have had better timing.
As you may have read in a recent post, we have two babies on the way in the night watch.
Make that three. I’m going to give it a little time before I announce the happy couple to the world.
However, it seems that Clay and Sarah really started something in our little night watch community. When you consider how few married couples there actually are among us, we have some pretty high percentages in the “soon to be parents” category.
Clay just told us all tonight that he and Sarah are having a boy! I’m so excited. I mean… I was going to be thrilled either way… but I was kind of hoping for a boy. It just seems to fit for their first child.
So… those who have intentions of lavishing gifts upon this first nightwatch baby… think blue. I wonder when he’ll get his first pair of cowboy boots.
And… I’m not sure if I have actually mentioned this yet, but another couple on our worship team is pregnant. Travis and Jessica Damme are about 7 weeks behind the Edwards’. Some dynamics are going to seriously shift around here come summer time!
Years of experiencing the December Dis (a term you will understand well if you have a December birthday) are almost compensated for by the experience of Night Watch Birthdays.
When you are on the Night Watch, you get two whole days for your birthday by the simple nature of the hours that you are awake. In fact… we tend to draw it out to almost a week, but at least two days of that are totally legitimate.
First, there is the day that your birthday begins. Though it’s not official until midnight, the entire day (leading up to midnight) is filled with the joy of anticipation. In a few hours, it will officially be your birthday. So you’re already in celebration mode… and rightfully so. Plus, since we all serve in the prayer room during the night watch, the time at which we are most likely to see all of our friends is after midnight… at which point your birthday has begun, beyond all arguement.
Though you may go out to breakfast or something after the prayer room, you do eventually have to go to bed. But when you wake up the next day… it’s still your birthday! So, day two of birthday celebration begins. And just because the date changes over at midnight doesn’t mean it has stopped being your birthday. It was your birthday when you woke up and you are still awake. So it is still your birthday. It’s as simple as that.
Because we generally only have one night off every week, you are likely to celebrate on your night off as well. And we have this habit around here of taking people out for dinner if we happen to have missed their other birthday celebrations. In fact, last year, I think I went out to dinner THREE times for one person’s birthday. It might have only been twice, though. (I only paid for hers half of one of those times, though. I don’t exactly have a lot of money.)
Anyway… my birthday is on the 22nd, and I am definitely looking forward to that. I already have friends asking me what I want to do. And… since our EGS was conveniently cancelled… my schedule is completely open. We are pretty serious about birthdays around here, too. It’s just a week and a half away…
It seems that I have this thing about me where I always want to stay up a little past any time that is socially acceptable. I got so excited when I joined the Night Watch because it meant that I could stay up all night and the people around me weren’t constantly telling me how crazy, stupid, or psychologically disturbed I was.
Well… I have reached that point, yet again, where my sleeping habits are attracting the scorn of many a friend.
A few months ago, I fell in love with the morning section at IHOP. Especially on the weekends, there is this amazing hiddenness to the mostly empty prayer room (that used to be in the night watch). I enjoy the worship teams, and there are a handful of really amazing people faithfully showing up every morning who just encourage me by their presence.
Because they are situated right next to each other, it seems conceivable that a person could do both the night watch and the morning section. Midnight to noon. Not so bad, really.
Well, it would seem that everyone else disagrees. I had check-ins with my supervisor tonight (Clay), and we spent the entire meeting talking about how “horrible” that schedule was and the fact that I really need to leave it. Clay even suggested that I switch to days so that I could do mornings!!! And he is certainly not the first to suggest it. My friend Cheston has recommended this several times. When I said that I couldn’t possible leave the night watch and do days, his response was, “Well… you can’t do the night watch either.”
Ouch. Point taken.
I am really wrestling with this right now. I think I am going to continue staying up until some time between 10am and noon until the onething conference. (I will most likely be switching to days for the conference, anyway.) Alisha (also a section leader in the night watch) suggested that I find three or so close friends who know me well and can tell me when my schedule starts to send me off the deep end. So, I think I am going to set up a net of close friends around me and try it out for a while.
The hiddenness of the morning section is likely to disappear within a few years, just like it did in the night watch. Why not enjoy it while it exists and I have the added freedoms of being single and in my twenties?
Beginning on January 5th, 2005, the night watch is entering into 90 days of consecration as a community. This is huge… and I am really excited (though a bit intimidated and quite sober) about it.
“It is our desire as the Night Watch leadership team to seek the Lord for a grace to lay hold of the next level of establishing a culture in our section that seizes the reality of the Night Watch lifestyle unto pursuing the mandate the Lord has given the IHOP missions base.”
On the personal level, we have been exhorted to focus on the following things during this time of consecration:
~ Getting clarity in personal vision
~ Wrestling through personal core values
~ Establishing a regular routine in our personal schedules
~ Seeking strength through God’s grace to overcome “areas where we have besetting sins as we seek the Lord with true repentance.”
~ Seeking grace to enter into the disciplines (prayer, fasting, studying the word, etc.) and having these things reflected in our schedules.
Corporately, we will be doing the following:
~ Begin with a 21-day fast (Jan 5-26)
~ ABSOLUTELY NO TALKING in the prayer room between midnight and 6am.
~ Establish fasting teams for every day of the week
~ Actively encouraging one another in our personal consecrations
~ Weekly gatherings (about an hour) for corporate encouragement, testimonies, exhortations, and going through the Psalms of Ascent together (Psalms 120-134)
When our night watch leadership cast the vision for this time of corporate consecration, the invitation to press in and go higher was met by overwhelming support and gratitude. You would not believe how many people spoke up, saying things like, “God has really been speaking to me about these things lately,” or, “I really need this.” Seriously, everyone I have talked to about it is totally on board… and really excited about it. The unity and like-mindedness that we all have in regards to this sacred time is nothing short of a miracle. I have seldom seen a community of people respond so well to a call to come up higher. We are beginning, even now, to prepare for this time of consecration.
Please keep us in your prayers as we are preparing for and entering into this new time of consecration before the Lord.
