Please turn your Bibles to James chapter one.

Today we kick off our annual vision series. I don't know how you feel about that. There's not quite enough people in the room to get much raw raw today. I don't know, but I'll live off the very little that I can get.

I'm sure you're going to be able to get a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit.

Can I ask that of you? Can I put that request on you? Thank you.

You can't even smile at me because it's meaningless with the mask. But hey, I'll take what I can get.

Today we kick off our annual vision series, which is less of an attempt to articulate our vision for Bridgetown Church in the year of head.

It is that, but it's more of an annual attempt to articulate Jesus' vision for what it means to apprentice under him or in other language to be a disciple of Jesus.

Not just a Christian, that's more of an American cultural word. It's not really a New Testament word, but to apprentice under Jesus into life of the kingdom, which as Bethany just said, we define as a life organized around three very basic goals.

Number one, be with Jesus. Number two, become like Jesus or what most people mean by spiritual formation.

Number three, do what he did or a more specific way to say that is do what he would do if he were you in your time and in your place.

And so most years, I stand up here and I give the same sermon every single September and I attempt to make it a little bit new, but whatever.

But not this year. 2020 is just not a normal year. Again, if you're new to our community online or whatever, we would invite you to go back or ask you to go back and listen to a previous years vision series.

Go back to the beginning of the practicing the way, kind of teaching series and listen through that paradigm or vision. But really this year is a bit different.

It's just our attempt to articulate the spiritual direction for our church, meaning just what's our best sense of the as leaders and as kind of core community, of the invitations of the spirit of God to us as individuals, but really to us as a church in the year ahead.

So the next few weeks are just kind of a few pastoral words that we hope and prior poignant for the season to come, however long that season is.

All right, turn to James chapter one and give me a few minutes to get there.

Do you all know what the leading cause of death for people under the age of 50 is in organ in 2020.

It is not COVID-19, contrary to what you might think. It is not cancer, which in a normal year is at the top of the list or heart disease, it is death by suicide.

There has been a massive spike in the last seven months. It's way up. In fact, more people have died from suicide across all age categories than the 500 plus who have died from COVID-19 in our state.

And I say that not to shock you, but just to call out the obvious, the elephant in the room, people are in pain due to the cascade effect of living through a global pandemic.

As if that was all we were dealing with right now, followed by an economic disaster, followed by over a hundred days straight of strife between protesters and police, which only ended and only for a little while because it was followed by a once in a generation cascade effect of wildfires that shut down our entire life.

And the entire state shut us indoors for almost two weeks, followed by more social unrest over the grand jury's decision a few days ago, and by the way, our election is coming.

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