An Introduction

It’s been said that necessity is the mother of invention.  People were tired of reading and working by candlelight and lamps so Edison invented the light bulb.  People needed a concise, immediate way to contact someone across town, so Bell invented the telephone.  People needed a way to find out who was the lead actor in the Gremlins, so IMDB.com was created.

If invention comes from necessity, one could deduce that reinvention comes from a flaw in the system.  Take the beeper/pager.  In the 80’s and 90’s, this was the be all, end all in contacting your friends, family members, and business associates.  The problem was you had to find a phone to call that person back.  We didn’t “need” the pager, unless you were a doctor.  The need was for us to be able to contact someone while mobile; there was no immediate feedback via the beeper, so cue the mobile phone.

We, the Blackwells, have pinpointed a flaw in OUR system.  We are the typical middle class, Christian, American family. A husband, wife, 2 sons, and a dog, living in a 3 bedroom, 2-bath home in Small Town, TX, USA.  We go to church almost every Sunday, and worked for years as teachers.  Sounds normal (granted we are anything but) but here’s the kicker; our flaw is that we are typical.  God didn’t call us to be typical middle class, American Christians.  Typical is going to church because it's on your Christian Checklist.  Typical is singing Christian Karaoke on Sundays and being mute of the Gospel the other 6 days of the week.  Don’t mistake what I am saying.  Corporate worship is not Karaoke, but when your life doesn’t reflect God the rest of the week, are you truly spending that time in worship or are you just singing the songs you’ve heard on Christian radio? And the crazy thing in this is the devil usually leaves the typical alone, because they aren't a threat.

Now no one sets out to be typical. We go to church, because at the heart of it, we do love our savior, and we want our children to love our savior.   But somewhere we got comfortable, and sometimes with comfortability comes laziness, which leads to just showing up to church and make excuses on how not to commit.  The biblical word for typical is lukewarm.  I’ve always envisioned this verse like God biting into a have cooked hot pocket.  It’s just warm enough to fool you on the outside but when you get to the meat its almost cold, and it makes you just want to throw up.  Makes my stomach churn just to think of that.  I can’t go back to that, The Blackwells can no longer stomach being typical, or lukewarm. 

Reinventing the Blackwells isn’t going to be a self-deprecating look at our flaws, or a social media experiment.  We are finding who God made us to be, our pursuit is real and this is our journey, and we’d love to see you journey with us as we discover how to no longer be typical.