Say Goodbye to the "Wubbie", Bill

In the film Mr. Mom, Michael Keaton's character (that would be Mr. Mom himself) has to help his youngest son say goodbye to his beloved "wubbie". The wubbie, of course, is a special blanket that the little fellow takes everywhere with him in the manner of Linus of Peanuts fame. My thesis is that we all have our Wubbies, if you will, and that there is a time we too may need to let go of them in order to, well, grow up.

I speak of this because the time has come for us to move out of the 1,000 or so square feet we have been subleasing since last August after we left our Crown Valley Vineyard Church space in Rancho Santa Margarita. The new (and much smaller) office / storage space represented my last grip on traditional church as I have known it. We may have deconstructed our worship center and other remnants of a destination campus and moved to house church mode, but at least I still had my own office and Pam, our administrator, had her desk there, too. So, now that our obligation to stay there is finished and the time has arrived to move out, I automatically began looking for replacement office space -- smaller and cheaper, of course -- but we would naturally need to retain an office location for the Vineyard Community Mission Network (or so I thought). Turns out, not so much...

Before long I came to the sobering realization that having my own church office space was a "wubbie" I needed to surrender. Given our mission, our operational needs and our calling to be community - based, an office no longer makes sense. So it's "say goodbye to the wubbie, Bill" and keep saying hello to the new way of being in the ministry that this whole journey represents.

I wonder: is there a "wubbie" in your life that needs to be surrendered?