Blogs That I Read and Why

A year ago, before I started blogging, I wasn’t even sure that I knew what a blog was.  Since then, not only have I enjoyed this whole process, but it has been supplemental to my growth as a christian and a church leader.  It’s been fun to say the least.

So these are some of the folks in my blog reader and why…

• This guy makes me want to be better at what I do.
• This guy I look up to.
• This guy just oozes with the Word of God.
• This guy inspires the crap out of me.
• This girl encourages me and almost always entertains me.
• This guy stretches me and the way I think.
• This guy makes me laugh out loud at work.
• This guy I work for so I have to read his.

Random Facts About Me

Volume 2 of RFAM.  Read volume 1 here.

Todays topic - What I find entertaining:

1. Talk Radio - Current favorites are Rick and Bubba and Glenn Beck.  It’s funny and thought provoking.  Julie HATES talk radio.
2. Reality TV - The good stuff like Deadliest Catch, and Everest: Beyond the Limits.
3. The Office - Quite possibly the funniest show on TV right now.  I rarely get to watch it, but try to often.
4. Having a conversation with Jacob -His thoughts are much more developed than his speech.  He’s so cute when he’s articulating words, sentences, and expressing himself.
5. Watching Jacob play with other children - If you have toddlers, you know what I’m talking about.  Kids are hilarious.
6. Backcountry Camping - The REAL outdoors.  No bathrooms, no coolers, etc.
7. Canoeing/Fishing - Do you have to ask?
8. Golf - Not as good as I used to be, but still fun.
9. Reading - A good book is just as good as a good movie.
10. Cookout- I love having friends over and just grillin’.  Many memorable moments made during those times.

Do You Ever Feel Like This?

Lonely.  Do you ever just have a day where you feel lonely or down?  It’s like a funk that you can’t shake and you have no clue where it came from. 

Yesterday was one of those days for me.  I’m happily married, have a wonderful child, great friends, and enjoy the company of my coworkers at a great job.  So how is it that I can justify having days like that.

Anyone else have a clue about this?

Small Slice of Irony

This morning I made a comment to my coworker about how much my appetite has slowed as I’ve gotten older.

As fate would have it, at 3 pm, I’ve had lunch but have also managed to cram an additional small bag of pepperoni pizza combos and a snickers bar into my gullet.

I guess I just need to keep my mouth shut………but I can’t today because there’s food going in it!!!  Small slice of irony?  I’d probably eat it right now if I could get my hands on it.

Ever have one of these days?

One on One with God (Part 1)

Let’s discuss the importance of our time with the Lord.  The “quiet time” if you will.

First, let me just say that I believe that a person will grow closer to God if there are two elements present in his/her life.  They are 1) the desire and 2) time to invest with God.

Church services, small groups, accountability partners, etc. are all great, supplemental tools for growth.  However, these alone are not substitutes for your one on one time with God.  You are directly responsible for just how close you become with Christ.  Your pastor, wife, best friend, or whoever cannot get you there by themselves.  Example: reading the bible without trying to connect to God through it doesn’t do you much good.  At that point, it’s just reading.  Praying to God out of obligation is pretty much meaningless, too.

So then, a couple of facts.

Fact:  I know there are Christians lacking the desire.  They feel as if they know enough already or have achieved a certain level of spiritual understanding and therefore the overall desire is subdued.  Or the case might be that they are under the illusion that they can’t get any closer to God.  The list goes on.  There are many more scenarios that I could describe, but I want to keep this post short.

Fact:  I know there are Christians lacking the time to invest.  Today’s society is fast paced.  We are constantly finding ways to cram more and more into our schedules.  But when our schedule gets too tight, what is the first thing to usually go?  That’s right, our time for God.  John Ortberg once said that in our time today ‘hurry’ is the enemy of spiritual growth.  I totally agree with that.  MAKE TIME!  If you don’t make time for God, you will not grow.

How do I know these two facts are true?  Because I have been an example of each one at one point in my life or another.  I’ve been a Christ follower for almost twenty years now and I’m just now at a point in my life where I am sure of my calling and truly attempting to answer that call.  My desire to be faithful to God is still growing and I’m finding more and more ways to invest in the ministry of Christ.  In the next post, I’ll share with you what I’ve found to be most successful so far for me in how I spend my time with God.

Let me leave you with these two thoughts. 

• You will never get too close to God.  Don’t ever be complacent with where you are.
• Your responsibility is your responsibility.  Others can lead you, but you have to make the decision and commitment to go to the next level.

 

Cookout

Having the connect group gang over for a cookout tonight.  I’ll try to post pictures later.

Burgers, dogs, potato salad, beans, chips, good weather, and great friends…who could ask for anything more!

I’M HUNGRY!!!

Message In A Golf Ball

Do you ever feel God remind you of Himself through daily activities?  Just trying to get your attention?  I do all the time.  It’s kinda crazy.  Or as my pastor’s wife, Pam, always says…”IT’S INSANE!”

Anyway, yesterday evening, I was outside cutting the grass, trimming weeds, and cleaning off the patio behind the house.  Jacob came outside with a little putter and a ball to play golf.  The putter is his and the ball was mine.  He proceeded to hit the ball around the aggregate concrete “green” of our patio.

He was having fun, but two things bothered me.  1)  He was severely scratching the bottom of his new putter and 2) I knew my good golf ball was going to get marked up and rendered unusable.  I really wanted to go inside and get him an old crappy ball to hit around so that mine would be okay.  It was a selfish thought I know.  It’s just a golf ball, right?

Then it hit me…the God moment that is.

By allowing Jacob to play with and potentially damage one of my “expensive” Titleist golf balls, he was simply having a little fun.  My small sacrifice was giving my son some joy, even if only for a few moments.  I was instantaneously reminded of God and His sacrifice of Christ for us.  The sacrifice of Jesus was enough to allow us to have eternal joy with God in heaven.

It was just a golf ball, but a great reminder.  I never get tired of God ministering to my heart even if it’s in the smallest, most insignificant moments of life.  Thank you Lord for all of the those moments!

And yes, I let Jacob continue to play uninterrupted.

How Do You React?

I was recently prompted by an email from a friend to go back and read the story of Isaiah and King Hezekiah (2 Kings 20:1-11).  This story is familiar to me, but I have to admit that when I read it from the bible this time, my response was not the same as it had been in the past.

To quickly sum it up, it goes something like this…

Isaiah went to an ill Hezekiah and told him that ‘you are going to die, you will not recover’.  Because of his relationship with Isaiah, Hezekiah knew these words were from God and he easily and quickly accepted them as fact. 

The reaction of Hezekiah after this time was to pray (good reaction might I add).  He prayed to God and told Him that he had always been ‘faithful’, ‘devoted’, and ‘had always done good’.  Surprisingly he didn’t pray specifically for healing or something along those lines (although it wouldn’t surprise me that he may have felt the desire to do so.)

At this point, after the prayer, God told Isaiah to go back to the King and tell him that 1) his life would be spared for now and 2) the city would be delivered from the Assyrians (a little bonus if you will).

Isaiah did so.

What was the King’s response?  It was this…‘what will be the sign’ by which I am healed?

STOP RIGHT HERE.  What?  Are you kidding me?  The King’s response is a desire for affirmation?  Yep that’s right.  It wasn’t praise or a prayer of thanksgiving.  It was doubt.  Hezekiah was quick to believe the bad news earlier but not the good news now.  That is so typical of us humans.

Next, God responded to the King’s desire of wanting a sign.  God said He would move the sun and even give Hezekiah the choice of having it move forward or backward.  And what did Hezekiah choose?  That’s right.  Out of another brief moment of doubt or brazenness in my opinion, he asked that the sun go backwards.  Since the sun already goes forward, that wouldn’t be quite extraordinary enough for Hezekiah.

STOP RIGHT HERE AGAIN.  Quick sidebar - God is so patient with us…don’t you think?  Thankfully He is a God of second chances (and third and fourth, etc.)

So God moved the sun backward just as the King asked.

So what point am I trying to get at here?  Is it that God can do anything?

Nope.  That’s already a given.

To me, this is a story more about faith and doubting God.  Even after we become believers, we are still very capable of having doubts.  Doubt is a very ‘me-centered’ reaction.  Faith, however, is the antithesis to doubt.  The King’s reactions throughout all of this was very weird in my opinion.  He reacted good to the bad news and bad to the good news.  Don’t you think that’s weird?

As believers in Christ, we are still imperfect human beings and we still don’t have it all together.  I would like to say that all my responses to God moving in my life were God centered but they haven’t.  Many times, whether good or bad circumstances, my responses have been ‘me-centered’.  As my relationship with Him grows, so does my faith and thus fewer instances of doubt.  I pray now for you and for myself that our reactions to circumstances in life would always be directed toward God.

So the real question is this.  How do you react?

Name Change

Okay.  So everyone but me has a cool or unique name for their blog.  What would that be classified as, “blog title envy”?  Whatever the case, I’m not really creative when it comes to stuff like that so I took a stab at it.  The result is what you see above.

Don’t know what to truly think about it at this point.  Maybe it will grow on me.

Just so you don’t have to go look it up, “perceptible cogitation” is a glorified way of saying viewable thoughts.  I apologize for being a nerd.

Community…We Belong

I can hear the Pat Benatar song from the eighty’s in my head right now.  You know the one where she sings…”weeeeee belong, we belong, we belong together.”

We belong.  What a cool thought.  Did you know that the apostle Paul stated that we “belong” to each other as believers?

Think about that for just a second.  What does that mean to you?

Hmmm.

God is relational.  VERY relational.  He created mankind simply for a relationship.  He sent Christ and sacrificed Him just to salvage that relationship.  The ten commandments are all about relationships, either with God or other people.  Jesus’ commands to us were the ten commandments summed up into two, love God and love others.  It should be no doubt that God is all about relationships.  So then, if we’re created in His image, should we not be pursuing meaningful, Christ honoring relationships?  That is where connect groups come into the equation.

As I briefly spoke about connect groups on Sunday from the stage, let me reiterate what I said in that a connect group is where you will find the heartbeat of the church.  You will not be able to experience the authentic community that God created you for on Sunday morning at a worship service like you will in a connect group.  Its just not personal enough.  You can’t get close to people only seeing them for one hour on one day a week.

In our connect group this week, we started to open up this topic.  Our group is still young.  We’re all still kicking the tires and getting to know each other better.  However, we need to grow even closer to one another.  We need to feel safe and secure with our environment so that we all can open up share and eventually grow with one another.  Until we develop and deepen our relationships, ‘we ain’t going nowhere’.  I love this group of people already and I can’t wait to see what the months ahead hold for us.

My final encouragement to anyone reading this (even though it may sound weird)…BE INTENTIONAL ABOUT BEING RELATIONAL.  Why?  Because we belong to each other.