My Ramblings

Our 4 year old recently shared some great wisdom with us and I thought I should pass it on. School has started this week and our oldest son began a new grade in a new school. That will be its own post. However, as my wife and I were trying to prepare him for his transition, we talked with him about what he wanted to wear. His response: "My skin." trying to avoid the question. Our 4-year-old responded, "You can't wear naked." We still laugh about his wise words. So, if you can't decide what you want to wear, just remember, You can't wear naked.

About two months ago, after much prodding by my wife, I went to have a physical, my first one in several years. Aside from the occasional cold and stress headache, I am perfectly fine. I am a little overweight, but I have been working on that. According to my tests, I have good blood pressure, good good cholestoral levels, good bad cholesterol levels, etc. The only bad thing, besides my weight, was a high liver reading; not very high, just a little high. The doctor wanted me to wait a month and retake the blood tests.  I retook the tests and the liver reading was still a little high. The doctor ordered a sonogram to check my liver and ran extensive blood work to begin ruling out possible causes. After all the tests and the visits to the doctor, it was discovered that I have some slight fatty infiltration on my liver, which accounts for the high blood count. If the fat gets worse, it could possibly lead to serious problems. In short, I need to lose weight. I did not feel sick...

I spent the last week with my family vacationing along the coast of North Carolina (go Heels!). It was a great vacation. I missed two Sundays at our church and had a lot of work to do before I left to make sure everything was in order. I accomplished almost everything I intended to, and the stuff I didn't accomplish, I just left. Normally, when I go on vacation, it takes at least two days to switch from work mode to vacation mode, longer if things are left undone. I vacate for a couple of days and then I start thinking about work again. It was not that way this year. I worked late on Friday, but once work was done, it was done. I was able to let work go and not think about it again for over a week. I have no explanation for this victory, except that God was helping me. I thank God for that help, and all his mercy, love, grace, etc. God helped in another way as well. Many of you are aware of my former struggle with lust and addiction to pornography. The beac...

Wednesday was an interesting day for me. I have a monthly meeting with a few other senior/lead pastors for prayer and mutual accountability. This past Wednesday was our third meeting. Our times together have been helpful and encouraging and God has blessed our praying for one another. I joined this group especially for my need for and conviction about personal accountability in the lives of Christians. I won't speak of what is going on with the other guys in the group, but I will mention what's going on with me. Our times of sharing personal struggles, etc. for prayer have been good, but not great. We have only met two other times, but we are still only sharing surface-level struggles, things that won't be too bad of a reflection on us. This level of sharing is expected, but not really helpful.  Over the last couple of weeks, I feel like the Lord has been speaking to me about taking the next step toward vulnerability with the group. As we went around the group sharing...

What is it with today's business world? My wife and I were commenting today on a situation we faced. She and I had a conference call scheduled for today with a company we are hiring to revamp our church's website. Now, four hours after the time for the call, we still can not reach the company or the rep that we were to speak with. Granted, there may be a good reason for the missed meeting and I have been praying for the rep, in case something is wrong. On the other hand, this has become normal protocol for several of the businesses I have tried to work with here in Maryland. We have gone so far as to get referrals and check references only to sign a contract with a company and have them fail to follow through on their work. This has happened on several occasions. My wife is also a teacher and recounted for me the message she gives to students regarding the importance of punctuality. "When you get in the work world, being late will not be tolerated." Ap...

I recently received a solicitation to view an online parenting book. The book was titled, "A Father's Guide To Raising Daughters". However, it was the subtitle that intrigued me, "A Father's Guide To Raising Daughters: Because I Need One!!!" I felt better knowing that I was not the only one who failed to receive the instruction manual for my kids when they were born. For a while I thought I had figured out a lot of things about raising boys, that is until our second son was born. Even though both of our children are boys, they are nothing alike. They are 7 and 4 years old now, but my wife and I could tell they were two completely different individuals within the first year. They each have their own personality, they express love differently, and they respond to discipline differently just to name a few. So, what we do is take the things that we know and learn/figure out how to adapt them to work with each of our sons. Parenting is certainly an advent...

The more I thought about the peek-a-boo analogy, the more appropriate I think it is. I already mentioned the idea of playing hide-and-seek. There is another aspect to my relationship with God that wasn't mentioned. There are rather frequent moments when God just shows up. For example, I will be driving home after work and all of a sudden, wow! God's abiding presence fills me and the space around me. There is no question, God is there. He is always there, but not always like this. On many such occasions, my physical reaction to His presence is just to cry; not a cry of fear or shame, but more along the lines of the way my wife cries at all the Hallmark commercials. At other times I just laugh. Sometimes the laugh is because at the moment, it strikes me as funny. At other times, the laugh is a laugh of relief because God has reminded me that He is there. How silly I was to think that God did not know or care about what I was facing or going through. The ...

As a new Christian, I recognized that God had sought me out, found me, and saved me. As our relationship grows, it takes on another dimension of this game of hide-and-seek. Somewhere along the road I began to realize that at moments, the roles of the game would reverse; God would hide and I would become the seeker. For my theological friends, I am not saying that God would go away; David declares in the Psalms that there is nowhere we can go to be away from God and God promises to never leave us nor forsake us. Maybe a better analogy would be God playing peek-a-boo with me. It is a humbling albeit humorous thought. Anyway, to this day, there are moments when I am trying to connect with God and I don't feel His presence with me.

As my relationship with God grows I am learning that He enjoys playing hide-and-seek. Early on in our relationship, He was the seeker. I am convinced God's nature includes the character trait of intentional pursuit. In the Old Testament, God reveals Himself as pursuing and calling specific individuals. Jesus, God in the flesh, continues this pattern in the New Testament and adds to it parables like the lost coin, lost sheep, and lost son just to name a few, to help to expose God's seeking nature. God loves people and he pursues relationship with them. God pursues both those who don't realize they are hiding and those who are intentionally running away from Him. I know this because God has been chasing/seeking me for years. I don't know why. I couldn't imagine that perishable, imperfect, finite, people could love me, much less a perfect, holy, all-knowing God. But He does! He loves me enough to pursue me, even when I reject Him. He purs...

I recently came across what has become, to me, a great metaphor. Between 1980 and 1994 Michelangelo's paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel went through another restoration. For years artists and onlookers had assumed they knew what the paintings looked like. The restoration didn't reveal any new images. However, once much of the smoke and dirt that had accumulated on the paintings was removed the true vibrancy of the colors used by the great painter were realized. "This restoration had a profound effect on art lovers and historians, as colours and details that had not been seen for centuries were revealed. It has been claimed that as a result 'Every book on Michelangelo will have to be rewritten.'" ( Restoration of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, Wikipedia) When I heard this story on the radio, it brought something alive in me. I recently started a new sermon series, "ReDiscovering Christianity." The discovery at the Sistine Chape...

Regularly on Sunday nights, there are several people from the church who get together at my house. We eat a little, laugh a little, pray a little, etc; we enjoy being together. One of the other things we do is talk about the Bible. This tends to be accomplished by either a group member leading us in a study/discussion of a particular passage of the Bible, or by our viewing a video and following it with discussion from our Christian perspective. Over the past two weeks we have been trying something different. Two weeks ago, we replaced the Bible study or video with discussions about the sermon we heard on Sunday morning. We begin with a short prayer followed by an ice-breaker. Our ice-breaker is each of us sharing something that is personal, but not invasive; for example, "What is one trait about yourself that you really like?" The ice-breaker is followed by a 45 second recap and outline of the sermon. This is easy for us since I am usually the one who giv...

The last two months have been brutal for me. Several weeks ago I preached a sermon entitled, "distracted by the things that had to be done." The title references a story from the Bible about Mary and Martha. In the sermon I pointed out that Martha was not distracted by unimportant stuff, but by things that had to be done. How do you put aside something that "has to be done?" I think it was Martin Luther that had the answer, "I have so much work to do that I must spend at least three hours in prayer in order to accomplish it all" (my paraphrase). Things were great for me up to that Sunday; or so I thought. Since that Sunday, the Lord has allowed numerous circumstances to line up in such a way that they revealed my need for personal change. The circumstances have forced me to recognize that I had allowed my priorities to get out of order. God has spoken to me through my family life, church crisis, sermon preparation, friendships, leader...

    Much has happened over the past few months. I completed my masters program, my family and I moved into a new house, we brought another full-time pastor on staff at the church, etc. More than all this external stuff, there is a lot of internal change taking place. I mentioned to my fellow journeymen on Sunday that the Lord is doing some interesting things in my life. As I sit and reflect on it, it seems clear to me, but trying to put it into words is next to impossible. In a good way, I feel like my world has been turned upside down. Now I am working to reset my bearings and find the map to this new part of my journey.     This past Sunday I had an interesting experience. For weeks now, the Lord has laid a verse (actually a phrase from a verse of Scripture) on my heart. I know that he is speaking some things to me in the deep places of my soul. I felt that the Lord wanted me to use this verse and some of what he is doing in /speaking to me as a basis for the sermon Sunday....