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MOSTLY FINISHED
I only have energy for a bit of stream-of-consciousness writing tonight, so here goes: It’s weird to finish a project that you’ve been procrastinating on for nearly 4 years. My deadline for the stair railing was 2:00 today. That was when an appraiser was coming by our house to judge what it is worth. With an extra hand from Hannah at the finish line, I had all the balusters in place by 2:45, just as the appraiser was ready to leave. He complimented my work, said he was glad it wasn’t his project, took a picture of it for his…
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POWER OF A DEADLINE
There’s nothing like a firm deadline to motivate me. Sandwiched between our anniversary getaway these last two days and a trip to Milwaukee for our nephew’s wedding this weekend, Melissa and I are frantically attempting to finish some home improvement projects. So it’s almost midnight and I am halfway through installing a new railing on the steps down to the basement. These steps have been rail-less ever since I ripped the old railing out as part of our updates to the house post-Haiti. Only 4 years or so! And it’s been a year and a half since the lack of…
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48 HOURS TO CELEBRATE 24 YEARS
I consciously took last night off from writing – the first time in at least 6 months – for the sake of uninterrupted time with my wife. Yesterday marked the 24th anniversary of the day Melissa and I stood before friends and family and God and pledged to stay with each other for better or worse. There’s no doubt we’ve been blessed with quite a bit of “better” and very little “worse”. So even though the timing was far from perfect (being in the midst of a dozen home projects under the pressure of summer days quickly passing), the two…
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FINGER POINTING
I have been following developments on Twitter since the attempted assassination of Trump yesterday. I don’t read it regularly anymore but it does tend to be a good place to take the culture’s pulse on the topics of the day. I was surprised at how many tweets in the last 24 hours sought to pin blame for the shooting on somebody other than the would-be assassin. And, of course, the other party was always “the one who started it”. It’s strange – I don’t remember a single tweet suggesting the shooter’s mental health as a possible factor. And there was…
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INCH FROM CHAOS
Imagine the chaos which was nearly unleashed on this country (and the world) this evening. If that bullet had been an inch to the right, our timeline would have taken a sharp turn into instability and the unknown, for all of us – Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike. Tonight I am thanking God that the shooter failed in his mission and praying for the families of those who died. What needs to happen is a swift and permanent cooling of the rhetoric on both sides, but I fear this will only inflame it instead. The major sentiment I see on…
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GOD-GIVEN WORK
Tomorrow morning, on behalf of Mission Resource, I get the opportunity to address the monthly men’s breakfast group at Community Church of Columbus, my former church home. I help in the kitchen each month as a way to keep ties there. The menu always includes biscuits and gravy, hash browns, scrambled eggs and sausage. There’s always prayer and worship music and then a guest speaker. Dave Ketchum and I will be filling that role tomorrow. The attendance averages around 35 to 40, so there’s always a good energy there. As a Scriptural grounds for my portion of the talk, I…
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NEW CHAPTER FOR HANNAH
A little family update tonight. Melissa and I took Hannah out for dinner this evening to celebrate her first real world job offer! After graduating from Olivet in May, Hannah has been researching interior design firms and sending out her resume. If she couldn’t move to Italy, she was praying for the opportunity to live somewhere near the ocean, preferably in North or South Carolina. Eventually she came across a small firm in the market to grow their team: iQ Designs … in Myrtle Beach. It’s looking like a true Win/Win. Hannah gets her dream location and a steady paycheck…
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THE GOSPEL OF SIN MANAGEMENT
I am more and more convinced that the shrinkage of the American church is due to the narrowing of how we understand – and proclaim – what we call “the good news”: You are a sinner, but if you put your faith in God’s Son, you will be forgiven all your sins and you will go to heaven when you die. How utterly anemic this is compared to the true gospel! Dallas Willard calls it “the gospel of sin management” and suggests the ineffectiveness of the modern church “is not in spite of what we teach and how we teach…
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A SECOND REBELLION?
I am preaching this week on Genesis 6:1-4, the weird prelude to the flood narrative. 1 When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters…
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MEDITATION LITERATURE
Throughout the summer I have been meeting with the teens of the church on Monday mornings for breakfast and Bible study. [The difficulty of getting teens to the church at 8:00 am following a summer weekend is actually part of the design. I didn’t necessarily want it to be easy.] This morning we had 4 young men in attendance and we had donuts, fried eggs, and bacon and looked at Genesis 2 – the creation of Adam and Eve. After we read the passage out loud, I encouraged these guys to pose questions that the text raised in their minds.…