I remember saying to a friend about this time last year that I wasn’t sure I would ever preach again. Not so much because I was sick of preaching, but because I couldn’t imagine why any church or group would ever want to hear from a failed church planter like me. I believed I had […]
My Love/Hate List
Another lesson I’ve learned in the past year is that doing what I love makes me happy. Forcing myself to do what I hate sends me into a depressing funk. So I’m trying to spend more of my time doing what I love and less of it doing what I hate. This is why I […]
November 15, 2011 by 7 Comments
Insight is O-V-E-R-R-A-T-E-D
A second lesson I’ve learned this year is that insight is overrated (I got this line from a friend). Not unimportant, just overrated. I have the kind of personality that craves insight from past events. I want to understand why things happened the way they did, why I responded the way I did, and what […]
November 10, 2011 by 3 Comments
Failure Is All It’s Cracked Up To Be
Last November was the worst month of my life. I was trying to recover from a devastating professional failure, understand how I ended up trying something I turned out to be so ill-suited to do, and figure out what to do next. Can you say Happy Holidays? (As far as tough times go, mine have […]
November 7, 2011 by 7 Comments
The Lost Secret of Running
November 3, 2011 by 8 Comments
Attack the Resistance!
One night back in the summer, while playing basketball with the boys under our street light, I had an idea for a short story that I thought they would enjoy. Over the next several days I thought about the plot and how to best start and end the story. I started writing it at nights, […]
November 2, 2011 by 2 Comments
Have You Hugged a Zombie Today?
Last fall, because of the Twitter buzz among my friends, I started watching The Walking Dead on AMC. This was a completely new genre for me. I can count on both hands the number of horror films I’ve watched from beginning to end. When I was kid I went to the movies with a friend […]
October 25, 2011 by 16 Comments
Meet The Preacher Geek
Yesterday I launched a new blog called Preacher Geek. Why? Because sometimes preachers talk about the strangest stuff and I wanted to host a dedicated blog for such discussions. It’s going to be a place where I (and others) will write about all kinds of preacher stuff that is far too geeky to inflict on […]
October 21, 2011 by 4 Comments
What Are You Doing In That Tree?
In Luke 19, we read another story about how Jesus goes out of his way to give an outcast a new identity. One day he’s walking through the streets of Jericho and a crowd gathers parade-style, by the side of the road to welcome him. In the crowd is a short tax-collector named Zacchaeus. He […]
October 18, 2011 by 1 Comment
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons