Tuesday Brain Dump

I figured that while I eat some Lean Cuisine and listening to some podcasts I'd give a little mind dump of all the things going on in my life these days...
  • Feeling a tad guilty about not taking any summer courses over the next few months... Ideally I wanted to take at least 2 courses each summer in order to speed my program along... but the only course that really fit in my program was a course on the book of Revelation. Now, that's a cool book and all, but I would rather use my New Testament elective course for something other then that one... just me I guess :-)

  • I REALLY need to get into a better shape then round :-) I'm going to start jogging. A buddy told me about this program called Couch to 5K Running Program. Looks pretty interesting. I'm going to start that this evening... If you find my corpse on the side of the road somewhere please let my wife know :-)

  • Our trip this weekend to Ottawa and Montreal was great. It was so nice to see family and friends. It sure was a fast trip though... only 4 days to see so many people. It was nice to be at our nephew's birthday party. It was great to see the Becket Player show. It was great to worship on Sunday at our church there. And it was just nice to sit around with dear friends and get caught up with them. Hopefully we'll be back there again this summer.

  • Guitar Hero ROCKS! I played until 1am last night! I would make a great rock star! Maybe that will be my next career if this pastor thing doesn't work out for me :-)

  • I'm reading so many great books on authentic community in the church and impacting the people around us. This is awesome awesome stuff! As God continues to move us here in our part of the world, I'm SOOOO pumped and excited to see where it's all going to lead!
That's just some of the things occupying my gray cell matter... I have a bunch of things I want to write about... my get to some of it this week.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Practical Atheist

Image
Over the past few weeks our church has been doing a preaching series called Practical Atheist. This is based on the book The Christian Atheist by Pastor Craig Groeschel. I've been blown away by how God has worked in the hearts of so many people over the past few weeks. Mind you, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Pastor Craig's ministry has had such a huge influence on my personal walk with Jesus so just is just a continuation of that blessing. This week we're probably going to hit the hardest topic for me to preach on, I Believe in God but I Pursue Happiness at All Costs. I'm going to be using Jesus' parable of the sower and look at how our pursuit of happiness causes us to miss out on truly how God wants from our lives. This topic hits me right between the eyes as I'm being open and honest with God about what allow to be entertainment or how I go about trying to be happy. Do I allow myself to be entertained by sin? Do I pursue the world's view
Read more

Revitalized Pastors and Leaders

Image
On March 15, 2023, the Barna Research Group released the "The Resilient Pastor Initiative". Its goal was to explore and share the state of pastors in America in the post-COVID climate we find ourselves in. According to the data, the state of pastors may not be as good as it appears from behind the pulpit. From 2015 to 2022 Barna notes the following where pastors responded "Excellent" in a number of categories: Spiritual well-being dropped from 37% to 14% Physical well-being fell from 24% to 9% Mental and emotional health plummeted from 39% to 11% The overall quality of life dipped from 42% to 18% The level of respect they felt from the community tanked from 22% to 10% Level of ‘true friends’ dropped by 50% from 34% to 17% The data also showed that this drop in wellness was more prevalent in younger pastors! Older pastors are riding it out to retirement. Now, before anyone from my church begins to panic, I'm OK. As shared in a blog post from January 2023 entitled
Read more

Captain America Rocks!!

Image
I gotta admit... sometimes I'm pretty clueless as to what is going on around me. I never buy the newest technology, and I never catch the cool TV show as it premieres. Sometimes it takes a big news flash to open my eyes to some cool stuff right in front of me... and this is definitely the case with the Captain America comic series! It took killing Cap to get to pick up an issue. And boy am I ever glad I did! I've never read anything with Captain America before. It wasn't until reading Civil War that Cap even came on my radar. I guess it's just the Canadian in me that just assumed that the character wouldn't be relatable if I wasn't American, or if I wasn't a war story nut. Civil War changed my perspective of the character. Sure, he's all American. But he's all that is great about the US. His morals, his values, his respect for others. His love of liberty and equality for all. His role in Marvel's Civil War was great and really gave me an
Read more