Being a speed bump to the Gospel
So I have had the great pleasure / heavy responsibility of teaching my first adult Sunday School class this spring, and it has been eye-opening to say the least. First, as an aside, I have so much more respect and honor for pastors that prepare sermons every week. It is a fairly stressful ordeal of realizing that you are putting words around the truth of Scripture and the Gospel. <church comedy start> I mean honestly pastors should get 5 to 10 mulligans a year where they say, “Look other than the Scripture of this sermon, the rest is likely to suck and I am sorry. I am claiming one of my mulligans” <church comedy end>. So this leads me to think about my class. I am teaching on Heaven which is a subject that I am wildly passionate...
Mercy in the Workplace
One of the things that I often struggle with is how to incorporate my faith into my work. At work, I am very execution minded. It probably has a lot to do with wanting to avoid negative attention most of my life (didn’t like turning in homework late or being the last person sitting down at lunch), but for the most part I like my projects to be delivered on time and really complete. The unfortunate side effect (or sin effect) is that I end up having very little patience with people who cause my projects to be put at risk. I try hard to give people lots of heads up, but when it is coming down to the wire, I tend to apply pressure on people until I get what I need. In an effort to be vulnerable, I am not going to dress up the last couple sentences to...
Shocking lack of personal insight
Over the past week, I have spent several conversations with close friends holding a mirror up to my personality / how I treat people. It has been hard to see how little insight I have into myself and my behavior. This is tough for me as how I handle myself in some areas (work for example) is receiving a fair amount of positive feedback. However, in friendships and other close relationships, I am finding that I look more clueless than anything. I find this really frustrating as it not only extends to close friends, my wife and my kids, but certainly to my relationship with Christ as well. I praise God that I have a Savior and close relationships who will continue to put up with me, but I wonder if there is a way to help this process along. With my...
Our actions reflect on us
So one of the things that I probably follow too closely is politics these days. Regardless of which side you fall on, now is clearly an interesting time for the US, but that isn’t the point that I want to talk through. This week, a representative from NY basically got caught in a whole mess of online infidelity (cheating on his wife) and then lying lots about it. While this isn’t something that really surprises me given the tremendous damage of our over-sexualized culture of easy access and low standards, I was really surprised by one part of his admission. He apologized to his wife, voters and his staff, but said that he wouldn’t resign as nothing he did impaired his ability to serve as a public servant. I find this trend all over the...
To be salt and light
One of the things that I have always struggled with is parties. I generally hate going to them unless I know everyone fairly well. It simply isn’t an environment where I have ever had much success with connecting with people / keeping up conversation that myself and the other person enjoys. The trouble is that, generally speaking, this is the venue to get to know my neighborhood which is comprised of mostly unbelievers. In the last several months, our family has been noticeably not on the invite list for various neighborhood parties. I have been frustrated by this as it continues to further limit my interaction with neighbors and have wondered if I did something wrong to not be on the invite list. We have had several people over to our house for...