Mondays are for Anniversary Ramblings

Ramblings

Wonder what Manu Ginobli will be doing when he retires? How about exterminator?

At the behest of my children I dressed up for Halloween. I found the best clergy costume money could buy for 60% off at K-Mart and dressed as a monk. Me as a monk is actually kind of creepy. Who knew? I will post a picture later to confirm the creepiness.

I am abandoning football season to watch two teams that make my heart have joy. Here is a big salute to the Capitals who are awesome right now and to the new look Wizards that are the most complete team I have ever seen as a Wizards/Bullets fan.

I am using a whiteboard for my new preaching series called from Here to Eternity. I am quite the artist, here is what it looked like by the end of my sermon. See if you can decipher the hieroglyphics.

Happy Anniversary DCC!

Yesterday marked one year of being the pastor at Duneland Community Church. It is hard to believe a year has passed by already. So much has happened in a year. On a personal level, it has been a year of transitioning our lives from NC to IN, which has been difficult but rewarding. Looking back I can see that leaving our family and close friends behind has had a positive effect on our family dynamic from the standpoint of learning how to more fully enjoy our time together. This is especially good since there has been a lot of it. I can honestly say that the decisions we have had to make throughout this transition and the reliance we have had to discover on God and each other has put Gretchen and I’s marriage in a better place than we have ever known.

From a church standpoint I just don’t know where to begin. Someone asked me about a week ago, “Looking back over the past year, what would you have done differently?” My only response was, “I have no idea because I never thought we would come this far in a year.” I have thought about that question quite a bit the last couple of weeks and all I can think is that I would pray even more. I have no question that I have made decisions that I would go back and change, or sermons that could be better, or forgot to do things that I should have, but God has done such extraordinary work in our church this past year that I wouldn’t want to change a thing. Much of the work has been so amazing as to render any doubt I have about my ability to bring about absolutely moot. God has simply breathed new life into this lump of clay we call DCC and into my own understanding of being a pastor.

In many ways I think about it like losing weight. When you first start dieting, just changing up your routines and trying to be healthier yields great results. You haven’t figured it all out yet, but you are losing weight and feeling good about yourself and just thankful to be doing so well. But there comes a wall ahead of you when your body adjusts and you begin to understand how hard it is to bring about real lasting change. I think that in the next year we will hit that wall. We will have gone through the hard work of finding a vision, but then we will be faced with the much harder task of implementing that vision. That is when we will find out who we are as a church.

We have proven we are a church that can survive, but we have yet to demonstrate, in ten years of existence, that we are a church that can thrive for an extended period of time. Here is a prayer that next year I will be marveling at our ability to stp into this even bigger challenge.