Occasional family and ministry updates
It is a common theme in the Christian world. A man is called to the ministry in the local church and over time proves to be a man who can build a church, a man who leads or preaches in such a way that a church grows up around him. His popularity results in book…
Last night I returned safe and sound from all of my travels. I thoroughly enjoyed the speaking trip, but as always, it was wonderful to return home. I came home not only to my family, but to that new dog I surprised my kids with (am 8-week old Chocolate Lab). I figured I should include…
It was a busy day, yesterday, my last full day down here in California. Or out here in California. Or whatever the proper terminology is. I spent most of the morning preparing my chapel talk for today, eventually settling on a message about distraction in the digital age. I was asked to speak as much…
It was an interesting and full yesterday. I’m still out here on the West Coast doing quite a lot of speaking. Yesterday began with preaching at chapel at The Master’s College. I realized as I was sitting there, just before the service began, that this is the first chapel service I’ve ever been to. It…
Well, I made it safely from Boston to Los Angeles. One thing I neglected to realize when planning my travel is that arriving in L.A. at 10:30 PM is a lot later than it seems when coming in from the East Coast. So I arrived at 10:30, but of course it was really 1:30 AM…
It’s the first day of fall today and I’m kicking off the new season by setting out on a speaking trip. In just a few minutes I’ll jump aboard a really small plane (motion sickness guaranteed!) here in Toronto’s Pearson International Airport and make my way to Providence, Rhode Island and from there to West…
I lay in bed for quite a long time this morning, in that strange state that is somewhere between asleep and awake—that place where the mind is working but the body is not. My mind was racing back and forth and eventually settled on an old memory. It’s a memory I hate and one of…
I’ve just returned home after spending a week in the United States. I travel to the U.S. quite often–easily 8 or 10 times a year, but more often than not I am there for just a day or two and I often see nothing but an airport, a convention center or church, and a hotel.…
It has been several months now since The Next Story released and already I am fielding questions about my next book. I find that I am beginning to think about it as well and this got me thinking about the time after the release of The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment. i went looking for some…
September 25 will mark 9 years since this blog began. I guess it is more accurate to say that it will mark 9 years since the site began–the blog took a few months to come to life. It was 9 years ago that I decided to begin a web site that would display pictures of…
Last Christmas coincided with the start of my new job as a pastor at Grace Fellowship Church. This meant that for the first time in many years I was working outside of the home. My Christmas gift from Aileen and the kids was a digital picture frame, something that would keep me thinking about them…
I am often asked how I organize my time–how I get things done. Over the past few years I’ve invested quite a bit of time in trying to find a system that works for me and along the way have had plenty of stops and starts. But I thought today I’d share the system I’ve…
I’m on vacation this week–not the kind of vacation where we all jump in the car and drive to warmer parts of the continent, but the kind of vacation that allows me to just stay around the house and do what I love to do–hang out with the family and read good books. I guess…
We were up at 7 this morning to get our Christmas started with stockings and gifts and a special breakfast and other family traditions. And a few hours later I’m sitting here at my computer, running back through Christmas posts from years past to see what I was doing on Christmas in 2009, 2008, 2007–I…
It must have been back in 10th or 11th grade, maybe even a little bit earlier, that my parents sensed a bit of purposelessness in my life. Where some kids hit their teens year and have an idea of what they’d like to do with their lives, I really had no idea at all. I…
I’ve now written two articles about how I got here (part one and part two). I sat down to write about the background to this site–the events that led to its beginning–and got a little distracted along the way. Today I’ll actually get to the heart of the story. I ended the last article in…
Yesterday I began writing about How I Got Here in an article that somehow began to turn into a loose autobiography. I got as far as walking into my first day at a new high school and being confronted by a cute girl whose first words to me were “If you ever tell anyone, I’ll…
Last night my wife and I were reminiscing about this web site, about my growing career as a writer (at least I hope it’s growing) and about the church contexts that produced me, that produced this blog. As we spoke I realized that I’ve never really discussed the genesis of this site and, by extension,…
Admittedly, the title of this blog post is a bit of hyperbole. That’s probably not the best way to begin an article, but I know that far more people will read the first line of the article than the last one, so if I leave the punch line too long, most people will miss it.…
A question I am asked quite often goes something like this: “Do you ever have a day where you just do not want to write anything?” Are there ever days when the absolute last thing I want to do is to sit down and write? I can answer, quite honestly I think, that this happens…