Occasional family and ministry updates
When I was a teenager, there was a boy in my class who was not quite normal. I don’t know if he suffered from a type of mental disorder or if he was just a bit “different”–never completely accustomizing to the culture he lived in. I suspect the latter. Somehow he did not quite fit…
I’m a bit late posting today. I had arranged weeks ago for my son and me to head to the Rogers Center today to see the Blue Jays take on the White Sox. We were going to meet a new friend (and reader of this site who just so happens to have served as chaplain…
Last week at The Basics Conference I was privileged to lead a seminar on the topic of blogging. The topic that was assigned to me, “Blogging Your Ministry,” is probably not the best title for what I delivered. I spent a couple of weeks trying to figure out what I could possibly say about blogging…
About one year ago I became the owner of the domain discerningreader.com. The purpose of Discerning Reader has been to serve Christians by providing discerning reviews of books that are intended for Christians or that are of particular interest to Christians. The former category primarily includes titles published by Christian publishing houses; the latter includes…
I have found it exceptionally difficult to write this week. Actually, I’ve found it difficult to work as well. I’m not sure what’s going on, really. So today I’m going to cop out and just share a few personal tidbits and try to come up with something more creative and more exciting for tomorrow. Part…
Last week Jacob Hantla wrote about an article that had appeared in the news the day before. A girl who lives in the Minneapolis area unexpectedly gave birth to a baby. She is overweight and it seems that neither she nor her mother had known that she was pregnant. She did not want the baby…
The Pacific Campaign of the Second World War is a fascinating slice of military history. In many ways, it seemed like a nonsensical series of battles between the United States and Japan–battles that ranks as some of the most horrifyingly brutal in the long and terrible history of warfare. As the Americans sought revenge for…
The first Monday in April has long been one of my favorite days of the year. It is the day that the Boys of Summer take to the field and begin the long, difficult journey through the baseball season. Since I was just a child I have loved baseball. I grew up listening to the…
I’ve been thinking for a while now that it would be interesting and beneficial to have bloggers post their testimonies to their blogs. Some have already done this, but many (myself included) have not. And yet I love testimonies and find them so beautiful and so moving. It is amazing to read about the many…
I was skimming headlines a few days ago and noticed a story about some activists on a college campus who were planning to cover all of the school’s mirrors for a day. I did not read long enough to see why they wanted to do this, but I assume it was somehow meant to draw…
Roy Halladay is Toronto Blue Jays’ ace pitcher and is one of the top players in baseball. Halladay has a well-established routine that begins as soon as a game is complete and continues until the next game has begun five or six days later. He has another routine which takes him from the end of…
I am quite a fan of sports, or certain sports at any rate. One thing that has always attracted me to sports, and baseball in particular, is the numbers. I can take a brief look at a list of players and immediately have a sense as to how they are doing. The sports pages always…
Thank you. Just over a week ago I asked that you would pray for me. I asked that God would allow me opportunity both to work (and thus make money to support my family) and to find time to finish up my book in what is going to be a very busy six to eight…
This time next week, if all goes well, I will be sitting on a plane, on my way to Los Angeles. I will be heading to the Terrace Theatre: Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center (that’s a mouth full!) to bring liveblogging of the Resolved Conference. This kicks off my 2007 liveblogging schedule–a schedule that…
I am drawing ever-closer to the deadline to hand my book to the publisher. The current word count is somewhere around 43,000 and the page count around 140 (though obviously the page count can change a whole lot based on the spacing, font selection and so on). As work continues and as the book draws…
Being a parent is wonderful. Parenting is filled with moments of joy and happiness and excitement and love. But it’s also filled with moments of almost overwhelming frustration. We’ve had plenty of great times and plenty of awfully frustrating times in the past few weeks. A couple of days ago Aileen and I were talking…
This thing called blogging is not nearly as easy as it looks, and this is especially true in a blog that receives a good deal of traffic. I suppose if you were to plot out the history of this blog in terms of its traffic, you would end up with a graph showing a slow…
Prayer Answered: R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was moved out of intensive care and into a private room at Baptist Hospital East this afternoon and continues to improve following complications from abdominal surgery that was performed Dec. 28. Russell D. Moore, dean of the School of Theology and senior…
As I continue to press on with writing The Discipline of Discernment and as I see the book starting to come together I am slowly beginning to consider some of the finer details. For example, I have decided to add a “Key Thought” to the end of each chapter. I always appreciate when authors are…
My work on The Discipline of Discernment has taken me to many places in the Bible and to many of the books on my bookshelves. I have been surprised and delighted to see how God has been preparing me to write this book, for many of the books I have read in the past few…