It has been a long time since I have posted.  The primary reason for this has been related to my lack of funds.  You see my hosting renewal came up and I did not have the money to renew my hosting.  I pulled the trigger a few hours ago and purchased my hosting.

Not much new here in northwest Missouri.  The job hunt still continues. I have updated my resume I can’t tell you how many times but I know the best way for your resume to be noticed is for someone else to deliver it.  However I still keep plugging away.  Some people have asked if I want to be a youth pastor or a senior pastor and right now I am kind of in the either one camp.  I have 15 years of experience as a youth pastor and that is something I enjoy doing.  So in the right circumstance I would take a youth pastor postion.  However most of the churches I have submitted to have been senior pastor postions.  All of this to say the search continues.  It has been 2 years since I have ministered in a full time capacity and trust me I am ready.  But it is God’s timing so i will continue to wait upon the Lord.

It has been along time since I have posted primarily because I have been so busy.  I know that is hard to believe that I have been busy without a job but I sure I have been.  Rather than update about Mike Erre’s book (I will do that later) I thought I would just give some things that have been going on in my life.

I’ll start with the crusade we recently had.  I meet with one of our Pastors pretty regularly and I really enjoy the time I get to spend with him.  Leading up to the crusade he asked me if I would like to help with train the counselors I of course jumped at the opportunity because this is the very thing I love to do.  So I spent a few nights getting things ready and going over the training and then we trained the counselors for two evenings, to be ready for the response we were expecting during the crusade.  The Impact Macon Crusade was February 22-25 and I was there every night.  We saw God move in a remarkable way during that week we saw over 100 decisions for Christ and over 90 0n one night.  I must say I was not ready for over 90 people to respond to the gospel that night but it was wonderful.  Hey they were all counseled to.

Secondly I was asked if I could teach a book of the Bible to the youth what book would it be.  I replied I would go through the book of James and the response was “why don’t you teach it” of course I jumped at that any time I get a chance to teach some teens I am going to do it.  So on Sunday nights I am taking our Student Overflow through James.  I pray and hope they are enjoying it.  I have already taught through James so I already have the messages done, but if you know me you know I spend a great deal of time with message prep even if I have already done it before and making sure I am saying what the Lord wants me to say.

Thirdly the first week in March I started taking over the Wednesday evening teaching to the Youth.  This has been going great once again I love teaching the teens.  On Wednesdays I typically play a game with them and then we go over prayer requests and then I teach.  I desire to see both these ministries grow tremendously and I have seen God definitely working on the hearts of some of the teens that come.

Fourthly I received a call from the principal here at Atlanta school and was asked if I could come in and teach Science while the current teacher is away on maternity leave.  I accepted the position.  Which if you are a teacher you know the work that gos into lessons and so forth.  So for the next few weeks I am now a Science teacher.  I must say that teaching in the public school is a lot different then teaching in Christian School, or teaching at church, however the kids seem to like me as a teacher and some even thanked me for teaching.

Finally all of this has been happening while still sending out resumes (required for state aid) and while going through an interview process with a church that is interested me.  So yeah I have been busy but hey I like being busy.  Please pray I will be directed to the church God wants me at and that I will know it and so will the church.

It has been along time since I have posted primarily

Chapter five of Mike Erre’s book Why Guys Need God is called Harps, Clouds, and Backhoes.  In this chapter I want to talk about this paragraph

What we are doing matter less than why we are doing it.  A biblical masculine spirituality doesn’t bother to dicriminate between important and unimportant jobs or spiritual and sacred ones, but instead encourages men to do the best they can, for the glory of God, with whatever assignments fall their way.  To use our everyday work to cooperate with God’s invasion of the earth is the essence of following Jesus.

Sometimes we put the emphasis on what we are doing instead of why we are doing.  In some sort of vain way we want to say hey look at me look what I can accomplish.  I know I have many times fallen into this trap but in reality we need to stop and put some htought into why we are doing.  We so often clump our work or jobs into categories as if well my job is more spiritual than yours.  I know as a pastor I have been faced with this idea many times.  Sometimes people have come up to me and just told me htat my job was somehowe more spiritual than theirs.  However we need to be encouraged as this paragraph says to do the best we can no matter what the job for the glory of God.  It does not matter what I am doing I need to give it my all for God’s glory.

So I have had alt of churches contacting me over the last weeks which has been crazy in itself.  The reason it is crazy is because I don’t know how alot of these Churches even know about me or that I am available.  Most of these churches are from all over the US Texas, North Carolina, and so forth.  I have never really looked that deep into any of these positions as far as what the towns are like and so forth.  I especially had not looked into the cost of living into any of these places.  

Honestly I am still undecided on what I want to do or pursue.  I really think a year off from full time ministry is probably what is best for me and my family right now as we need to heal.  At the same time I want to be open to where the Lord may lead and doors He may open to me.

Anyway there has been one Pastor that has been in contact with me for a little bit now and has really pursued after me.  They have just built a brand new facility completed a few months ago and are currently running about 60 kids and the church has about 280.  He asked for a statement of beliefs from me and I send it out to him and we seem to have alot in common.  Though I am still unsure what the Lord may want and even though personally this sounds like it would be a perfect fit for me as far as a church and even location though I would still be far from family.

Well here is the part that scares me.  The pastor said I want you to look at the cost of living here as housing is very expensive and that is the downside to our location.  I was thinking well how bad could this be I mean I live in Berks County PA and housing is expensive here so I thought.  Anyways I began to check out realtors and and soon found out that housing was through the roof.  The cheapest house I found was for 189,000 and that was a trailer on some land.  Ouch you talk about expensive.  So I did some more research thinking we could probably rent and be ok.   There was a three bedroom 2 bath trailer for rent it was only 1200 ouch again.  Man this has totally floored me.  After some more digging I found that the cost of living in this place was 16% above the us average.  The good news they are one of the fastest growing counties in the US.  

Well to some it up there is alot of potential in this church and if God calls us there He would definitely have to supply.  Please understand names, and places have been left out intentionally.