My wife and I recently returned from an anniversary trip to southern California. It. Was. Amazing. Refreshing in so many ways, beauty in more places than I can count, and I did it all with my best friend.
It usually happens at weddings when the loud and exuberant DJ walks over to the longest married couple in the room and asks the question: What does it take to stay married for as long as you two have? The older man will pause, look around the room and say, “Two words: Yes, dear.” Of course his comedic timing is perfect, and the room erupts with laughter.
Most Monday mornings I sit down in the staff meeting and I ask the team to review the Sunday-morning experience. Let’s be honest, we are a church, and what we do on Sunday is important. We need to know how things went. In our most recent review, I asked the team how they thought the message went, and one of our team members looked at me and said, “Tony, it was the most political message I’ve ever heard you preach.”
Have you seen the news lately? People are mad. People are angry. Trust me; I get it, I can understand why people are so upset, scared, and riddled with uncertainty. We live in different times, and the world feels different. In my lifetime I can’t recall a more divisive feeling in our country.
Several years ago a pastor friend introduced me to a practice of starting off the year with a Daniel Fast. In the book of Daniel, Daniel abstained from the king’s table so that he could hear the voice of God. Many years later it is a fairly common practice to do the same.
I have been reading a book titled Manage Your Day – To – Day: Build your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind, written by a group called 99U. This book has eaten my proverbial lunch.
This past week I took all my kids out for special dates with their dad. It was awesome. We saw two movies, ate an unbelievable amount of popcorn, tried ice skating, and even painted a pottery version of a purse.
It was good intentional time with each of them, and it made my heart full.
This year the blog turned three! What an amazing journey this has been for me, and I thought I would take a minute to say “thank you.” Thank you for all the encouraging comments, thank you for all the emails, and thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to read some of my crazy thoughts.
Listen, I get it, there are a lot of things that happen around the holidays. Some of them are tradition, some of them are fun, some of them are even fun traditions. As a pastor, one of the things I’ve learned that there is a large portion of the community who will come to church on Christmas Eve.
It was a weird moment in my life. My mom had just told me that I had lost my aunt (her sister). She let me know that Peggy had passed peacefully in her sleep.
Throughout the course of my life I have had to deal with a significant amount of death, bothin my own life and through the church. I lay in bed, processing the moment and, surprisingly, I felt better.