Rob Bell’s Nooma videos are extremely popular. If you haven’t watched one – - then they have probably at least been mentioned to you. . . you may want to read C.J. Mahaney’s thoughts and Greg Gilbert’s critique to which he links.
Monthly Archive for February, 2008
Page 3 of 3
Paul probably didn’t picture a blog when he wrote, Titus 2:3-5. I doubt that his vision for older women teaching younger women included someone in Florida being able to write thoughts instantly accessible to the world. But, Pollwog Creek lives out the exhortation of this passage.
In Northern Illinois, we got hammered with snow today. Somewhere around a foot of the white stuff came down.
So, I’ve been hunkered down in my study at home – - I studied, prepared a sermon and listened to a sermon (while I dusted) by Crawford Loritts on pastoral courage. Leaders need to listen to this one!
“From time to time, little men will come along to find fault with what you have done; to say that something could have been done better; that there has been some mistake, some shortcoming; that things are not really managed in the best of all possible manners, in the best of all possible worlds. They will have their say and they will go downstream like bubbles; they will vanish; but the work you have done will remain for the ages. It is the man who does the job who counts, not the little scolding critic who thinks how it ought to have been done.”
Teddy Roosevelt, to the builders of the Panama Canal.
“Most pastoral work involves routines similar to cleaning out the barn, mucking out the stalls, spreading manure, pulling weeds. This is not, any of it, bad work in itself, but if we expected to ride a glistening black stallioni in dialy parades and then return to the barn where a lackey grooms our steed for us, we will be severely disappointed and end up horribly resentful.” Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, page 16.
Eugene Peterson wrote in Under the Unpredictable Plant that pastoral visits are:
. . . occasions for original research on the stories being shaped in their lives by the living Christ. I go to these appointments with the same diligence and curiousity that I bring to a page of Isaiah’s oracles, a tangled argument in St. Paul . . .
I love doing the original research of studying the lives of our people. Exegeting the stories of our small town is one of my greatest joys. I wrote the following newsletter article after a visit last week.
It’s an amazing day we live in when those who tucked in with a clean blanket of snow in Illinois (Isaiah 1:18) can enjoy and be thankful for a particular little bird in Florida . . .
C.J. Mahaney recommends books to read on the Cross. One is not even out yet, so unless you are really in the loop and J.I. Packer and Mark Dever has asked you for an endorsement, then you haven’t read them all . . .
