Preacher's Slip...

You know how sometimes when you talk, you slip up and make a mistake? Sometimes you say the wrong day, month year. In some cases, you may forget the name of one of your best friends while she is sitting beside you. :) It takes a while to live that down. Well, this past Sunday I had one of those slips.

I was preaching for a small congregation who invited me to preach for them. I guess it is obvious they invited me, but I digress. This was the first time I had ever spoken in front of this congregation and as is my custom I like to give a little back ground about myself. It makes people more comfortable when they know something about you.

I start off with where I grew up, in a small town in Oklahoma. I was baptized at the age of 13 and preached my first full length gospel sermon at the age of 14. I mention what my formal education is and where I went to school and what my work experience is and what I do for a living. I spend about two minutes in a very short introduction. I never say the years that any of this occurs because one of two things happens. Either I say the wrong year or people try to figure out how old you are. This past Sunday, while I was giving my introduction I must have mentioned the year I was baptized along with my age. Well, let me say I mentioned a year. I didn't even realize I had given a year, but I had some confused people come up to me after the service. Some of them were very impressed with my accomplishments and experience at my age.

On Sunday I mentioned that I was baptized at the age of 13 in 2001. The I went on to college for a bachelors, Masters and currently on my Doctorate. On top of my education I mention that I have spent the last 10 years working in health care.

Have you done the math? If I have been working in health care for 10 years, that means I started in 2000. According to the year I was baptized I would have been 12. Prior to that, I completed my bachelor's degree, so I would have had to start college at the age of 8.

People always tell me I am smart. I didn't realize I was a child prodigy. For the record, I was not baptized in 2001. The year was actually much earlier than that, but that is what can happen with a single preacher's slip.

Two Weeks Done...

Well, I am completed with two and a half weeks of my class. I need to be working on the research and assignment that is due tonight, but I wanted to take some time to update you on where I am at.

Previously I mentioned that I had planned to strive for a B, but might as well work towards an A. I am still on that path. After two weeks of assignments, I have a 97. It seems that every assignment I turn in has something wrong so I lose one or two points. It has been a little frustrating. I have spent the past two years writing using APA 5th edition. That is the edition that is still acceptable for me to write in because of when I started the program. The problem is that some of the students in my class are new to the program and are under the 6th edition. So, to make it easier, the professor is grading using APA 6th edition. Although they are very similar and almost identical, only being one edition off, there are minor things that are different. So when I reference my 5th edition guide, I am sometimes wrong. I guess that is okay, because by the time I am finished with this class, I will be used to the 6th edition. My gripe about it is that while it is only one or two points here and there, that gives me fewer points I can miss in the end to make my A.

The class is going well otherwise. I am exhausted, but getting through it. Still have my A and hope that the next five weeks will bring fewer errors and more points. The bright side, I am two weeks done.

The pain of being a parent...

Being a parent is great joy. I feel for those who have the desire but for some reason are not able to have children. A very dear friend of mine recently had the joy recognized after a long (about seven years) battle. I tried to be there for her, and I hope that I was able to give her some comfort during that time. I share in her joy today, even though it is mostly through reading her blog. I wish I could see her more, but the hundreds of miles between us are hard to cross very often. I am digressing from the point.

Being a parent is great joy, but at times it is very painfull. My children are still young, so I know I will still have more pain ahead, but I will address that when it comes. Today I want to discuss an incedent that occured recently. My son has never really wanted for anything. He may have had to wait a few days or weeks on occasions, but he has mostly gotten what he wanted. Our daughter has experienced the same comforts, although she isn't quite old enough to be able to communicate what she wants other than baby dolls. (I am sick of baby dolls and refuse to buy more.)

A part of getting most of what you want, comes a feeling of entitlement to getting their way also. My son has gotten pretty bad about doing what he is told, especially if his mother is the one who told him to do it. Last night he was driving me crazy. Not doing what he was told. Finally, I sent him to bed, although he still had half of his milkshake from dinner sitting in-front-of him.

It was very sad for me because he was excited about that milkshake, but it had to be done. Did it cause physical pain? No, but it is sad to see your child run up the stairs crying because he can't finish his milkshake. Our daughter was all too happy to have to go to bed. She loves going to bed, but our son hates it.

Discipline is something that I have to do a lot and it is hard. It is necessary for children to grow up with rules and that those rules are enforced. I was raised with discipline and I turned out fine. That is just the pain of being a parent.

IT'S A SUGGESTION!!!!!

Have you ever had a person ask for a suggestion on how to do something and then argue with you about how it won't work? That really frustrates me. That just happened no more than 10 minutes ago.

We have a project that our client has assigned for us that covers 22 states. The states are divided into two teams. One team has 14 states, the other team has 8 states. The Lead on the team with 8 states asked a few of us for suggestions on how to best develop the requested output. When I gave my suggestion, his response was, "My team has never done it that way, and I can't change things with such a short deadline." My response was that the team had done it that way, and in fact was the standard way of doing this type of request when I was on the team prior to my promotion in March.

To make a 15 minute discussion short, he wants input, but doesn't want suggestions. I think what he really wants is for us to tell him to do it how he wants to, and then sympathize with all the work he has. He won't be getting sympathy from me. While he is dealing with a maximum of 32 algorithms across his team of 6 programmers, I am dealing with the QA of 56 algorithms by my team of 1 in half the time.

It's a suggestion!!! Don't ask for them if you don't want them!

Preach the Word...

In this post I want to talk about a special part of my life over the past year. A lot has happened in the last year that has provided me with the opportunities to strengthen my faith and my love of the Lord. I want to make it clear that I am in no way perfect and will never profess to be. I have tried to grow closer to the person that God wants me to be and this post will reflect back on that endeavor.

January of 2009, my wife and I decided it was time for us to leave the congregation we had been worshipping with since we got married. I had been worshiping there since my move here for college. It was a difficult decision, but had been in the making for the six months prior to the final breaking point. My wife and I were concerned with the lack of structure in some of our son's classes. He loved going to class, but on many occasions, the time was spent playing with toys with little Bible being discussed if any at all. This was not acceptible to us. We want our son to grow up loving the Bible and having a desire to study the Bible.

I want to take a minute before anyone says that it is the responsibilities of the parents to teach their children, and I agree 110%. I also believe though that Bible classes should teach the Bible also.

We raised our concerns with the elders over the congregation, but did not see any action to change the situation. As we talked back and forth about leaving, other situations began to arise. The breaking point came one Sunday in January when one of the elders stood up and slandered the names of some of our good friends from the pulpit. We decided we could no longer worship in that place.

It happened that the good friend whom had been slandered had also been talking with me about the need for an active congregation of the church in the area where we lived. God had opened a door of opportunity for us to reach out into our community and preach the Word. In total we had about twenty people who began worshipping with us in our homes. The services were very uplifting, and for the first time in a long time I began to feel alive again. I was no longer sitting in a pew with hundreds of others. I was in a close personal setting, and I was working.

I did most of the leg work to get our congregation recognized as an entity with the state as well as get a tax ID and tax exempt status. My good friend took care of getting our bank account open, and we began looking for a space we could rent until we could afford to build a building. We knocked on doors, which our young children loved doing. We prayed for people we had never met, took food and flowers to families who were struggling that we had never met. We worked in our community.

Along the way, some of our number decided to move on to other congregations. Building a new congregation takes time and is a lot of work. For some, the growth wasn't coming fast enough. Their enthusiasm ran out and they moved on. At the same time, we grew from a family who began to worship with us. It was very exciting.

We were able to rent some space at one of the local schools and this provided a place to invite others to come and worship with us. With the building, we decided we needed more consistency and structure. I began preaching full time for the congregation and my good friend began leading singing full time. The other men filled in the other areas that we needed workers. Our women were great at teaching our classes and the space at the school provided a chance to have those classes. We had families come and worship with us and even had one come back and visit a couple of times.

Some of our members suffered illnesses, others experienced family growth and others began to experience dissatisfaction with the slow growth of the congregation. All the while I tried to provide spiritual nurishment and sermons that applied to each of our lives. Perhaps in later posts I will provide some of my topics and add some notes.

2009 was a difficult year financially for our country. In November of 2009, the financial strains began to appear in our contribution. It became apparent that something was going to have to change. I want to make one point here, we did not have any paid staff. I was not being paid to preach, keep our finances or any of the other tasks that I performed. At the same time, no one else was paid either. Our expenses were in the space, which was our largest expense, as well as our website and our insurance. We decided that each family would try to find ways to contribute a little more than we had been. In reality, most of us were giving all we could give. Each month when we paid for the rent and janitorial staff, we shrank our bank account. By March we were down to our last month.

Our bank account held just enough money to cover the expense of the space we were renting. The men held a meeting and we discussed our options. We had two, go back to meeting in homes or search for another congregation we could join with to strengthen both groups. After two weeks of prayer and discussing with our families, we made the decision to find another congregation to worship with.

Perhaps in a better year we would have been able to survive, but financially we were done. So was the last year a failure? No! We were able to heal from the hurt some of our members had felt over the previous year. I was able to expand my study of the scriptures and spend a year preaching the Word to a great group of people. Most importantly, we were able to go back to work and get into the communities in which we live and touch those lives.

The past month has been difficult for me. I am now again sitting in the audience listening to the sermons, instead of giving them on a regular basis. Even in this, I have found the chance to grow my knowledge. I still have the opportunity to preach and will be preaching in a couple of weeks. It happens that the congregation we have been worshipping with is looking for someone who can preach on a regular basis. Perhaps the Lord is opening another door for me to Preach the Word.

It has started again...

Some of you might be confused by the title of this post. One of the things I love in my life right now is that I am close to completing my coursework for my doctorate. What most of you don't know is that I am having a hard time getting into some of my classes. Part of that is because they have so much busy work.

I have been trying to make A's in all of my classes. Although I have, I still don't have a 4.0. That is a gripe for another day. In short I am going to say that apparently not all A's are created equal. In some cases an A- doesn't count the same as an A.

I had come to the decision that I would strive to be satisfied with a B in the class I started yesterday. I was feeling good about the fact that I could put in less effort, maybe not do some of the assignments and still get a B. Life was good. Then we got the syllabus. For those of you who might not know what a syllabus is, it is the single most depressing document for any class. It tells you all of the work you have to do and when it has to be done. In the case of this class, it also broke down how the grading would be done. I assumed going into the class that I would have four assignments due in a week. That is pretty standard for the classes at my school. Based on this assumption, I thought that I could skip an assignment or two and still get at least a B. I think someone was reading my mind. The course has a total of 370 something points possible. If you divide that among the 29 assignments, missing a couple of assignments would not kill you. The problem is that the overall grade is divided into 9 assignments. Each of those assignments is divided into multiple parts. In order to get credit for the assignment one must complete all of the parts. Thus my skipping assignment thought is gone. As my best friend, next to my wife, told me, "You might as well try for that A."

I guess that is where I am at. the class has started and there is much work to do. The course culminates with a 40 page final project. Here's to hoping I get that A.

Back to the Blog

It has been over a year since I started this blog. In that time a lot has happened and I haven't written about any of it. After talking with one of my best friends in the whole world today, I decided to try to actually type in my blog. I think she was somewhat joking when she made the suggestion because she knows how busy I am, but I am going to try.

So how busy can I be? I have a full time job to which I put in anywhere from 42-60 hours each week. It varies a lot due to my job relying on others to do their jobs first. I am married, which most men will tell you is a full time job in and of itself, and to throw more excitement in, we have two kids. Right now our son is 4 and our daughter is almost 2. I try to stay active in our church and was at one time preaching, maintaining the church finances, and putting powerpoint slides together for both Sunday services. I am currently writing a book, that has taken longer than I expected and just for the fun of it, I decided to go back to school for my Doctorate. I am currently five classes, comprehensive exam and dissertation away from completing the degree.

Taking all of this into consideration, and seeing it written down, a blog might be a little ambitious, but I am going to try.

I thank you all in advance for reading this blog and commenting on any entries.