Overcoming Prayer Frustration
Prayer isn’t always easy. I want to address a real problem that people often feel when they pray: prayer frustration. The frustration comes in knowing that you should know how to pray but not really feeling like it’s working or connecting. So we stop praying or say something quickly but then feel guilty that “it wasn’t enough.” It is normal. And if it doesn’t happen I’d have an entirely different set of…
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Living Thanks
Living Thanks: Showing our faith through thankfulness. Thanksgiving is coming up in the U.S. and already the holiday has a very “2020” feeling about it. I usually make a big invitation for anyone who doesn’t have a place to go (even Facebook friends that I’ve never actually met) to join my family at any point in the day. So far I’ve had at least two people per year take me up on…
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Re-calculating: can we measure faith?
What counts when it comes to faith? Numbers don’t lie. But they can change. I’m a pastor. We look at numbers on Sunday to give us an idea of reach and engagement. For the past three years I could predict the attendance on any given Sunday based on the prior five years worth of data and the trend for the year. Then we moved 100% online. Now we measure views. Length of…
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The Price of Faith
We can’t afford to not do this… Yesterday I was on a Zoom call with leaders in my community who were open and willing to talk about race relations. The topic was regarding a program that taught structured conversation techniques to use dealing with difficult conversations. The program has been used across Georgia for corporations, communities, and individuals to lean into issues of gender, race, sexuality, environmental concerns, community development, and conflict…
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Practice Prepares Us
Time to practice… My daughter plays violin. She’s been playing since she was 3 years old. She’s getting to that stage where she doesn’t like to practice much. But then she’ll go through a spurt where she practices in large chunks of time. She knows she should practice every day but it is so tempting not to. She also plays basketball and soccer. She likes going to those practices because those…
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Good Habits and the Good Shepherd.
Time to re-habitize… This post is written by one of my church’s Bible Study leaders, Fred Panhorst (family pictured above from the time period mentioned in the post). His words remind us about the importance of habits and prioritizing what matters most. Matthew 18:12-14 (NIV) “ 12. What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the…
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