I definately have not been blogging as frequently as I planned at the beginning of the year. If I’m completely honest with ya’ll it’s because I’ve been sucked into the vortex of trying to get “Loremaster” of Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms in the game World of Warcraft. Basically, you have to do 700 quests on each continent in order to get the title. Last night, I completed 700 on Kalimdor and have only 100 left on Eastern Kingdoms. I’m a nerd. A complete nerd. And I don’t really care.
That has basically what I’ve been doing in my free time. Which means no time left to blog.
Church work has been very fruitful in the past few weeks. I was in a bit of a preaching rut, but I dug myself out of it on Sunday. We had a baptism, communion and an ad board meeting all in the span of the morning – and so I knew that my sermon needed to be much shorter than normal. And having to focus on being concise really helped the message. Our speaker system also was malfunctioning, so I preached without amplification, which also made me consciously enunciate more and put more emphasis and passion behind what I was saying. Not that I wouldn’t have meant it the same way before… but I really felt strongly about this sermon on forgiveness, felt like God was calling me to say some things, and not only did I say them, but the Holy Spirit helped them to make contact with a number of people. I actually felt energized by worship, instead of that feeling of just being absolutely spent when I got home.
Ironically, it was a message that really came true in my life later that day. God has a way of hitting us upside the head sometimes and more often than not, I find out that the message I’m preparing is as much for myself as for the congregation. We really are all on this human journey together.
Yesterday I got a great surprise when I recieved an email from someone who is in the local hospital. They were in need of some conversation and faith wrestling and found my email and our church through our website. It was the first time I’ve heard about our website having an impact on others, being a vehicle for invitation, and all of the time I spent on the site really has paid off, just in the one conversation I got to have with her today. If the site was shut down tomorrow, I know that it has served it’s purpose. Hopefully, it will continue to be a place for connection.
