I received an email today from someone with the following info:
William,Hey I was wondering what are the costs, and all that is involved in setting up a website. I’m looking for a site that we can post pics, newsletters, and videos. I also am interested in a blog. I’m not sure if we should do a blog somewhere else and feed it also to the website. I would like to have a site that if any body is interested in this ministry, they can find everything out right on there. Thanks bro.
Then that’s all there was. No email I could respond to or anything. I’d love to help you get up and rolling, and even share with you my pricing for this, but I don’t know where to send it. If this is you, call me at (740) 281-1351 and we can chat about it.
My wife and I have started working through reading the Bible together in a year. It comes down to four chapters each night (we each read two) right now. I am not sure if it doubles up chapters later or not. The interesting part so far has been the other things that seem to happen around our house while we sit down to do it the last two nights. In two nights we’ve had our dogs spontaneously start fighting, Aidan wake up crying and quite terrified for no reason, dogs randomly start barking, and neighbors begin being rather loud.
All of which were quite distracting from reading the Bible together.
Spiritual warfare?
Change is hard. We all know it. We get tied into a persona, a name, an idea and we one day find that it’s not us anymore. A friend of mine is contemplating changing his domain name. His old domain is edgy and raises eyebrows. The new one is really just his name. For awhile it works to be edgy and new and that guy with the edgy domain, but he has grown beyond that “edgy” name. He is broader, deeper and more alive than the name itself allows for. As a Christian, there’s a place in scripture where it says we will be given new names in Heaven. Our true selves will be revealed to us. That for me is exciting. I am not tied into my identity as a person anymore, but I am tied into my identity in Christ. It’s a whole different way of thinking. If we count our own identities as loss, then we are free to be more ourselves than ever.
CS Lewis makes the statement (I think it’s in Mere Christianity and please pardon the bad paraphrase) that we don’t lose ourselves in Christ to become a bland shell of who we once were. The miracle of our faith is that when we are made more ourselves by the Creator.
My advice to my friend about his domain name was to be authentic. Be yourself and quit trying to fit the mold you created for yourself. You may lose readers, you may gain readers, but ultimately it comes down to you being yourself. If the old name doesn’t fit who you are anymore, then surprise your readers with a more authentic version of yourself.
I can’t resist sharing this. I’ve been watching this show for awhile now. If you have never heard of it, enjoy (and now you have).
I think anointing someone with oil is very Biblical and very much a part of worship. Growing up in church though, sometimes there was a person who it seemed was getting anointed every week. I don’t know if that person just wrote a big check each week or what the reasoning was, but it always intrigued me that someone would go up there every week and ask to have oil poured on their head. It’s a humbling experience and not one that I’d want to exploit for personal attention. Anyway, I’ve always imagined a pastor getting fed up with that person and dumping something else on their head instead.
I feel like there is a Jesus image that we lift up for each generation. It’s rather strange to think that this timeless Gospel must be re-branded every few years to “relate” to our culture. Our culture is going downhill rather fast. Shouldn’t we be lifting up the timeless truth of the Gospel rather than the latest rendition?
I’ve been giving a lot of though to the idea of how we typically do outreach. I think I have often misunderstood that marketing and outreach were the same thing. A talk the other day with one of the pastors at the church I’ve been involved in lately has really opened up my eyes to how marketing can also become a trap that we fall into. We are supposed to “market” God with our lives, not just some catchy slogan on a billboard somewhere. The catchy slogans are good for building awareness that someone indeed wants to reach out (outreach) to them and may serve as a connecting point, but we will never touch a life through a fancy billboard. It’s what happens when people do respond to our marketing efforts that changes lives. But here’s the catch, marketing isn’t required if lives are indeed changed. Marketing will only be to let outside people know of the exciting things already going on.
I am guilty of this. A friend or someone has opened up in some vulnerable way and just laid bare their soul before you and not knowing what to say or do, I’ve closed up the breakage with a greeting-card-sticky-pathetic-sloganized “I’ll pray for you”. Almost as if a vital artery (are there non vital arteries?) has been cut and we just slapped a band-aid on it and sent them home. I was talking online via xbox the other day with a friend of mine and he opened up about a situation that has been on his heart and mind a lot lately. I almost said “I’ll keep you in prayer, man” but I thought better of it (or more likely, I was too tired to be overly spiritual anyway) and I just told him flat out “um, I don’t really know what to say… If you are asking my opinion, then I don’t have an answer for you on this one.” For a second, everything went really quiet as if I had crossed some invisible line. Then he went on to tell me that he really only needed someone to listen and be available in that way.
I started a series awhile back called “full disclosure” and one of my little business card slogans was “I am praying for you”. But, I think I even perpetrate a misconception about prayer at times. Prayer isn’t something that we do because it’s easy to close our eyes and act like life doesn’t get messy at times. Life gets quite messy, dirty, and rather unpleasant at times. God knows that. Jesus even died on the cross a messy, horrible, even nasty death so He knows it better than we can imagine. He even prayed a messy prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood and asking His Father if there were any other way. But we often use prayer as an excuse to get out of real life situations that are quite hard to deal with. The bad part about it all is the fact that most times when we flippantly tell someone that you are praying for them, that we completely forget to do so. Or worse yet, it’s just the “Christian” (say it with sarcasm) way of telling someone to bugger off!
I saw this video the other day and I thought it was wonderful. You may also recognize the guy who plays in the tv show “Bones”. But what I liked about the video was the message. We have an opportunity to “validate” and encourage others. So often we miss out on the chance to do so.
found via shallowfrozenwater (awesome find by the way)
