Church

Jim and I will be starting a new series this upcoming weekend called "Contagious Generosity."  We'll be exploring the value of developing a generous lifestyle and a spirit of gratitude. The college I graduated from had a motto: "Teaching how to live and how to make a living."  I remember it was plastered on a billboard just outside of the small town where the college was located. I may not have agreed with everything that my alma mater aspired to be, but I liked the motto.  I still do.  It reminds me that the most important thing in life is not what you do for a living but how you live. As it relates to generosity, true wealth comes not in what you keep for yourself but what you give to others.  It's a radical way of thinking compared to the prevailing wind of our culture.  It's also God's way…

As I shared last weekend in my message on spiritual nutrition, one of my favorite wrestlers as a child was Dusty Rhodes.  Not just any Dusty Rhodes but "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes.  After one of his hard-fought wins(!), he was interviewed by "Mean Gene" Okerlund and asked about his training regiment. His response: "I train on beer and pizza." Many of you probably didn't realize you were training to be a professional wrestler. Just as good nutrition is important to live a healthy physical life, we need a good spiritual diet to stay spiritually robust and alive.  Yet many of us settle for a spiritual diet that consists of beer and pizza.  While that may be good on occasion, to eat and drink that at every meal will make you sluggish, overweight, and at risk for a heart attack. When our spiritual diet consists of snack foods (an Oprah…

A number of years ago, I began putting my bread in the refrigerator as a way to keep it fresh longer.  Nothing is worse than wanting to fix a sandwich and finding out the bread gave up its spirit weeks ago.  So, along comes this tip from DIY website about how to "de-stale" your bread.  Not sure if that's an actual word, but you know what they mean. Here's the tip: use celery. Want to know more, read the full article here.

Now that I'm officially in my forties (40, to be exact), it's interesting to reflect back on my twenties and thirties from a relational perspective. We didn't have kids until our late twenties, so much of our twenties was lived as DINKS (double income, no kids).   Lest you think we were on the fast track, our "double income" consisted of a teacher's paycheck and a pastor's salary.  Not knowing it as much at the time, we were blessed to have many mentoring relationships with people older than us.  In fact, one of the couples we spent a considerable amount of time with was three and a half times our age.  He was a retired Naval officer and he gave me a great tutorial on how to handle people. I'm not sure if they set out to mentor us or if it just happened.  Many of my best leadership lessons were…

Found this article via Twitter (thanks to @jamesreiner).  It's from the Wall Street Journal and it's about coffeehouses and how they have changed over the years.  Here's a quick sample: We've become a nation of coffee sophisticates—to the point where McDonald's feels compelled to roll out some semblance of an espresso program—but we're still rubes when it comes to the real purpose of the place: It's not the coffee. It's what your brain does on it. The article does a good job talking about how coffee shops began as a place of discourse. It's where students and academics, activists and organizers, or just people with time for opinions and conversations, met to discuss things.  The atmosphere was loud.  The conversation was the primary selling point, not the coffee.  The coffee just fueled the dialogue.  But something changed.  Here's what the author says: Which brings us to the laptop. At any…