My warm fuzzy!

I have been doing independent contract work with a company in the area fixing computers, setting up networks, and helping people know how to make their computers work.  I think one of the things that interests me the most in this whole situation is the age of the people that I am working with. Most of them are on the other side of the hill, in fact, if I dare say so, I would have to say that some of them are fairly close to no more hill left.

Sometimes the things that they ask me to do are funny, sometimes finding the problems they have gotten themselves into is just plain frustrating.  If they have animals I get to deal with things like this lady’s dog the other day sitting behind me while I was working, incessantly licking his KONG toy, not really the most enjoyable thing to hear while trying to install all of the software this lady thought she would need and then some.

I have had some really great experiences, and some really frustrating ones.  I am enjoying the time frame, it works out well and allows us not to have to get a sitter,  I have even been able to share my faith, in a non threatening way, and have enjoyed finding that people were not totally turned off by a Christ follower.

Anyway the other night this one thing happened and it has been my warm fuzzy for quite a while now.  I have had the privilege of being an integral part of all three of my daughters early years.  All three of them have spent time in a church office, they have all spent the first 6 months to a year with me in the mornings.  Amberly even went to Men’s breakfasts when we were in New Castle,  she would sit in her carrier and we would talk and eat and pray, it was really cool.  I love this opportunity, the chance to be in my daughters lives in a way that many dads don’t get to have.

If you were to divide my heart into pieces it would look something like this, now keep in mind that it’s hard to divide a heart…



J’s letter is bigger because well lets face it, she has the biggest chunck of my heart, and as I said it’s hard to divide a heart so getting the girls portions even was pretty close to impossible.  I hope everyone realizes as well that my relationship with God comes first.  I would love to be able to tell you that it always has, but I’m human and there have been times when that has not been the case.

Anyway the four people in that very amateurish picture represent my warm fuzzies, but I have to tell you that each of them fills that segment in different ways.

J: The fact that she has put up with me all these years and still loves me is, well pretty amazing,  having said that the warm fuzzy from J comes from those times when she holds my hand, or snuggles up with me all on her own.

Amberly:  Her spirit and willingness to try things is amazing. The warm fuzzy I get from her comes from her attempting to embrace everything I like; she has sat in on full blown role playing games with me pen and paper style mind you, she rides all the rides, she likes the movies I like, but the biggest warm fuzzy I have gotten from her lately was looking at the way she signed her signature on a paper for school. Yes, that’s right, she attempted to match my scribble and did a pretty good job, even emulating the"A" I use.

Zoey:  Has always been my snuggler, she will crawl up next to me given the chance and just snuggle and tell me she loves me and when I have to work late in the evening, well the other day says it all; “I don’t like it when you work late, I miss you.”

Lil Jo:  The other night after a long afternoon of work, I came up to the front door, stuck my key in the lock and opened it.  There was this huge scream and Jo just ran to the door with all the speed a 15 month old can muster she was so excited that I was home.  Forget the fact that she had been with me throughout the whole day, she was happy that I was home.  She ran to me and wanted me to pick her up.  Of course I did so.

So there you have it.  My warm fuzzies.  I may get frustrated with the girls.  I may lose it when they don’t flush the toilet, or when I have spent the entire day cleaning only to have it wrecked within 5 minutes of them being home, but on balance.  The warm fuzzies that I get from my family far outweigh the frustrations.  I think I’ll keep them, and I’m reasonably sure they plan on keeping me.

What in the world

Sometimes my blog really just writes itself.  I sit down after reading and praying and things flow, or there is some great visual that I see that just makes the words stream from my fingertips. 

Sometimes it’s a struggle to figure out what to write, the interesting thing is that many times when that happens I really want to write.  I sit down and open up the editor and stare at the this big blank expanse and feel my brain telling me to get to it, to put my hands to the keys and write something already.  The funny thing is when this happens I’ll leave the editor up and come up with all sorts of reasons to get up from the chair and do something real quick.  Sometimes I’ll think that I need to warm up my coffee, or change the music, or I’ll load the dishwasher real quick.  Usually when I do sit down to write it’s when I have put Jo down for a nap, a process that can last from 20 minutes to 3 hours.  When this happens of course I use her as an excuse as well, checking in on her to make sure she is okay or still asleep or whatever. 

It’s not like I have nothing to write about.  I am reading in Mark and almost finished with Paul.  I spent yesterday listening to all sorts of great music, I even thought at the time of a few really cool blogs that would come from any number of the songs I heard,  I have seen some interesting things as well, including 2 vultures eating a deer in the middle of Muddy Branch the other day, surely that should have garnered something blog worthy right?

Oh look my coffee cup is empty… and I’m back of course in addition to making a cup of earl grey hot, I remembered that I had to bake some bread, so I put that together and it’s rising on the back of the stove. 

I guess the whole thing makes me wonder.  How I can feel this need to write, and yet I can’t always get anything deep and meaningful out every time I do.  Then it hit me.  Sometimes I don’t really need deep and meaningful, sometimes light and fluffy works too.  It’s the writing that’s the important thing right? 

As I read through Paul's letters sometimes I wonder different things that relate directly to what I’m talking about.  I wonder if Paul ever called over whoever was listening to him dictate on any given day and I wonder if he said.  Hey I feel a need to write lets write a letter, then all of a sudden he thought of all the other things there were to do or if he got off track or if there really wasn’t anything pressing to say he just wanted to do the deed of writing, to have someone else hear or see what was going on in his brain…in his life. 

Don’t get me wrong,  I don’t begin to place myself on the same level as Paul, far from it, but he was a person just like I am, he did a lot of his teaching and preaching through the written word.  I do ALL of my preaching through the written word at this point.  I can say that it’s not nearly as satisfying as it could be or should be, and every once in a while I am positive that J wants me to actually preach somewhere, mainly because she has to bear the brunt of living with someone called to be a pastor, without a congregation.  She will even say, “you really need to get to preach soon.” 

I wish I had the answers to this.  I wish I had the ability to just make a church want me, or all of a sudden have a huge group of friends who decide that there is a need for VERITAS. I ask God to show me or lead me or whatever it is he is doing, and I get these glimpses of possibilities.  They happen and I get a little bit excited only to have them fall apart.  I don’t like that part of life, the waiting, the believing the hoping.  It gets harder and harder to do. 

So I open up my laptop and I sit down and decide I need to write and then I do all the other things that “need” to be done because ultimately I end up feeling like it’s never going to happen, and that I’m going to be relegated to putting out the things that are in my heart and mind and that come from my time of study and observation on this blog.

So I wonder, what’s next, I pray for it, I ask for the grace to be able to wait and for the willingness when the time comes, and I write because that’s all that’s left at this point.  

Lets be clear…

Okay so the other night a friend of mine on Facebook wondered if I was still doing the Kids and Family ministries thing at this church that I was part time at.  She wasn’t sure because she hadn’t really read about it on my blog. 

My reply was that I didn’t really deem the church blog worthy, mainly because I knew sometime in September or October that things were not going to last much longer.  I had some serious concerns that were never really answered in a positive way.

As a one time pastor who has begged God to take away the calling that he placed on my life all those years ago, and who in fact continues to do so off and on as they days go by. I have always known certain things.  I have understood what it means to have a relationship with Christ. 

Matthew 28:19 (NLT)
¹⁹ Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

This verse really doesn’t seem like rocket science to me, so I would like to ask a question of all of you. 

What does it mean to lead someone into a relationship with Christ? 

This was just one of the questions that presented itself.  There were social issues, spiritual issues, and very real personality conflicts.  Change was talked about but not really wanted or needed. 

All of these things coupled with my really not understanding or being able to articulate what I felt the church did well went to prove the fact that I really wasn’t a good fit, and while I miss aspects of ministry there, I don’t miss the place at all.  I enjoyed getting to know some of the people, and others well you never like or will like everyone. 

I am sure I made many people uncomfortable, I am sure that my desire to move things into new directions really was frightening,  I am also sure that there are some things that I am and some things that I am not, and one of the things that I am most defiantly not is Methodist, at least not that particular flavor of Methodist.

Here’s the thing,  some of the things that the Methodist movement does well, I can really be on board with.  There is a real sense of the importance of the social aspect of the Gospel at work in the Methodist church, and I have come to realize that many churches today, really could use a good old dose of reaching out to their fellow man or woman regardless of the bottom line, or what it gets your particular church. 

Many churches today seem to think they are an integral part of the work of salvation.  I am not sure why but for whatever reason we have placed our programs, and thoughts, our style, music, sermons all of those things into the mx in a way that they just don’t fit.  Don’t get me wrong, all of these things are important, they are needed, the church is needed.  God tells us not to try and go it alone, however somewhere along the line the church, especially today’s evangelical movement has developed this idea that salvation has contingencies,  you have to look right, act right, be right.  You have to come to the front and make this proclamation in front of the body of believers.  Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s very important for a new Christ follower to tell someone that they have made a decision to walk with God.  To live and move and have their being in Him.  Not telling someone makes me suspect of weather they even have, but it seems to me that it makes more sense to make that profession to someone that you know, someone you have relationship with.  That means so much more than a bunch of people you don’t know. 

I guess what I’m saying is the Methodist church gets the importance of the social side of things, but from what I experienced recently the spiritual side, was not really up to the standards that J and I have set for our family, and trying to make those things happen in this particular church didn’t really work out. 

So there it is, a bit of an explanation as to why we are no longer working at the church we were at, and why I didn’t really deem it blog worthy, it was an educational experience, and there are people I met that I have respect and even fond memories of, however I do not miss the rest of it…

Now we wait, and pray and remain open…