Rick Nier...Woo!

I have a new senior pastor. He hasn't even preached his first sermon here yet. Seeing the change coming for quite a few months now has given me time to think about transitions. Since I have never been a senior pastor (though it looks pretty easy) I have no advice specific to senior pastors. But I do have some thoughts for anyone anywhere that has ever started something. Actually, getting started is oftentimes most of the problem. John Maxwell talks about this when talking about leadership and influence. He says that when momentum is created it solves 80% of the problems in an organization. It makes sense in our personal lives. The hardest part of finishing a bag of cookies is getting up and forcing yourself to get the bag. But once momentum is created... But starting is a must in our lives. Homework doesn't get done before it is started. Neither do home projects, reading assignments, reports, applications, training, etc. I was once asked for my advice when it comes to deciding ...

My senior pastor just retired. Two days ago. It sounds like a good idea, but my wife shot the idea down pretty quickly. Something about not wanting me around the house that much. Or maybe it was something about saving money for our children’s college fund. So it looks like I’ll remain among the working for a bit longer. But all of this did get me thinking about transitions and how a person ends what they began. It is the hope that will finish strong, because, just as in a basketball game, people always remember the last shot. This doesn’t just apply to people who are retiring. Everything from how you end a career to how you finish your day should be included. Are you ending a school year? An extensive work project? Your high school or college career? Maybe you’re finishing a letter or email to a friend and need to decide how to sign off. There are Biblical examples that prove my point. Consider King David. Before he was king he was a national hero who killed Goliath and r...

A couple of weeks ago I celebrated my birthday. Here's how... I woke up sore. Very sore. As I went to get up, every muscle in my body screamed at me in laughter as if to say, 'What, are you kidding me? You're getting up? Now? At all?' Are those my hips creaking? My feet are yelling at me. My body feels....really...old! Is this the beginning of the end? Will I ever want to get up again? If this is what the down hill feels like, then I don't like it. How is this happy? That is how I felt on my birthday. Then I remembered that I had been walking around Disney World for two days straight while carrying a 40-pound weight, also known as my 4-year old daughter. Sometimes our immediate pain causes us to forget our true identity. I'm 36. I'm still young. I'm in reasonably good shape. But my suffering (if the effects of a great Disney trip can be called suffering) caused me to forget my true identity. The truth is that we are not what we experience. We can allow t...

Hmmm.... I agonized over this decision. What should I do? Should I write some posts ahead of time and schedule them out while I am away? Didn't that sound somewhat needy of me, assuming that people couldn't possibly survive without my online presence? Every once in a while I remember that it's not about me. I'll be back in a couple of weeks. Try not to be lonesome without me.

It was the subtitle that first caught my attention. One Man's Year of Almost Living Truthfully Could Change Your Life. No Lie. Phil Callaway was going to attempt to go an entire year without telling a lie. At first this might sound like something every Christian could write a book about. But how many of us would be willing to put our failures so freely out there. That's what Phil does, as well as discussing several other shortcomings in his life. To tell the truth, which seems like a good idea given the book I'm reviewing, I was a bit concerned about reading a book by a comedian. Because I was expecting it to be funny, I feared it wouldn't be funny enough. I was not disappointed. Callaway is a long-time comedian and has written several other books. He writes this one journal style, taking us through 365 days of this experiment. He admits at the beginning to stretching some truth in the writing, but assures us the difference is negligible. He groups about 30 days at a t...