Pastor Dave’s Blog

January 5, 2009

I’ve been reading about being guided by God. I’ve been asking myself how I can better discern what God wants me to do. Today and in the next few blogs, I’m going to be examining ways. Maybe together, we can discern even better than just me, myself, and I.

Let’s begin this with the right attitude. After all, the Bible doesn’t necessarily have an answer to each of our specific questions or issures. Rather than demanding specific quidance, we need to search the Bible to know the kind of relationship God wants with us. The closer we are to God, the more we learn about His character and teachings. The more we learn these things, the better we learn about ourselves and the direction God wishes for us. Jesus stated it this way, “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and will come to them and make a home with them.” (John 14:23) The closer we are in this relationship, the easier it is to know the path God wants us to take.

If we are looking for quidance concerning marriage, we discover a lot about God’s plans and purposes. For example: Ephesians 5:25. This passage and others give us insights into God’s values, which hopefully help us to evaluate our values in this area. Certainly, marraige is only one example. Remember, It begins with growing in the relatioship God has restored with us through His Son, Jesus.

This is a start. I’ll continue other guides in upcoming blogs.

Pastor Dave

Comments (0) Jan 05 2009

January 2, 2009

My suggestion #1 New Year’s resolution was: find out the secret name God gave you. How do you find out what your secret name is?
1)    First of all, you don’t find out your secret name by going inward, by navel-gazing and being focused and fixed on yourself.
Throw yourself into the needs of the world. Let loose your compassion.
Think of all the astounding events surrounding Jesus’ birth, all the prophets and wise men and seers like Simeon and Anna. Yet Joseph and Mary went home to their ordinary life in their very ordinary town. It was living and growing up in Nazareth, learning a trade at Joseph’s side, being part of a growing family that struggled to stay fed and clothed, that allowed Jesus to grow “strong” and to be “filled with wisdom” and to find the “favor of God” resting upon him.

2) As you throw yourself into the needs of the world, throw yourself into your passion.
For it is your passion connected to your compassion that will most likely reveal your “secret name.”

Malcolm Gladwell has a new book out. The author of The Tipping Point and Blink, his major discovery is this: If you want to be a success in your passion, whatever your passion is, you must be willing to invest 10,000 hours of practice to take your passion from pastime to success.     On what do you spend the most time? Ever clock how much time you spend watching TV? What if we all started the New Year by beginning to stockpile 10,000 hours of compassion and passion on our soul search to discover God’s purpose for us? We begin this name gradually, as life unfolds.

Comments (0) Jan 02 2009

December 15, 2008
Ten days before Christmas and all through the house
Everything was stirring, AND I THINK I’M LOSING MY MIND!!!

So does that about sum it up? It does for me. Working for the church at this time of year is always interesting. (That’s the polite way of saying it.) It usually seems this is when rivalries come out, people’s anger overflows, and everyone who has a gripe about something is sure to voice it.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel.
This is what I would like to hear, and seldom do.

So, what’s going on? What are people really saying. I’ve learned that people seldom say what they really mean. What they mean lies somewhere underneath their words and actions. It is often rooted in some frustration of their own.

How do we handle it? I’m still working on that. I haven’t gotten a great solution yet, probably because not one solution fits all issues. So we just keep struggling to give Emmanuel to those like Israel need to know that God is with them.

This still is the message and the reason for the season. God is with us. That is the good news. And in this frantic and anxious time we live, it is still the only hope I have, and the reason I keep doing what I’m doing.
So my prayer for each of you is that you would experience that GREAT NEWS, that God is with us. Nothing can take Him away. Not recession, not frantic schedules that still cannot fill up that void in our lives, not the rivalries or struggles we find ourselves in. GOD IS WITH US - GOD IS WITH YOU!!!

So when you think your losing your mind, it really pays to be still and know, God has not forsaken you. Actually, is with you today, and everyday you continue to breathe - and beyond.

Comments (0) Dec 15 2008

December 9, 2008
I don’t know about you, but my mail box, this time of year are filled with two sources. The first are catalogs from stores of all sorts. Boy do they fill up the box. The second most source of mail doesn’t take up as much room, but we get just as many as catalogs. We receive a multitude of opportunities for charitable giving. The question arises, “How do you decide which one?”

1. Where to give? - When choosing what charity to give to, my first and most important advise is to give according to your passion(s). What are you most passionate about? What area touches your heart? Some are concerned about relief and development in neglected areas of the country or world. Others are concerned about foreign missions, education, community development, Christian growth, or even advocacy programs. Ask yourself, what touches my heart the most? What causes the most emotional distress for me?

2.  Is the Charity Effective? - At this point you will need to research which charities are most effective at carrying out their stated mission. When doing this, you may call the charity and ask probing questions. Scrutinize annual report. Obtain IRS Form 990.

3. Is the Charity Efficient? - Most charities should spend 75% of their budget on programs with no more tha 25% on fundraising and overhead. One way to determine if they charity is efficient is to discover if they have goals that are achievable, and spelled out well.

4. What Is the Charity’s Capacity? - Does the charity have the ability to carry out it’s vision? Is it stable? That is particularly important to discover in difficult economic times.

5.  Are the Charity’s Truth Claims Factual? - Rodney Pitzer is the Chief Operating Officer for Wall Watchers, which runs MinsitryWatch.com. He says” Donors might be surprised to discover that an organization they think is Christian is actually not and is just marketing to Christians.”

Choosing a good charity is important for many of us. If you wish to give to one this Christmas Season, please think through these 5 questions. There are several reliable websites to explore: quidestar.com, minstrywatch.com, charitynavigator.com. You may find these helpful.

Pastor Dave

Comments (0) Dec 10 2008

December 4, 2008
I like to think of this time before Christmas as a journey. So for me, I’m on an Advent journey.

Now most of us are working hard to make a place of rest and comfort, a place we call home. We want a place to come and stop. We want something called normal. We want….

It occurres to me that a common human striving is for THAT place.

But just when we feel liked we’re all settled in, something usually happens to unsettle us. Maybe someone has a change of jobs, it might even mean a move and starting to create home all over again. Or maybe a friend moves, or someone retires, or … and our homes are disturbed. Certainly our economic upheaval is unsettling.

Even when our job is consistent and our home life seemingly stays the same and our neighborhood is constant, something else happens to disturb HOME. It’s called time. Our children grow up and they go to school. We try to fit into our home life the constant movement of our children’s activities. And then they go away to college, or they move out with a new job because they now have their life apart from us.

Home doesn’t always feel like home. And we struggle to re-establish HOME.

What we don’t understand is life that is a journey. We can emphasize it during this time of year, but our journey lasts our whole life long.

There’s a great saying, “Home is where the heart is.” What we fail to see is that we were at home at the beginning of time as we were at one with the heart of God. But sin created a chasm and I’m convinced that we have been searching for that HOME which is the heart of God ever since. And because we can’t find it, God chose to make it easy for us by dropping, not just into our world, but into our lives through His Son.

Advent is about journeys, not only God’s journey to us, but also our journey to him. Who has come the farthest distance? That’s what I’m celebrating as I journey toward HOME.

Comments (0) Dec 04 2008

December 1, 2008

Yesterday I greeted those worshipping with those simple words. Some may have thought it sounded crazy, but that’s just Pastor Dave. Other’s knew that Advent does begin a new church year.

I like to celebrate Advent and recognize it as a new beginning in time, time being an important understanding. We live in time, in this time of 2008. But this time we live in has been given more depth and meaning because of times before. And so we celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, special days - including Holy Days and Holy Seasons. This is the regular rhythm of life we call a year.

Why is this important? It’s important to me to know there is depth to my faith.  I am enriched on a cyclical basis and I am blessed to remember. And in our remembering we have opportunities to share with one another and with our family and friends stories that have significantly shaped who we are becoming.

It’s also important to me to know our faith community has a past, and not one simply rooted in the last decade, but one that is founded at the beginning of time by a God who knew us then and places us in this time for a special purpose.

Time is something we often try to avoid, because there are things about getting older that are unpleasant. It is also a blessing and something we all still look forward to embrace. How else could we look forward to something called Christmas for so many years. All we celebrate is a baby born in a cattle feeding trough in a stable in a little insignificant town over two thousand years ago.

Yet, even though society tries to keep this time totally in the nations secular lives, we still end of thinking about that seemingly insignificant birth so long ago. Why? Time has taught us that is was not so insignificant. It was, it is and it always will be God’s love coming into our time. That is the hope of the world, and that is what we will celebrate in just a few short weeks, but also for years to come.

So Happy New Year!

Comments (1) Dec 01 2008