Professional tennis player Grigor Dmitrov of Bulgaria has long been called "Baby Fed." Why? Because even casual fans will notice that Dmitrov has patterned his game after Roger Federer. Federer’s Serve: Dmitrov’s Serve: Federer’s Forehand: Dmitrov’s Forehand:...
Last month, I posted about my experience at a Led Zeppelin cover band concert. You can read all about the "soundtrack of my youth" here. Well, a happy consequence of going to that concert was free tickets to this past weekend's show by On The Border, a...
So here was yesterday's bottom line: delay criticism to deliver affirmation. And how to apply that, concretely, in the immediate aftermath of the sermon? By placing a blank piece of paper in the program and allowing people time to write notes to people in their lives...
In William Skidelsky's Federer & Me: A Story Of Obsession, there is a chapter devoted to Federer's nemesis/foil/kryptonite, Rafael Nadal. Here's the opening page of that chapter. If you are not a tennis fan, you're bewildered. If you are a tennis fan and a Rafael...
In the early part of November, Good Shepherd teammates Ron Dozier, James-Michael Smith, and Shannon Schauber carried our mission of inviting all people to India. (Because of security concerns, we kept much of the trip on the social media downlow.) What did your...
In lieu of a sermon yesterday, we played the Billy Graham Association's short film, The Value Of A Soul. This is the third such short film Sunday we've had -- in 2014 it was Defining Moments and in 2015 it was Lose To Gain. Each of the films weaves together art,...
Some of you know that this past Monday (Nov. 14) was my birthday. As happens in the age of Facebook, I was inundated with birthday wishes. And one note in particular was especially interesting. It came from a friend who was on my high school tennis team in Dallas. ...
A Good Shepherd friend told me this week that she is "a poster child for our mission statement." Meaning? "I knew about Jesus," she said. "But I didn't know what it meant to have a living relationship with him til I got here." And: "I'm not just a poster child for...
I don’t hear many pastors of churches our style talk about funeral ministry. Sometimes I get the impression that if your church is somehow “contemporary” or “large” or even “mega,” then people in the congregation don’t die, so pastors don’t have to devote much time or...
How could we . . . a) receive "promise cards" (aka, pledge cards) for 2017 generosity; AND b) distribute "movie tickets" for our short film Sunday next week? Answer: "In The Long Run" (yes, title borrowed from chorus of an Eagles' song), a sermon with this...