Roger Federer lost a big match in Indian Wells, California this past Sunday and for once, I wasn’t too upset.
Why?
Because the guy who beat him, Austrian Dominic Thiem, has a glorious one-handed backhand.
For the uninitiated, most players today hit their backhands with two
hands, which is generally more effective but less aesthetic.
Yesterday’s message …
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Have you ever noticed that if you have some litter, some
clutter, some DEBRIS around your house or your apartment and you don’t remove
it quickly, you just get USED to it? Almost stop seeing it? It
works this way in my garage (pic). There will be leaves, grass, furballs,
spider webs, and I simply stop seeing them. They’re obscuring the
original, beautiful, clean garage and really, the only time I really think
about it is when I drive past my neighbor’s house and his garage door is open
and it is SPOTLESS and then, very briefly, I’m like, “I might be able to get
mine looking like that one day.” But then I get home and it’s
“nope.” I stop seeing what I ave allowed & tolerated. You could
say I’ve …. Settled.
Forget Head Scratchers.
My REAL first book was “University Park Football” and had a release date of Fall, 1968.
The book tells about a game involving the University Park Mustangs (we lived in the Dallas enclave of University Park and my to-die-for team was the SMU Mustangs) who were led by a quarterback named “Rex.”
I practice my sermons before I deliver them.
Every day.
I’ve been doing it for as long as I’ve been preaching without notes, which is almost as long as I have been preaching.
And then, while preparing the forthcoming book Simplify The Message & Multiply The Impact (release date: 2.4.20), I realized why: it’s the value of Sounding Out A Sermon.
Recently, a United Methodist clergy colleague suggested in an online conversation that John Mellencamp is essentially a fraud, having gained his popularity because his manager must have given payola to various radio programmers to get his sons abundant airplay.
That colleague is now in the category of Former Friend.
Yesterday’s message …
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One of the many interesting things to me about human behavior is the degree to which we choose the fake instead of the real. The imitation over the authentic. It goes from the deeply personal – like the blue tinted contact lenses I ALMOST wore today to convince you that I’m really Swedish – to the more whimsical. The cubic zirconia instead of diamonds. The fake Rolex. The faux mink. The imitation Kate Spade.
You know who was Born To Be Wild, don’t you?
It’s in every fiber of my being, obviously.
Actually, as part of our ministry of empowerment in South Asia, we distributed about 40 bicycles and two motorbikes.
I reluctantly left this one here. Too bad. It was such a perfect fit.
During a recent mission trip with a team from Good Shepherd, I had the extraordinarily good fortune to sit once again under the teaching of James-Michael Smith.
James-Michael is a former staffer and current member of Good Shepherd while also developing an itinerant teaching ministry. In India, he is a certifiable rock star to the pastoral networks we support.
Along with Wayne Hobson, our Pastor of Congregational Care, I am currently on a teaching team in South Asia.
To know Wayne is to love Wayne, and here is some of what I’ve learned from him when he takes us through First Peter.
The beauty of God’s word is that it never speaks to just one generation. God uses what he said to one generation to bring encouragement to all generations.
