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What Would We See?

April 27, 2012 in Church Life, Daily Faith with 0 Comments

Lou Gehrig

Lou Gehrig was one of baseball‘s greats. People came to games just to see him play. He was one of the best and most popular players of all time.
Once, Gehrig’s team, the New York Yankees, played a pre-season exhibition game against a college team. The score was tied 2-2 in the seventh inning. The tension was building as the college team realized the possibility that they could win against a professional team. It was Gehrig’s turn to bat. There were two runners on base. The count on Gehrig soon became full, three balls and two strikes. The next pitch would make the difference. The local fans went wild. The pitcher waited for the sign. After a long pause, he lobbed a slow ball right across the middle of the plate. Gehrig walloped it over the left field fence.
The catcher went berserk, he ran to the mound screaming at the pitcher. “You Idiot! Didn’t you see my signal?”
“Yeah,” replied the pitcher, “But I got to thinking. I’ll never pitch a big league game, and I’ll probably never get to see a game at Yankee Stadium. But I sure would like to see Lou Gehrig knock one out of the park.”
All that young pitcher wanted was to see Lou Gehrig at his best. For a moment, he was willing to put himself aside in order to bring out the best in another. He put aside his own ambition, pride and even his skills so that another might be lifted up.
What if we in the church were willing to put our own ambitions, our egos, even our pleasure and convenience aside in order to see others at their best? What if we were willing to put self aside to see the church at its best? What would we see?

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Invite Me In!

April 5, 2012 in Church Life, Videos with 0 Comments

Who Invited You to Church?

March 25, 2012 in Church Life, Videos with 0 Comments

Who Invited You to Church?

Picking Up the Pieces

February 26, 2011 in Church Life, Daily Faith with 0 Comments

 

A man came home from work one day and was greeted by his two daughters at the door. “What did you two do today,” he asked them?

How easy it is to point out blame, to ridicule and to condemn. How Christlike it is to pick up the pieces.“Oh,” exclaimed the oldest, “I washed the dishes.”"And what did you do?” the father asked the younger girl.She replied with a big smile, “I picked up the pieces!”What a beautiful picture of the church in action. We are most like Christ when we pick up the pieces. There are broken lives scattered all around us. They have been broken apart by tragedy or despair. Sin often shatters many a life. And some are simply torn apart by the hectic daily grind of everyday life.We can show God’s love as we help others pick up those pieces and put them together again. They see Christ in us as we forgive them and help them receive God’s forgiveness. They receive God’s healing grace as we encourage them and help them find hope in Christ. Also, the beauty of God’s kingdom is that we who help to heal often find healing ourselves.

“So speak encouraging words to one another. Build up hope so you’ll all be together in this, no one left out, no one left behind. I know you’re already doing this; just keep on doing it.”  (1 Thessalonians 5:11, The Message)

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Mindset Lists

September 7, 2010 in Church Life, General with 0 Comments

Every August since 1998, Beloit College in Beloit Wisconsin, has released a mindset list. The purpose of the list was to help their professors be aware of dated references in their lectures and to help in interactions with their students.

Here are a few examples for the class of college freshmen this year.

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
7. “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.
10. Entering college this fall in a country where a quarter of young people under 18 have at least one immigrant parent, they aren’t afraid of immigration…unless it involves “real” aliens from another planet.
11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis.
12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.
18. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.
19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.
20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.
26. Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.
27. Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.
31. The first home computer they probably touched was an Apple II or Mac II; they are now in a museum.
32. Czechoslovakia has never existed.
41. American companies have always done business in Vietnam.
46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station

Check out www.beloit.edu/mindset for the full list or to see previous years’ lists.

I think it would be good for the church to have a mindset list as well. We need reminder that the world we live in is changing. We need reminded that we can’t put our trust in the things or ways of this world. There is only one who is changeless and His name is Jesus. And we need to be reminded that even though He is changeless, we can’t become set in our ways. Just like those college professors, we can’t use the yellowed notes from last century to talk about our faith. We need to be constantly working to find new ways of telling the old, old story to a new generation.

See you Sunday,
George

Turtles, Posts, and Us

February 1, 2010 in Church Life, Daily Faith, General with 0 Comments

Alex Haley, author of Roots, had a picture in his office of a turtle sitting on top of a fence post.
When you see a turtle sitting on a fence post, you know that he didn’t get there by himself; he had to have some help.
That’s why Haley kept the picture in his office. He said, “Anytime I start thinking, ‘Wow. Isn’t it marvelous what I have done?’ I look at that picture and remember how this turtle—me—got up on that post.”

We consider it admirable to be independent. We want Frank Sinatra’s song, “I Did It My Way” to be our theme song. Is it because we want all the glory and the praise?
The truth is that none us became who we are by ourselves. All of us had parents. All of us had someone to change our diapers. We all had teachers who taught us. We’ve had examples, good and bad, that have directed our lives. And, whether we believe it or not, we can look back and see the fingerprints of God all over our lives. In other words, we didn’t get on top of the fence post by ourselves.
We need to realize that humility is not a weakness as many try to portray it. It is a powerful strength that change our world. Jim Collins, in his book, Good to Great, makes the observation that one of the characteristics of great companies is that they have leaders who are quick to share the credit for success. Companies with prideful leadership never seem to make it to the top with lasting success.
Remember, humility is not a nice religious ideal that is not practical in the real world. It is what frees us to live the full and contented life we been wanting to live all along.

“Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.”
Philippians 2:3-4 (NLT)

The Power of Teamwork

October 5, 2009 in Church Life, Leadership with 2 Comments

 barn

In 1981, Herman Ostry and his wife, Donna, bought a farm a half mile outside of Bruno, Nebraska, a small community sixty miles west of Omaha. The property had a creek and came with a barn built in the 1920′s. The barn floor was always wet and muddy. When the creek flooded in 1988, the barn ended up with 29 inches of water covering the floor. That was the last straw. Ostry needed to move it to higher ground.

He contacted a building moving company and was discouraged by the bid. One night around the table, Ostry commented that if they had enough people they could pick the barn up and move it to higher ground. Everyone laughed.

A few days latter, Ostry’s son Mike showed his father some calculations. He had counted the individual boards and timbers in the barn and estimated that the barn weighed approximately 16,640 pounds. He also estimated that a steel grid needed to move the barn would add another 3,150 pounds, bringing the total weight to just under 10 tons. He figured it would take around 350 people with each person lifting 56 lbs. to move the barn.

 

The town of Bruno, Nebraska was planning its centennial celebration in late July of 1988. Herman and Mike presented their barn moving idea to the committee. The committee decided to make it part of their celebration.

So, on July 30, 1988, shortly before 11 a.m., a quick test lift was successfully made. Then, as local television cameras and 4,000 people from eleven states watched, 350 people moved the barn 115 feet south and 6 feet higher up a gentle slope and set it on its new foundation.

The reason most people think that something cannot be done is because they know that they can’t do it by themselves. But impossible things can be done if we join together in the task. Working together, we can not only move barns, but change the world.