Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Wednesday waffle

Early this morning as I walked out of 'Pastors prayers' a friend came up to me and said 'I love your blog- keep doing it'. Just when I thought it might just be time to knock it on the head. According to Ben Arment, apparently only middle aged men write blogs. Guilty as charged. As a point of note, this particular reader was a woman :)

Blogs are dead.
(Except for middle-aged-man blogs read by other middle-aged men.)
(Twitter killed the blogging star.)
(And Instagram killed the Twitter star.)

Having said that, without the blog I would be more annoying than I probably already am with all my recommendations. There is also something very liberating about not concerning oneself with whether or not anyone visits here. If you do - wonderful- and I continue to pray my posting and waffle is a blessing and encouragement in some way.

In the car, I was listening to Unbroken Praise and one line from it hit me. As we were praying together, a pal prayed exactly that line. Go figure. Here's the line:

'So let my deeds outrun my words and let my life outweigh my songs'

....we then discussed that as a bunch of pastors words come easily. Deeds, we agreed, less so.

Adam, who helps me steer the good ship HT Barnes, recommended 'My rock, my refuge' by Tim Keller on Sunday which I have now taken delivery of and am reading together with BiOY as a devotional. It contains much treasure.

Someone recommended a talk by a prophetic American chappy (Doug- the tattoo prophet, dream interpreter and life coach) who has a website which I checked out. The talk was about 'Purging'. His January podcast sounded to me a bit like the Holy Spirit giving a month by month annual shipping forecast. Trouble is coming from the West just past German Bight in mid -June etc. His word had been a great and timely encouragement to this person and I found his stuff on pruning from John 15 interesting. I think we need to be sending far more tattoo prophets to BAP's. :)

I've been pondering the Christian professional's who have websites but no church. Driscoll is now one of them. He's got his library back.

A couple of other American chappy's I am planning to hear speak over the next few months are Mark Batterson and Kevin de Young. Both men have, in their own ways, be helpful and resourcing for me.

I am loving preaching on Philippians and Matt Chandler's book 'Die to gain' was a good find.

Our Community Groups are using Nicky Gumbel's material 'A life worth living'  as they study Philippians which I read twenty-five years ago and have revisited. Terrific nuts and bolts discipleship stuff.

I am trying to memorize (again) Proverbs 3:1-11 which I read the other morning, prompted by this post. If you can commit it to memory in five minutes you are doing better than me. I've written it on a card which reminded me of learning French vocab for O-level which, as it happens, I failed twice. D at the first attempt and an E at the second. Proverbs 3:1-11, I have learnt unlocks the whole of the rest of the book. While I'm on Proverbs, I recommended the talk 'Your Plans God's Plans' to someone recently.

Yesterday, as my day turned out, following one unexpected phone call it rather mirrored the quote from The Imperfect Pastor and 'wasted' the whole afternoon. Far from it obviously....

'Spear' is an incredible ministry.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I read your blog and I'm neither middle-aged nor female... It's a great combination of reality, insight to life as a pastor, is an encouragement and also a resource so please keep it up!

Saturday blog-sweep

 Some interesting books for pastors The State we're in Attack at dawn Joseph Scriven Joy comes with the morning When small is beautiful