Friday afternoon thoughts

After spending three days this week camping with my mother-in-law's family at Gooseberry Lake, AB, I'm back in the office today and doing some "catching up." A few links to interesting articles and a few thoughts on them:


1) An article indicating that local church's giving has decreased thus far in 2009 even though church budgets were slightly increased. Hmmm! As one of our congregation's elders, I know that we also fit in that category. We saw it (and still do) as a step of faith... though I think we do need to be careful that the things we call faith are not "spiritual-eze" for wishful/stupid decisions. http://www.earnedmedia.org/cti0618.htm


2) An interesting article in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell on "Why David beats Goliath." I was very challenged by Gladwell's most recent book, Outliers, and think he's an insightful writer... and he's Canadian too!

3) Ran across this article a couple weeks ago about the Facebook Generation vs. Fortune 500 and got to thinking about some of the implications for leaders, especially within a Christian community.

4) Looking forward to preaching this next Sunday (July 19) at Crossfield Baptist Church and then on July 26 at the Prairie Tabernacle Congregation. Lord willing, I'll be preaching from Daniel chapter 1 on "Standing for the Lord." I've been thinking about this topic recently for a variety of reasons, not only in relation to preparing the sermon. Along with praying for those who "get" to listen to me, you can pray for me too... but most importantly pray that the LORD will be the One who speaks to people's hearts and minds.

5) Finally, just wanted to reflect again on how fun it is to see God at work in all sorts of little ways... from me being in the office today so that I could receive and return a reference form for a recent PCA grad quickly, to a nice "unplanned" visit with another recent PCA grad at the post office, to hearing how my mother-in-law and her brothers met up at the "other school" near Consort with people who knew their grandma and aunts on Wednesday night, all "by coincidence." I trust that the Lord will help me to never stop seeing the appointments He arranges or the sequences of events that He orders that are just one of the many ways a person can see His Hand of Sovereignty among our world of chaos.