CONFESSION: I CHEATED ON MY BLOG

I’m sorry overflow. You’re lovely and nice and I like you, but like 12 people in the world follow you. So I confess, I cheated on you.

I wrote two posts for a friends blog. He was in Kenya and asked for some guest posts and I thought… hey, that might be fun.

The first was called, “LIFE IS HARD, TAKE A NAP AND FIGHT BACK.”

Life is hard. Ministry is hard. Balancing ministry and family and school and my own soul is hard. It just is… and it’s so hard, that life has a way of knocking good people out of the game. I’ve been in ministry long enough to have seen first hand the casualties of marriages, careers, families, and personal faith all destroyed by hard stuff and poor choices that followed.

In an effort to not become a casualty of the same statistics, I had to confess this past December that I was becoming a victim of my own bad habits and neglecting the care of me for the care of others. I know this to be theologically and practically wrong, but I still was doing it. First to go was exercise. Then reading. Then sleep. Then eating right. Then…. I started kicking the dog. It was bad.

So I have had to make the following adjustments before my kids call dog protective services on me:

you can read the rest here.

The second was called, “RETHINKING RETREAT PLANNING.”

Like many of you, when I signed up to be a youth pastor, I signed up to help students do life with God. I also believed then, and still do today, that there is no shortcut. It simply takes time. I also know that there is no greater way to spend big chunks of quantity time with students than the retreat setting.

So far, so good.

But what I didn’t know was that in order to do those retreats, I’d have to sign contracts that would cause me countless nights of stress leading up to them. I had no idea that 12 months out I’d be asking my church to leverage thousands of dollar on the belief that students will eventually express interest and sign up. And for me, times have been a changin’…