Dear Friends, This morning I found myself stuck in morning rush-hour traffic. It was a frustrating place to be, as I had a lot to do, and not enough time to get it done. Each time the light turned green, I had renewed hope that I would make it through the intersection, and each time, I found myself disappointed. After several rounds of this, I ended up two cars back from the traffic light - confident that I would make it through in the next round. The light turned green, and as I began to inch forward, I noticed the guy in the lane next to me motioning that he would like to move into my lane. His lane wasn't moving, so I could understand his desire to switch, and so I stopped my vehicle

Dear Friends, If you are around me for more than about 10 minutes, one of the things you’ll notice pretty quickly is that I tend to be an impatient person. It shows up in how I drive, how I shop, how I eat, how I talk, and how I channel surf when watching TV. I’m not sure why I’m always in a hurry, but more often than not, I am. As you can imagine, this has created problems for me in life, mostly because things don’t always happen at the pace that I want them to happen - and the result is that I find myself struggling with impatience quite a bit. This is especially true when it comes to having to wait on God. I know that God’s plans are best, and I know that God is the only one who can m

Dear Friends, Recently I’ve been thinking that I need to get more physical exercise than I usually get walking from the couch to the refrigerator. So every night, as I’m getting ready for bed, I tell myself that I’ll wake up early the next morning and take a walk around the neighborhood. However, every time the alarm goes off in the morning, I come up with some reason to not actually get up and follow through on the commitment I made the night before. The whole experience has taught me two things: one, I’m not good at staying disciplined when it comes to physical exercise; and two, I’m really good at coming up with excuses at the last minute. The upside of this experience is that it has r

Dear Friends, The past few weeks have been unusually busy at the church, and the result is that my “To Do” list of administrative tasks has continued to grow. So this morning I left my house firmly committed to getting through at least of half of the items on the list. However, my plans were almost immediately interrupted, as I got a series of phone calls from different folks with urgent problems that needed a pastor's input. As the morning progressed, so did the interruptions, and by the time lunch rolled around, I had accomplished only two things on my list, but had handled at least half a dozen problems from other folks. So I sat down to re-evaluate my list, knowing I was going to have