God's Plan

I Couldn’t Sleep Last Night

This isn’t anything new, I don’t sleep well most nights. A good night’s sleep for me is 4-5 hours and if I am lucky, no washroom interruptions somewhere in the middle. I don’t sleep during the day even after the few nights a week where sleep is limited to 2-3 hours and not all in a row. So why bring it up? Why call this blog post, “I Couldn’t Sleep Last Night”? Last night was different. A change in my pain medication meant I was free of the worst part of the pain I usually experience. As a matter of fact, one of the things that kept me awake was me wondering why I didn’t feel quite myself. What was different? In my world, a change in pain can be as unnerving as the worst pain I experience. So, I’m awake; now what?

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Guilt, A Useless Emotion?

I am not sure where I heard it said that guilt is a useless emotion. It could have been the always brilliant and insightful daytime talk show hosts. Maybe it was a talk radio interview. It also could have been a TV drama or a blockbuster movie. All I know is it seemed to make sense at the time. I am follower of Christ. I’m sure it wasn’t a Christian source but still I am forgiven and my sins are as far as the east is from the west ( Psalm 103:12NIV)so guilt must be a useless emotion, right?

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Transition – Discovering God’s Call for Your Church

Many of you know that my calling is to a very specific field of ministry in the church. I am a transitional pastor. I help congregations discover God’s call for their collective of Christ followers. I met Bruce Cormier and his wife Lesia at my last transition. Together we, the collective of Christ followers called Cornerstone Christian Fellowship – Mimico and myself, set out on what ended up being an 18 month journey to understand what God was saying about the future of our church. We had a building. We had a small in-person congregation of about 30 and a similar sized online group who, in their younger years had attended in person. It took me 18 months to get to this point and Bruce managed to say it in just over 1500 words!

This little church has close to doubled in size and continues to grow under their new permanent pastor. The biggest question we needed to answer was about the building the church owned. As you read this, maybe your church needs to ask itself the same question they were asking:

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I Am God

That’s a scary statement! It may be less uncomfortable if you assume that I am applying the rules for the title of a literary work by capitalizing each word. I could have been calling myself a god not the God but because it is a title it requires all caps. Then there is another possibility. I could be me attempting to grab the attention of the reader with the intention of pointing out that we are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27 NIV). Maybe in a strange way this does make us God. Maybe, but I am not comfortable even attempting to defend the suggestion that I am God because I am made in His image.

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Reports of My Death Are…

…greatly exaggerated. I really don’t know if anyone reported my death and if they did, I don’t know if they embellished anything other than the untrue statement that I had died. Yes, I have not blogged a lot. I have written weekly emails to the church I pastored during their transition, some of which will make great future blogs but that was the limit of what I could do. Writing blogs, as much as I enjoy it, is not something I could continue to do and still complete my transitional pastor calling. I did not die, I guess that is obvious by the existence of this new post, but I did struggle with some very serious health problems that have shown me that I may have been greatly exaggerating my own death.

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