As I continue in my pursuit to learn Spanish I am frequently sent new resources from others. Here is the first semester of Spanish love song. If this doesn’t make you want to learn Spanish then I don’t know what will!
I had the privilege to spend the weekend interviewing baseball all-star Adrian Gonzalez at Central. Despite the team he plays for, this guy is a class act. More importantly, he lives out his faith in an environment that’s not easy to do so. We spent most of our time behind the scenes talking baseball (like the fascinating story of the only time he’s faced Mariano Rivera and how the great closer managed to get the better of the at-bat).
Here is my interview with him from the services:
I have a love for reading so I enjoy seeing how other cultures and periods in history have approached the subject as well. My biography that I’ve been reading through this winter is about a guy named Cicero who was arguably Rome’s greatest politician. He lived during the time of Julius Caesar and their lives intertwined on quite a few occasions. The book referenced what reading was like in those days and I was a bit shocked by the difference from our standards.
“Readers had to work hard. Characters took one form only, without differentiation into capital and lowercase letters. There were no spaces between words or punctuation, and texts were unparagraphed.”
Translation = you really had to be disciplined to be a reader in those days! Not only did you have to read from a papyrus roll but you didn’t have the luxury of basic formatting to help you make sense out of the words.
In the Christian Church world there is a topic of conversation that comes up nearly every time a church is critiqued. How “deep” is the preaching?
It sounds like a great question to ask. But it isn’t. It isn’t because it becomes something that people hide behind and use to couch their own biases and opinions. If I don’t like a sermon then I’ll tell you it wasn’t deep enough. I may even go so far as telling you that it was shallow. But it is probably more a reflection on my opinion and less a reflection on the content of the message. Yet I wonder how many people have left a church under this disguise?
Now I know that some of you may be thinking: “Aren’t we supposed to critique sermons like this?” The answer is no. You are supposed to critique a sermon to see if the content aligns with Scripture. Not that it met your own personal expectations for how you like to listen to someone talk about the Bible.
Consider this, how do you define a deep sermon? Think of the following criteria that could (and does) get used to make this analysis:
One of the blogs I read regularly encouraged fellow bloggers to post some of the sites that they read consistently and have been influenced by. So here is my list of 3 three bloggers I’m thankful for (there are more, but I like the number 3 and it is a manageable list for you to check out for yourself.)
Tentblogger.com by John Saddington
John writes all about how to be a better blogger. He is incredibly insightful and full of specific resource ideas but is also user friendly enough that it isn’t too daunting for the typical blogger to be encouraged by.
I’m overseeing a new teaching blog for Central and it will have regular posts from lots of the people that you see on stage each weekend. Click here to check it out and enter your email so that you never miss a post!
(This is one of two side projects I’ve been working on the last few months. The other one shall be revealed shortly…)
