Stolen from an ad...

Where are you?
What are you doing?
Are you listening?
Paying attention?
Stay focused. 
Stop looking at your phone. 
Turn it off. 
Put it away. 
Be here. Now. 
In the present. 
Be with who you're with.
Talk with them. 
Live with them. 
Take some time. 
Think. 
Do you understand who you are?
What you were called to do?
Pause. Take it in. 
What is your community?
Who is your community?
What does local mean to you?
Do you have a presence?
If your church left the community what would happen?
Would you have left a mark?
Lead in the place you're called to. 
Don't worry about the past.
The future will come later.
It's all about now. Here. 
Go all in.
Be rooted. 
When you're home, be home. 
Focus. Look at the big picture. 
Look at the small pictures. 
We need your undivided attention. 

T.J. Quote of the Day

Today is Tim's 39th birthday. Tim looked wistfully at the birthday cake candles, sighed, and began... "Oh, thirty-nine. How can this be?" TJ interrupts: "Oh, NO! He's going to PREACH!" These are the nightmares for every pastor's kid, I guess.

Libraries - they're awesome.

Great article, a must read. From the New York Review of Books. It can be found here.

Great thought of the day

"You will never get everyone in your community into your church, but you just might be able to get everyone in your church out into your community."

Justice is Good Theology

A good blog about the death of Osama bin Laden from Foursquare pastor Tim Clark... it can be found here.

Prayer Points for Japan - from the field!

Here are some prayer points straight from Nathan and Inge Mikaelsen - missionaries to Japan who lived in Sendai, right where the earthquake hit. Recently they came to our church to give a testimony of what is happening in Japan and to give us some specific prayer points. Here's a copy of the list for all my prayerful friends:

Pray....

1. For a national awakening in Japan - a turning to the true Triune God.

2. For relief workers to share not only food and physical supplies in Tohoku, but also comfort for the grieving, and Jesus' words of hope.

3. For the nuclear power plant workers in Fukushima trying to control radiation leaks. For especially the 6 Christian workers there, to receive divine wisdom for this critical job.

4. For Caleb and Ohara working with CRASH relief efforts. For Dean and Linda Bengsten, and Roger Olson and others who will soon join the relief effort in Ishinomaki city. For Paul Mikaelsen and his girlfriend Nina Tesaker who may soon go to Japan to help.

5. For damaged churches in Tohoku to be rebuilt and more churches planted.

For more information about the Mikaelsens, look here.

Good C. S. Lewis quote for Easter - and for anytime really!

"I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher; but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."