After much thought and consideration, I have decided to move my blog. I have enjoyed working on blogger, but it has its limitations. I have heard great things about Wordpress and have decided to give it a try. The address to my blog is almost the same. Just replace "blogspot" with "wordpress". The new address is wjcollier3.wordpress.com. I have saved my old account at blogger just in case this one does not work like I want it to. This move is immediate and you should start finding new posts there in a day or two. Thanks for reading and following me to my new blogging home.
This past week in Minneapolis, the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination has been having its convention. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was meeting in the Minneapolis Convention Center, which is downtown and across the street from Central Lutheran Church. Wednesday afternoon at 2:00, the delegates were scheduled to debate and vote on their stance on the open practice of homosexuality among members of the church, including the clergy. At just before 2:00, a completely unexpected storm came through downtown. It included a tornado. The tornado damaged the roof of the convention center and broke the steeple of the church.
John Piper, who pastors in Minneapolis, posted some interesting commentary on his blog yesterday. In it he claims the storm was a warning from God given directly to the Lutherans meeting there to abandon their acceptance of immoral behavior. I am not one to find a spirit behind every bush. I try not to over-spiritualize things. This is pretty hard to ignore. I realize that sometimes a storm is just a storm, but this may have been something more. I don’t always agree with Piper, but this time he makes a great case.
Over at the Bethel blog, Todd has taken his monday WorshipWord to host a little Bible trivia contest. There is a prize. That's what makes it a contest. Here's the video:
My goal is to post at least every other day. My last post was on Friday and today is Monday. As you can see, I did not meet my goal. But it was a busy weekend. Unless you live in a cave, you are probably aware that there was a hurricane. Hurricane Ike. You could rename Galveston Tina. Some of you will get that. It was not a particularly powerful storm. It was only a category 2. But it was big. Bigger than Texas big. That is how I spent my weekend. It was windy and rainy, but it was not really bad here in Tyler. I have a brother and sister-in-law in Alvin who had some damage to their home. Due to their jobs, they were unable to evacuate. I am not even a little bit jealous of them.
During preparations for the storm, I watched a fair amount of the local news for the weather reports. There are always grossly overused expressions in the news media, but during hurricane Ike, there was one that truly got on my nerves. If Mark Scirto told us one more time to "hunker down", I thought I would have to punch him right through the television. Everybody I talked to was hunkered down. Everybody encouraged me to hunker down. My family hunkered down. I was so tired of hearing about hunkering down, I refused to hunker. I was willing to batton down the hatches, hole up in my home, seek shelter, or any of a number of options. But I was sick of being hunkered down. That has to be the most overused phrase of this storm.
Those of us who work in ministry sometimes struggle with being relevant. (Speaking of overused expressions.) Apparently, it is not only churches that strive to be relevant. With almost all the news – even the national news – devoted to hurricane Ike, it apparently could make for a slow news day in other parts of the country. Check out this headline from the Fort Collins Coloradoan. This is a perfect example of trying too hard.
Do you have any good, or at least interesting, stories from the hurricane this weekend? Share them with me and the three others that might read this.
I get too many blogs fed into my Google reader. There you have it. I admit it. As I migrated my blog back over to its place on blogger, I made a few very minor changes. One was to update my blog roll. Blogger has a nice little feature that will import them right from reader along with the latest post title. When I did that, I realized just how many blogs I feeds I subscribe to. It is truly ridiculous. I don't have time, or really even the desire to read all of that. The problem is that I don't know what I should delete. I guess I'll just leave them all there for now. I don't read everything posted, but I do scan them all for the things that interest me. I do make a point to read the blogs of my friends. Those are my favorites. Some of you that read mine are listed in my blog roll. So I would like to give a little shoutout to my friends who blog. (I could have turned all these into links, but that would be very time-consuming. They are all listed on the left):
After much thought and consideration, I have decided to move my blog. I have enjoyed working on blogger, but it has its limitations. I have heard great things about Wordpress and have decided to give it a try. The address to my blog is almost the same. Just replace "blogspot" with "wordpress". The new address is wjcollier3.wordpress.com. I have saved my old account at blogger just in case this one does not work like I want it to. This move is immediate and you should start finding new posts there in a day or two. Thanks for reading and following me to my new blogging home.
