Day1 Blog

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For any of you who may still be following this blog, I have also started blogging as a Key Voice blogger for Day1.org. You can find my first post here.

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Four Years

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Four years. Most people finish college in four years (I did it in three and a half, but who’s counting?). A lot of folks pay off car loans in four years. Four Years. How can such a span of time feel so incredibly short and long at the same time? I can remember being scared to death standing in that little apartment-turned-office in Kunming, my rising anxiety made all the more real by the dozen or so other people in that place making copies, signing papers, shuffling through bags to find passports and other documents. The only thing that kept me from going crazy was the same thing that always keeps me from going crazy, your mom. She knew what forms they needed to see, where I needed to sign. There was this flurry of paperwork it seemed, then, all of the sudden, without confetti, without the celebratory pomp and circumstance such an event demands, you came strolling in the room, holding the hand of a woman’s whose name I either never knew or have long-since forg...
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Ten years ago today, I was ordained to the gospel ministry, an affirmation of my calling to serve Christ and his Church through the practices of pastoral, congregational ministry. If I knew then what I knew now… It hasn’t been easy, but then again, I knew it wouldn’t be. Like most things in life, people can tell you a hundred times a day the way things will be, but there’s still something within you that wants to prove them all wrong, something within you that wants to triumph over the challenges of the past and straighten out the difficulties of former generations. I suppose we might call that hope. I listened to mentors tell me about being threatened by church members, how they had been verbally and physically assaulted in their offices, sanctuaries, and church parking lots. I listened to stories of how people had come into pastors’ homes to threaten their financial security, how a “gang of three” was all it took to persuade a congregation of hundreds that the best thing to “kee...
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