Where To Begin...

So, I’ve wanted to start a blog for a while now, but I’m not sure if I really have anything to say, or if I’m just enamored with the idea of a blog.  Only time will tell.

This blog is a journal of my random thoughts, an occasional pet peeve, and probably a good amount of meaningless and harmless chatter.  I personally believe there is a place in the world for meaningless, harmless chatter.  We often take ourselves way too seriously.

I’m not sure anyone would be interested, but I feel that some background information is an appropriate way to begin.  I am in what I used to call “mid-life” although now it looks more to me like those who are under 40 are all contained in the adolescent category, allowing me to fall into the young adult group.  You know they are saying now that 40 is the new 20.  Of course, this is a sheer delusion developed by aging Hollywood actresses.  Nonetheless, I will shamelessly embrace it, if only in my mind, seeing as how bits of my body are set on proving otherwise.  I don’t recall my body ever complaining when I was in my 20s.  These days, I have a hard time sleeping over all of the noise…

I am an ordained minister in a holiness denomination.  Don’t panic, I said “holiness” not “fundamentalist”.  We believe in living a life (by God’s grace) that supports instead of contradicts our confession of Christ as Lord but we do NOT believe it is necessary to turn off our brains, spout rehearsed dogma, and then firmly stick our fingers in our ears and sing to ourselves in order to avoid listening to anything else.  We’re not afraid of science or secular literature or a liberal arts education.  In fact, we have several institutions of higher learning of our own that grant liberal arts degrees and, being a product of one of those institutions (the best of them all, of course) I can say with genuine conviction that our universities do a wonderful job.  DISCLAIMER – I work hard at being grammatically correct but I didn’t major in English.  The author takes full responsibility for any failing in this area.

The journey to my ordination is a testimony to God’s love, mercy, and incredible patience.  The Reader’s Digest version is that I had a stable childhood, lost my dad when I was 17 and took a lengthy trip to the world of “Nobody Matters But Me”, and then after a pathetic series of bad choices and the resulting consequences, God found me in a heap and began to pick me up, dust me off, and show me how much He still loved me.  If you’d told me 20 years ago that I’d be an ordained minister, I’d have told you where to get off and I probably would have used some choice language to do so.  One of the great things about God is He cares more about where we’re going than where we’ve been. 

And so, I pastor a small congregation – my first – in the Deep South.  I am not a southerner.  I am, in fact, a Yankee, born and raised.  This fact alone offers a lot of material to blog about.  I’ll save that for another time.

Blessings,

L.