What I'm reading....

I just finished a good book called "War of Words". It was written by Paul David Tripp and is a discussion of how our words impact those around us and what the goal of our words should be. It focuses heavily on our selfishness and self-idolatry vs. our focus on God and on building others up in order to bring Him glory.... I might follow up on this with a little more detail soon...but probably not. It was a good read, I'd highly recommend it, although the first chapter was less than impressive... it got progressively better after that.

So I finished that and now am reading "The story of Christianity" which is a sort of history book about the church. It is two volumes, both thick, and covers the early church (Acts) all the way to modern day... or at least fairly modern day. This book has been really encouraging which I know may sound goofy for a history book! But really it's bringing to light many of the things you miss in the Bible and their significance because of cultural shifts from then to now. It's easy to read in Acts that the hellenistic Jews didn't get along with the rest of the Jews... but to see why, and how that impacted everything the church did at that time is very interesting.

I'm also re-reading "The gospel centered church" in preparation for leading some talks at our family camp. I'll let you know how this goes...

Blog ahoy!

Okay.... so I caved in. I swore I wouldn't blog and yet here I am blogging. As Corey and I were talking about how hard it is to keep people, especially far away people, updated on my life. Corey's solution to all this is for me to keep a blog as a kind of journal in which people can see what I'm learning and what my thoughts are just as if they were local and spending time with me on a regular basis.

Now one point worth mentioning: Don't expect anything spectacular. Instead, expect my random thoughts; expect me to forget to update it for weeks (maybe even months) at a time; expect it to be simple and lacking eloquence. I really don't want this to turn into something like my church newsletter that I type and re-type and have Corey proofread. This will be much simpler and much more prone to typos and nonsensical sentences.

So... here goes nothin'.