These days, I am toting two smartphones, one is my personal phone, the other is the church phone. Friends raise their eyebrows whenever I lay my two phones on a table at restaurants. They give me a subtle, amused look that says, “Somebody sure thinks he’s important.” Thankfully, I am not all that important, so having two phones has not resulted in twice as many phone calls.

A few weeks ago, I celebrated one more birthday by adding another notch to my belt. You see, each year on my birthday, my one request of my wife is that she prepare for me an obscene quantity of my favorite food – spaghetti with a cheesy bechamel sauce. My request always presents a moral dilemma for her, pitting her love for me against her concern for my health; that dish would be high on any cardiologist’s list of foods to avoid.

Every week for the past 35 years of ministry, I have thought about what is essential in corporate worship. I am a musician, and when I came to faith in Christ in a small, south Florida church, I naturally volunteered to be in the choir.

In this morning’s news, nestled among the latest updates on Taylor Swift’s love life, was an article reporting the growing number of America’s non-religious.
Pollsters have been reporting on the growth of the “nones” for decades.

In 2005, celebrity chef, Jamie Oliver, launched a bold initiative to improve the substandard quality of food served to children in Britain’s school cafeterias.
A decade later he reported that his initiative failed because, bottom line, the kids didn’t want the nutritional food he was promoting, they liked what they were getting.

I am not even remotely mechanically inclined. It is for guys like me that cars used to come with what my mechanic friend called “the idiot light.”
Pointing to it, he said, “If this light comes on, you got trouble; come see me.” Did he just call me an idiot?

I saw the movie “2001, A Space Odyssey” when it was first released in 1968.
In this story by Arthur C. Clarke, a crew of astronauts ventures into space to find the beings who planted a monolith on earth millennia earlier igniting the evolutionary process.

I had been a pastor for eight years before I enrolled in a seminary. When I first met the seminary’s director of church planting, he said, “Have you ever given any thought to planting a church? You’d be good at it.”

Last week as Hurricane Idalia roared up the gulf coast of Florida, my phone chimed with messages and calls from family and friends asking about our wellbeing.

Earlier in life, I had a brief stint in sales just long enough to convince me that I am no salesman. However, I did learn some interesting maxims from my sales training, like “The Rule of 250.”