I haven’t been able to post for the past few days because things have been moving a little too fast.
My class at Huntington went pretty well. This is the first time I’ve had a full class, and there were some things I was impressed with and some things I was disappointed by. My biggest two beefs have been that the “pace of play” is way too slow for me in a Dave Rahn class. I’m learning from it, but I just wasn’t sure if he didn’t have enough material or if he really thought his group learning exercises really were more valuable than content. All in all there was about 1/2 to 1/3 the content of a similar class I took on the undergrad level. The other beef is that there was zero biblical content to our sessions. We never opened our bibles in the 4 days the class met. Nor did we pray together. That really saddened me.
Saturday I took 4 of my volunteers to a Sonlife Training session in Saginaw. This was about what I expected and wanted all wrapped into one offering. The adults got swarmed with the Sonlife philosophy and it fostered a lot of good discussion. I think it will help them really clearly see what their task is as well as what the goal of the youth group is. Too cool.
On Saturday night I got a call from our interim pastor to let me know he had the flu and wouldn’t be able to do the talk Sunday AM. This put me in quite a bind as it meant I had to do the talk and I couldn’t possibly prepare correctly. Essentially, I did a simple talk that exposed a ton from my family background and such. I tackled two essential questions that all believers need answered. Can God use me? And What is my job as a believer? It goes without saying that the audience got a heavy dose of the Sonlife philosophy.
Interestingly enough, I must have done OK since at the business meeting a little later someone made a motion that the church hire me as the next senior pastor! (One of the funniest moments of my career.) I knew that some people thought that was a good idea, so I got up and explained what my intentions were and what I sought to do with my life. The biggest thing I think I communicated in that one minute “speech” to answer the motion was that I want to be here to support the next SP.
After that I had to rush over to play in the golf teams final event. We had a 2 man scramble. I played with one of my sophomores and we had a good time. We triple bogied the 4th hole to open our day but managed to end up with 2 over par. Except for that one hole, we played pretty good. Not to toot my own horn, but I played pretty good and helped get our score respectable on a day when the wind and the temperature brought out some ugly scores.
At the little banquet, I really got to see clearly how God is using and will continue to use junior golf. Many of the students were very open and even a little emotional about expressing their gratitude to me. I was really touched by this. The bottom line is that I see it as an honor to work with these young men. I hope that they learn about the game and I hope they learn about life too. I think I’ve helped to accomplish that. At the end of the banquet the seniors dragged me into their pictures and even made sure to go out and get their picture taken with the van, Big Sexy.
What a ride!
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