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The title of today’s entry is a take off on a chapter in John Wooden’s book, I believe it is currently referenced a few time already recently.

Tuesday’s mean lots of time with my giggling gals. They meet me at 6:15 AM at the local coffee shop for a little latte and Bible Study. We’ve been slowly and methodically working our way through Revelation… As much as I like it, I kind of wish I could be done with it since inside I am already looking forward to teaching Acts next Fall! (By the way, I’m only on week two of a 14 week series on Revelation, so I better settle in!)

After school, I pick up the same crew of giggling gals for worship team practice. Today, I don’t think they even got downstairs to practice, but that’s OK with me. It’s more important that they are happy and excited about it than anything else! Contrary to most youth groups in the world, the worship part isn’t going fantastic. In fact, I am pretty sure the quality has gone down in the last few months… But the quality of the leaders is good… So that can’t be bad.

Next week are finals at the high school. For some reason, some of my students are stressed out. It’s coming from a bunch of different angles… Last year I barely heard anything about this. I fully expect the juniors to be stressed out because juniors are always stressed out over school. I wish I could lie to them and tell them that college will be easier… But the unfortunate truth is that the undergrad portion of the bachelors in 3 junior years of high school in a row followed by a cupcake year. (At least, it was that way for me!)

No news on a make-up date for my grad school class. Perhaps we all are going to get off scot free. I doubt it, but perhaps.

We woke up this morning to about 6 inches of the fresh stuff. Now I like a good snow and everything but the Northern burbs are terrible about snow removal!

I had the darnest time just getting the van out of our little condo place. I had the speedometer up to about 60 MPH just to keep Big Sexy moving. I am certain that there are people stranded all over the area and I feel really bad for those who live in more rural areas than we do.

The bad news is that it looks like we will have to cancel our 8 Crazy Nights game tonight. I was really looking forward to this one… But it just is better to cancel it. I know that many students will be miffed but it is just the best thing to do with the weather. I’ll reschedule it for sometime in January or February.

I’m off to go shovelling again!

I wonder if this will be any good. Now that the elections are over, it seems that FoxNews has gone back to being more in the middle. I didn’t like O’Reily’s treatment of D. James Kennedy at all last night. He was way too suspicious. We’ll see.

There has been a lot said and written about protecting yourself from allegations and improprieties lately. Especially with the sex scandal of the Catholic church looming large in the minds of Americans. This is further developed in the media who rarely portrays pastors as normal people. They are often portrayed as sex craving hypocrites. The movie “Saved” pretty much nails the stereotype.

What this means to a pastor like me is that I have to constantly be overly careful. Even a few years ago this merely meant that I shouldn’t do anything alone with a female student. But this is now being extended to mean that I shouldn’t ever do anything alone with anyone. Should I feel guilty about being alone with my wife? Afterall, she is a volunteer staff person. Oh my goodness, Pastor Adam has sex with a volunteer! News at 11.

This is manifesting itself as we prepare for the Northern Ireland mission trip. As part of the trip, I have always wanted to have both a male and female leader go with our students. In this particular trip, the adult leaders role is very minimal since we are turning over the reigns of leadership to YFC from the onset. Yet I have always felt it was a good idea to take along a female leader just to be there for our girls. The rub with this is that some “old hens” have decided it doesn’t “look good” for a pastor to travel with a group of students and a single woman.

On the one hand, it’s my fault since I took what I had heard as a rumbling and took it to the deacons to think about before it manifested itself as a problem. To me, the whole thing would go away with a little education about this particular trip. It didn’t.

Now it is clear that the deacons want 2 females to go on the trip to watch over everything like nuns. [OK, that’s an exaggeration!] Actually, there first preference is that Kristen go. This can’t happen. The second preference is that I take two unmarried females with me. As if it there were strength against sin in numbers? The 3rd preference is that I go alone with the students. This flies in the face of both the churches policy as well as the parents “safety button.” The last preference is that the students go alone. But who wants that?

There must a line. There has to be a point where we are exercising caution but not being legalistic. We should be safe, but still leave room for God to act and speak. We should attempt to be above reproach while acknowledging that we are always sinners and always capable to sin.

I suppose this is an entry of frustration. I don’t see why this is an issue. I understand the issue, yet I don’t like to see ministry inhibited by the sinful thoughts of others. At the same time, if we don’t respond to the issues then they think we are being shaddy and not “above reproach.”

Praise God for responsive and action oriented leadership. This is one of those cases where I know I could fight for and win my point of view… But it isn’t worth fighting over. I could win this battle yet cost myself too much collateral damage along the way.

See, I do learn.

It’s been a couple of weeks since Kristen and I decided that the kids needed a cat. Al things considered, even though we really wanted a dog… the reality is that we live in a 2 story renal condo and having a dog probably isn’t the best idea. So we decided the next best thing would be a nice dependable and simple cat.

We haven’t found one yet. And I’m really sad about it.

We tried the humane society last week. Because we were too honest and said we had ditched our previous cat, Kelley, when she started getting to rough with Megan they said we weren’t good enough to take a cat from them. They would rather put an animal to sleep than give it to the mean McLane’s!

So we have been concentrating on the newspapers and our network of friends to come up with a cat option for us. We’ve made a few phone calls but nothing has worked out just yet. We had a promising lead yesterday but they people didn’t call us back when they said they would. Kind of sad.

I’m sure this story isn’t over. Have litter box, cat wanted!

Last night we had a pretty good youth group night. We’ve been having students bring friends lately, which is cool since I haven’t pushed that at all. The talk part went OK and the games were funny.

My lost sheep did come and he expressed how much he wanted to be part of our group again. So, we’ll need to be finding him a ride to get here. He was like, “I don’t get my license for another year and my parents can’t drive me… So I only need a ride for a year.” I thought that was pretty cute.

The big work problem of the day is trying to scrounge up 2 tickets to the WOL Superbowl. One ticket I’ll be in huge trouble if I don’t come up with since I made a mistake in not buying one, the other one I want to add since that student accepted the Lord at the Superbowl last year.

In other news, I’m dealing with some pretty hard core sin issues with a couple of students. There’s some conflict brewing and I need to come up with a strategy for dealing with it to reunify LF.

Relationships are messy. I like relationships. So I guess that makes me kind of sick.

I know my readers are waiting with baited breathe for news of our latest match with Grosse Pointe South.

Today was a great day for the Bulldogs as they held off a wounded GPS team 157-158. Leading the charge was N. Stevens (again) and G. Martin. Had K. Capai shot his normal score this would have been a blowout, but his score was not needed. This puts the Bulldogs at 5-2 in the MAC Red and 5-3 overall. With today’s win the Bulldogs pull into a share of the lead in the MAC Red heading into the last 2 matches. If we win the last two matches (Ford is still 0- the season) we will hold a third consecutive title.

Also, the JV improved their record to 6-1. Things are looking good for the Bulldogs for years to come.

Apparently I was very subconsciously bothered by the horror that had become my golf game. Today I again landed at a place where I could work on my game. I rolled over to Greystone GC (Romeo was closed for and outing) and they were happy to supply me with unlimited balls since there were tons left over from an outing earlier in the day. I must have hit 300 balls.

I was driving the ball great. I worked a little more on getting my hands perpendicular to the target by training my brain to hold the club back further in the stance. While this feels retarded, it is actually a good alignment. From that point on I was able to feel my hips and hands releasing at impact and ripping the ball again. No more pain. Of course, this radical change to my address is not without it’s problems. Mainly, I now have a tendency to hit the ball a little right with the irons and even a bit of a slice with the driver. However, the ball is flying a lot better. In the middle of the session I had the 7 iron dialed in and was pouncing on the flag at 160 yards. Two strokes in a row I flew it inside 3 feet of the cup, took a big hop and stopped.

I also got back to the 65 yard money shot I had down earlier in the year. I’ve got that flying right on the target line every time and it’s just a matter of lengthening the shot for distance. (I worked on the Ernie Els “nipper” shot a few times and was only able to get it to work 3-4 times. A nipper is a shot that is hit like a very crisp and hard chip. It hits the green with a tremendous amount of backspin, hops once and stops. It’s awesome when it works but it’s like hitting a flop off the fairway. Pretty when it works but ugly if you hit it heavy.) I must have used over 100 balls on the little 65 yard shot alone.

One more day of practice and I’ll be ready to play again on Monday. It seems I’ve gotten past that embarrassment.

IN OTHER NEWS: I received my one book for grad school and have gotten a good run on it. I leave for Huntington in only 5 days.

I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come. But I never like losing. The only thing I dislike more than losing is getting my butt kicked.

We took the 3 best sophomores and the 2 worst juniors to the Warren Woods-Tower Invitational today to play 18 holes at http://www.oakridgegolf.com where they proceeded to play against 18 other Macomb County teams. Granted, this was our jv versus all the rest of the areas varsity teams. However, we are better than we played today. Of the 4 scores we kept, only one of them was below 90. The winning team from DeLaSalle HS had all four of their scores in the 70s.

The spin on it is that it was good exposure for these students. Since we were so tough last year and the tournament didn’t know were were brining our jv, they lumped us together with the best kids around. The other 3 teams in my groups foursomes finished 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively. If we had brought our varsity than clearly that would have been the group to watch out for. So, it was painful to see these kids get pounded and finish 16 out of 19 teams invited. Had these students had played their averages, we should have finished in a respectable 9th place.

I am still waiting to hear how things went for our varsity team. They were across the state at the Zeeland Invitational, which is a showcase of the best teams in the state. In other golfing news we have a whale of a week coming up. Tuesday we will take the 8 best to http://www.golfmsu.msu.edu/ to get a preview of where this years State Finals will be. We will also have another look at it for the conference championship coming up in early October. Hopefully, the guys will be back there a couple of weeks later for the finals. On Wednesday, we have our first official match down at http://www.cherrycreekgolf.com/ against Eisenhower HS followed by a tough match against Rochester Adams HS on Thursday and Friday. Another busy week before school begins 8/31!

A few days ago I wrote about being stressed out with bills and my inability to balance the household budget. Well, t hat was a few days ago and I’ve calmed down a bit. Things seem a little more under control right now than they did “way back then.” Some of this has to do with lots of new expenses like graduate school and mechanic pre-school as well as our current backlog of things to do but not right away like new glasses, car maintenance issues and maybe even getting a new vehicle to the family arsenal. Long story short is that after getting paid… I feel a lot better about everything.

In golf news, I am hitting the ball very well. Yesterday I was in charge of golf practice since we had a varsity tournament elsewhere and the other assistant had some personal business going on. Despite the whining I had to deal with of playing Romeo’s North back nine, everything went fine. This was my first time playing with our new batch of freshmen. All in all I was impressed by their patience. They do not hit the ball well at all. I would categorize their game with one word: Awful So I had resolved to play 10-13 with them so that they could see that I knew the game and I could start to give them some pointers. As I was being overly nice and complementary towards them, my round started off terribly with a double bogey on the easy par 3 10th hole. On 11 I drove the ball very long down the right and was unlucky to hit a tree and bounce out into the 3rd holes rough. This left me with a very poor position for my 2nd shot on the par 5. But I felt pretty good about punching out through the trees and did so with ease. My approach trickled off the back to about 15 feet from the cup and I easily got up and down for a par. So, 2 over after 2 holes was a bit annoying when I was approaching the 12th tee. As the freshmen took their time I walked up and blasted my tee shot down the fairway about 310 yards. The 4 of the were impressed that I hit it that far and then they proceeded to hit it about half that. I think one student had already hit his ball 4 times to get to mine and it took about 10 minutes to get everyone up to my drive. I was sitting about 240 yards short of the green with a little wind in my face. But since I was in the fairway and there wasn’t anything to lose, I decided to pull the 3 wood and give it a go. Normally, I would have hit a 6 iron to about 130 yards for an easy par… But what the heck. So I lined up and swung nice and easy. As I released the ball I could feel that I made solid contact and was happy to see it floating down my target line perfectly. One freshmen said shortly after I hit it, “man, you hit that right at it.” But I was convinced that it was short of the green so when they asked if I was on the green I just assumed I had come up short. Well, lo and behold I had nearly holed it out for an albatross! It was about 3 feet below the hole and I easily tapped in for an eagle. That was my first one of those is a little while.

Later in the day I had agreed to play with a guy from the church who I knew was awful. He lived up to the billing easily. It was only his 3rd round of golf and with that in mind, he didn’t do a bad job. Mechanically, he’s not bad. He just needs to work on it some more and put some of the tips I gave him into practice on the range. He’s one of those guys that could easily break 100 with a little concentration and some practice. For a beginner I was really impressed that he didn’t get embarrassed or frustrated too much when he made bad shots. He also had a fantastic drive and 2nd shot on the last hole to finish with a putt for par. (He 3 putted for double bogey) As for me, I continued to hit the ball very well and even drove the first green. This was the 2nd time I had done something jaw dropping in a day! More impressive to me was that I was able to control the ball very well. Even when I got into trouble I was able to make adequate recovery shots and left myself with a birdie or par putt on every hole.