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Coffee Break – 12.10.2018

Your Monday Dose Of Inspiration - Christmas 2018 Edition

Two weeks until Christmas! Have you finished your shopping yet? If not, you’d better get moving!

Coffee Break

Today Is Dewey Decimal System Day!
Go visit a library and explore something new today.

Coffee Geek Gift List: Under $40 – This is a pretty comprehensive list for the coffee lover for Christmas. And the best part, this list stops at forty bucks. To be sure, you could spend more, but this is a great place to start!

The Coffee Compass Holiday Gift Guide – This is another nicely curated list of coffee gear for this year’s holidays. There are several items on this list that I have added to my own wish list.

The Art Of Manliness – The AoM store is one of my favorite places to browse. You will probably find several ideas for any men you might know in there.

Huckberry – The Huckberry stocking stuffer store has a lot of really cool stuff.

Where Is Christ Found In The Old Testament? – Christmas is when we celebrate the birth of Christ, but he was predicted and foretold long before his birth. This video takes a look at just where he can be found in the pages of the Old Testament.

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Boundaries For Your Soul by Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller

A Book Review for The Randleman Review

Boundaries For Your SoulWe are an emotional culture. We might even be an obsessively emotional culture. And with such a wide and volatile range of emotional thoughts and feelings, we are in desperate need of establishing control in this area of our lives.

Unfortunately, this is something that many people don’t realize, or if they do, they have a vague and indistinct understanding of the need for something more in their inner lives. That is why a book such as Boundaries For Your Soul is so critically needed by so many people. Because of the range and depth of our emotions, we can become overwhelmed easily and feel like we are sinking in over our heads with no hope of help.

What authors Alison Cook and Kimberly Miller have done is create a blueprint of what we need, how we can find it, and what it can do for our emotional inner life. With their insights, we can stop allowing our emotions to control us, and begin to exert more control over those emotions instead, and use them to our benefit. And by placing God at the foundation, they offer a solution to our emotional problems that so many other “self help” book fail to do, because such help can come from no other place than the one who created us and our emotions.

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Hugging Your Kids In Public

Godly Men: Being Deliberate With Our Wives and Kids

We had the opportunity to go see a Christmas program by Word Of Life Ministries when we lived in Florida, called Sights & Sounds of Christmas. As a minister of a church in their local area, we actually got to attend the dinner and show for free, and greatly enjoyed the opportunity. 

Sights & Sounds of Christmas

I have a large family, so events like this can quickly become expensive. We are grateful for their generosity while we lived there. It was a wonderful production, and our whole family loved it and had a great time.

We arrived early, since seating was on a first-come basis. As we were waiting, another family walked it and hovered in the lobby, also waiting for the doors to open. They were a nice looking family. But they didn’t really attract my attention at first. Just a father and mother, with four typical kids. The girls were chatting together, and the oldest son, who seemed to be sixteen or seventeen, had ear buds in.

But a few minutes later, I glanced up to see the father and son talking in a corner. This wasn’t any kind of “he’s in trouble” talking, and it don’t look serious. It looked to me like the dad just pulled his son away from the crowd to have a moment together.

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Coming Home For Christmas

Celebrating The Birth Of Christ In A New Location

I have moved several times throughout my life, mostly ministry related. It always takes some time to get settled in and acclimated to a new place. But this move has been a little bit different.

Coming Home For Christmas

I don’t really know what it is. It could be that the ages of some of our kids are older. Maybe it is because my wife and I are older. Perhaps it’s the home repair issues we have had to deal with, or the car accident that occurred shortly after we moved. Or, it could be the proximity to the holiday season. Whatever the case, I feel like we just haven’t gained our equilibrium after the move to Sedalia.

I’m not sure what is causing this (actually, I think I do. More on that in a minute). We just seem to be slow in getting settled in. Boxes are still not unpacked. Stuff still hasn’t been put away or hung on the walls. We just feel out of sorts.

During this transition, and in the weeks leading up to it, I felt the leading of God like never before. So I am absolutely certain that he has been right in the midst of this. Which leads me to believe that the unsettled feelings we have been experiencing are an attack by the enemy to discourage us and keep us off balance. The enemy is keeping us from making this house a new home.

As a result, I have been doing some studies through the Bible on people who have moved, such as Abram, who left home for an entirely new country. Or Jesus himself, who moved from Nazareth to establish his home base in Capernaum. What was home like for people such as these? How did they rely upon the Father fully during such times of upheaval? What does the Bible have to say about the concept of home?

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Coffee Break – 12.03.2018

Your Monday Dose Of Inspiration - Christmas 2018 Edition

December is here, and Christmas is right around the corner! For the next few weeks, Monday’s Coffee Break posts will be Christmas themed, with articles, websites, and holiday shopping guides for you to enjoy! Enjoy the season, and Merry Christmas!

Coffee Break

Today Is National Roof Over Your Head Day!
Today is a day to be thankful for what we have, beginning with the roof over our heads.

The Ultimate Roasterie Gift Guide For Coffee Lovers – The Roasterie is a great little place in Kansas City to find great coffee and lot’s of coffee related accouterments. Many of these items are on my own wish list for Christmas this year…

Real Men Real Style – Here is another shopping guide for the man in your life, or a list of things you need to add to your wardrobe. Some are kind of pricey, but others are not so bad.

The Familyman’s Christmas Trivia – This is a fun little trivia game you can play with your family. The Familyman also has one based on the movie Home Alone.

Why Reindeer Eyes Turn Blue In Winter – I had no idea that reindeer eyes changed colors, and the reason behind it is extremely interesting.

On Earth As In Heaven – “Christmas, 1968 and we first saw ‘earthrise’. But our mission to the heavens was a reflection of the first Christmas — God’s mission to earth.” This 13 minute documentary is worth watching

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The Indescribable Peace Of God

How God Meets Us Where We Are With What We Need

The past several weeks have been a whirlwind of busy activity, stress, and feelings of being overwhelmed. But in the midst of it all, there is a simple peace that pervades.

Peace of God

By now, you have probably noticed that things have been pretty quiet around here for the past couple of months. That is because we have moved, and life has been extraordinarily busy.

At the end of October, I concluded my ministry with the Cabool Christian Church in Cabool, Missouri, and began a new ministry with the Parkview Christian Church in Sedalia, Missouri, which is about three hours north of Cabool.

We packed up the house, got it ready to sell (which is an incredible story of its own), and made the transition to Sedalia. All in all, this took about two months, from the announcement of my resignation, to the day of the move. So far, we have been in our new location for almost three weeks, and getting settled in has been quite hectic.

So far, we have dealt with a plumbing issue, a furnace issue, and are in the middle of a roof issue. And we have boxes to unpack, lots of boxes. And the garage is full of all the stuff that we don’t have a place for yet. And we have been regular customers at Lowe’s and Menards as we go pick up the supplies that we need for various projects getting the house in line with our needs. I think I’m on a first name basis with several of the employees there.

We have unpacked the office, got the kids enrolled in school, experienced an early snow, provided a ton of boxes for the recycling truck to pick up, managed to fit all of our furniture into a smaller house, and are working on really getting settled in. I’m not sure this house feels like a home yet, but I think we’re getting there.