Thoughts from the Mound

You preach!  You may preach a lot. However if you are like me, you wish you could be better.  We all want to preach better, because we want to do our best for the Lord.  How many Sunday nights have we just sat and wished we were better?  How often on Friday afternoon have we wished we could be better? We know we’ll never be the best preacher in the brotherhood, but we sure wish we could be better.  We attend lectureships, seminars, we read books and listen to others yet, it seems, no one ever says – “Here is how you do it!”  How many times have we listened to some other guy and wondered, how’d he learn to do that?  Well, we did too. The “better” conference is a two day seminar for preachers who want to be better at the skill of preaching....

It seems like it was about two-thirds milk and one-third coffee, with several spoons of sugar thrown in for an even richer taste:) It was, with all due respect to ELF, “The World’s Best Cup of Coffee!” It happened at most once or twice a year. We would make the two hour drive to visit our grandparents in North Alabama. It was always the highlight of the year for us. We loved being in their home. There was something special, something magical about that house! Usually it was just a day or two, maybe a week at the most, but when we were there I would get up early in the morning and sit on at the kitchen window with my maw-maw. She would make that special cup of coffee for me and I would sit with her and watch my paw-paw leave with his employees for the work...

Just about every preacher deals with them. You know who they are in your life. They are those cantankerous, time-consuming, whining, lazy, difficult people. It could be the church member who seems to monopolize your time because something is always wrong. Maybe it’s a retired preacher who sits in your audience each week and tells you what you should have said, or what you misquoted in your sermon, or how he would have preached it. Maybe it’s a co-worker who refuses to carry his part of the load. You know, the guy who does as little as possible, just enough to get by. Or it might be an elder. The one who is always on your back, watching you like a hawk, secretly undermining and criticizing everything you do. What’s a preacher to do? What if your life and...

U.S. Navy Veteran Ron White memorized nearly 7,000 words and more than 2,200 names. Let that sink in for just a moment. To put it in perspective that would be similar to memorizing Psalm 119! “The U.S. recorded the names of the military fallen from Afghanistan on a makeshift wall in downtown Fort Worth…And he did it all from memory” He said, “I have pictures in my mind for each name.” It took the veteran who served in Afghanistan in 2007 around ten months to memorize all of those names. Despite the fact he has made the news and many people came to watch what he did, the veteran said he wasn’t doing it for the attention. “I would have done this in a field by myself if no one showed up, just because it’s something I wanted to do.” To remember...

“The expectations of a preacher are endless. Some members expect them to be omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent.But different preachers are wired differently.” That’s the way Thom Ranier began his article dealing with then things preachers don’t like about preaching. So, with apologies to Thom for sort of taking his title I decided to write from a different approach. What do preachers really love about preaching? What aspects do they enjoy the most? Some preachers may really enjoy and be fulfilled by counseling while another dreads even the thought of it. So I did a little informal and very unscientific survey of a rather large number of preachers. We contacted a wide range of preachers (ages, length of time preaching, many different regions). I asked...

Recently while I was feeling under the weather Laura drove through Chick-Fi-A to grab us a bite to eat. (Is there anything that Chick-Fil-A cannot cure?) When she drove up to the window after placing her order the cashier said, “Your meal was paid for by the person in front of you!” Laura said, “Well that was very kind. I’ll pay for the meal of the person behind me.” The cashier said, “You make the seventh person in a row to buy the meal of the next person in line!” That seems to me like the definition of paying it forward. We have no idea how many cars after Laura did the same thing. What we do know is the when you bless someone’s life it can become contagious. On another occasion recently we were eating at Chili’s with a friend of ours who was...