It’s Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada.  I was thinking about how my gratitude has shifted over the years.

When I was younger, I was grateful for things.  And naturally, I’m grateful for people and for God.  But my gratitude is shifting.  I spent a lot of time reflecting on what I’m truly grateful for at this season of my life.  I was surprised to see how my gratitude for these things is going deeper all the time:

• Love.  Without it, is life worth living, or even possible?
• Grace.  Because true love flows when it is deserved and when it is not.
• Forgiveness.  Life is about second chances.
• Relationship.  I am getting more joy out of some close relationships than I ever have before.
• Salvation.  That in Jesus God would deem us valuable enough to save us at great personal cost and suffering is truly mind-boggling.

Those are just a few thoughts this Thanksgiving Monday.  Where does your gratitude flow these days?

Meet my barbecue.  My amazing charcoal-retro-this-is-like-the-seventies Weber bbq.  I love my charcoal grill!

Last weekend I was grilling ribs and chicken.  As I was showing my friend Dave (who was pretending to be interested) the intricacies of charcoal cooking, I reached around the grill, got too close and burnt the underside of my arm.  Yowsa.  That hurt. (See the nice red welt on my arm?  Yeah…that’s the burn.)

It will heal, of course, but it got me thinking about how pain is such a great teacher.

Chances are that you have already been burnt by something or someone this week.  If not this week, then this month, and certainly this year.  One reaction is to distance ourselves from things that cause us pain.  Another approach is to learn from it. 

Here are some lessons pain has taught me over the years:

1. Even things you love cause you pain.  (Some might say especially the things you love.) That doesn’t mean you can’t love them, it just means we’d be wise to learn why that is and how we can avoid finding ourselves in that situation in the future.
2. Pain gets my attention. I wonder if one of the reason God allows pain in my life is because I am a better student when I am in pain than when I think I’m invincible.
3. Pain points to a deeper problem.  Sometimes when I’m in pain, I just want to the pain to stop.  But the pain is just a messenger.  It’s telling me something else is wrong.  The more I am willing to address the source of the pain, the more I can learn to grow and heal.
4. Pain can lead to greater humility. As much as guys want to say "I’m okay, I’m okay, really, I’m okay", the truth is we’re often ashamed of what caused us pain.  Much cooler to just bbq and be the hero than to burn yourself in front of 25 friends.  But where I have actually engaged the pain that comes my way, I can learn and grow from it, welcoming it even as a friend.
5. Wounds eventually heal. If you give a wound proper attention and time, it will heal.  You may walk with a limp for a while, but the truth is the body has an amazing propensity to heal itself.  The burn mark itself is about 30% smaller when I took this picture than it was when I burned my arm 4 days earlier.  Sometimes we lose track of the fact that we will get better, but God is an incredible healer.

What have you learned from pain?  How have you been burned and what has it taught you?

Man, I was having the most amazing day.  Felt like the weather yesterday (wet and gray), and this morning I woke up feeling fantastic.  Wonderful prayer time this morning.  A chance to be with 8 great pastors I’ve been tracking with in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area for you non-Ontarians) for a year now.  Fantastic.  Was even going to get the optical drive on my macbook pro fixed since I was in Toronto.  Sweet.

Then I got an email that pretty much means I have to haul gear this morning in order for us to have sound on Sunday.   A broken speaker needs to be fixed and at this point, looks like I’m the transport guy. 

Now I am thrilled about having sound on Sunday at our Orillia campus.  I am happy to help.

But it bugs me when my plans shift.  Last night I was walking into a Tim Horton’s for a meeting and ran into a guy I haven’t seen in a while.  I was totally awkward in the conversation and even got his wife’s name wrong because the chance encounter rattled me.  The strange part is that I like these people.  It was the "chance" part of the meeting that made me feel all awkward.  Something comes unhinged inside me when met with unexpected encounters. 

I am a weird duck.  Anyone else struggle with this?

I say all this only to say this: one of my growth points in life over these last three years has been to learn to enjoy the spontaneous moments in life.  I thought I had been making tons of progress on this.  Guess I’m still learning!

I was sitting in my car outside a hockey rink early yesterday morning, noticing how many cars were speeding somewhere  at 7 a.m. (to work, I imagine). 

I started thinking that traffic patterns are incredibly predictable.  I used to do traffic on the radio back in the late 80s and early 90s.  We didn’t have traffic cams and the station I worked for couldn’t afford a plane, so we relied on callers, the police and (frankly) other radio station’s traffic reports.  (Hee hee.)  Traffic was so predictable that at 3:30 p.m. we would say "401 westbound slowing now core and collectors through the basketweave to the 400. (The basketweave is that area between Jane and 400). 95% of the time we were right. Didn’t even have to look.

It amazed me that the roads are open 24 hours but we mostly want to use them at the same time.  The fact that I won’t have traffic to speak of at 3 a.m. is irrelevant.  My habit says I will use it at the same time as every one else.  Our lives are like that.

Chances are most of what you have done today prior to reading this blog post is habitual and repeated.  You got up, ate, showered, brushed your teeth, dressed, headed for work/sending the kids off to school/followed some routine you made up years ago and then went into your day which again, has a lot of routine in it.  You and I have already spent hours of the day we’ve been given, most without thinking about how or why we spend it this way.

Habits and routine are good, and they can be bad.  Often we say we don’t have time for what we want to do because most of our time is spent doing things other than the things we want or need to do. We each get 24 hours in the day. We spend much of it without thinking. 

As I think about my walk with Christ and my life as a whole, how much of my habit and routine are good.  How much is bad?  How much should be changed?  What gives life in my routine?  What stifles it?  What am I wasting without thinking?  What life does God want to add to my life that I don’t have room for because I filled my day with other things?

What areas of habit in your life could change so that life could come more deeply and freely?  Think out loud with me, if you will.

Thanks for the dialogue these past seven days on preaching.  Had to add one more thing.

My goal as a preacher to give messages that help people make the link between God and life.  I want it to help. But how do I know my preaching is helpful?  How do we know our preaching is helpful?

I think preaching can be helpful in multiple ways.  For example, last night I was reading a newsletter we got in the mail.  It was on teaching kids how to handle money.  After I read it, I was glad I did, but then I stopped to ask why.  It actually had no new information for me, so why was I grateful?  I figured it out: I don’t often read on the subject, and the newsletter affirmed what I already knew.  It let me know my approach was okay.  It affirmed and confirmed my direction. It was helpful because it told me I was moving in the right direction.

Got me thinking about the helpfulness of preaching more generally.  What makes investing 30-45 minutes in listening to a message "worthwhile?"  How would we preachers know if we hit the mark?  Just thinking in pencil.  Would love your feedback.

Content can be helpful if it:

• Brings a ‘new’ truth (didn’t know that) or discarded truth to light.
• Brings a fresh angle to a truth and makes people see God in a fresh light.
• Reminds people of a truth they know, affirming or correcting their direction.
• Shows the relevance of truth in current culture and life.

Application is helpful if it:

• Provides a practical step or steps people can follow to put it into practice in the next 24 hours.
• Shifts thinking deeply enough that people can’t think of things in the same way again (paradigm shifting).
• Shows how a particular truth will change how we live in our time and culture.

If a sermon does one or more of these things, I think I’d find it helpful.  Not just true…but helpful.

What do you think?  Do these resonate?  Any other categories?  Could you simplify these to make them easier to use?

Last week, a man I have known for over thirty years passed away.  He was my grade six Sunday School teacher, and I think he and his wife may be the only people (other than my parents) who have prayed for me every day for over three decades.  His name was Mr. Webster.  I will always think of him that way (I never want to call him Ed (his first name) – he’s Mr. Webster), and I am SO grateful he was in my life to continually point me to Jesus.  He lived his life so well.   He invested in so many others.  And after having lived a full life, he met the Jesus he loved so deeply.

Yesterday, I was on the phone with a man who started mentoring me ten years ago and who has become a life-long friend.  I got off the phone with him and thought "I am SO glad he came into my life ten years ago."   I would be so much less of a leader and person if my friend Chuck  hadn’t invested so heavily in me.

Got someone like that?  I hope so.  But that’s not the point of this post.

Here’s the point: BE someone like that.  Who’s in your life that you are building into?  Who are you praying for daily, investing in and helping through life? 

That thought is challenging me today.  Who will I be "Mr. Webster" to?  Who am I building into? 

If you have some time, share a story today about someone who built into you.  It might challenge all of us to give back in a way that will impact eternity.

I was ready to post this Monday after the markets crashed.  But I didn’t.

Then they crashed again today here in Canada and in the US.  I know our investment adviser (no, we’re not loaded, but we have some money set aside for the kids’ school and retirement) wrote a blanket letter to all her clients trying to encourage us to be patient and not sell.  Good advice in a time like this.

But it got me thinking about what this really all means and where we put our hope.   The Bible paints a very clear picture of where all the markets will end up one day.  You don’t even have to be a prophet nut to believe this.  Read what it says.  The entire economy will crash.  Things that we valued one moment will have no value the next.   Our whole economic system globally will end up having no value.  When Jesus returns, everything we now value will completely lose its value.  Seriously, you should read it.

What will matter?  One thing – our relationship with Jesus Christ.  From Him, all things get their value.  Ultimately, only as something relates to Him will it have any value.

Ironically, that makes me feel quite peaceful this week.  It’s only money.  What really has value is our relationship with Christ and our relationship with others.

I have loved the dialogue this week on preaching.  Thanks!  So let’s continue.

When we were launching Connexus last year I had this interesting lunch discussion with some church leaders.  What if we taught our congregations nothing new for the next year, and all we did was focus on applying what we already knew?  That thought gripped me pretty deeply, and it’s still gripping me. I didn’t do it, but I have come back to this theme of application again and again, and have been trying to act on it in my life.

My issue is not that I don’t know the Gospel, it’s that I don’t apply it as deeply as I need to in my life.  I think the problem with many followers of Jesus is that we know what to do.  We just don’t do it.  We define maturity as knowing more, not applying it more thoroughly.  I’m sure there are some people who authentically need to know more about Jesus (I’m very aware of this at Connexus), but we have this perverse trend in Christendom of producing people who know a lot about Jesus but who act like love and grace are far from us.

Now I’m a preacher.  And I believe in preaching.  I am committed to it.  But let me ask you, what helps you best apply what you’ve learned?  What is in hearing messages that turns you from being a learner into a doer?

I’m all ears as I sit down to write a message again today to kick off our new series – all ears.  (I’ll share my thoughts on it tomorrow too.)