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Ron Edmondson

A Week Of Thanksgiving: The Top People on My List

By Children, Family, God, Marriage, Parenting

I’ve been writing about people I’m thankful for this week, encouraging you to do the same. Obviously our greatest thanksgiving should be for our personal relationship with the Living God, but I’m thankful He allows us to have people in our life to love and help shape us. We’ve shared about people who have helped us professionally, been consistent friends, and helped us grow spiritually. You can still do that in the previous posts HERE, HERE AND HERE.

Today, I want to share the group most of us would put at the top of our thankful list….our immediate families. The people in my life I’m most thankful for are my wife and two boys. I’ve previously shared most of these points about them, but they are still true today.

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Week of Thanksgiving: Who Helped You Grow Spiritually?

By Church, Encouragement, Faith, God

We are sharing a week of Thanksgivings; celebrating people who have made a difference in our life. Read the previous two days HERE and HERE.

Today, let’s talk spiritual talk.

Who is the person who helped you most to grow spiritually?

Obviously, as with the other days, you could answer God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit, and of course those answers would be correct, but thankfully God uses other people in our life to make a difference. He shapes our life through the influence of people. So, in terms of your spiritual growth, who is the person who helped you or is helping you the most.

As I’ve done the previous days, I’ll go first.

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The Wheels On the Bus Go Round and Round

By Culture, Encouragement, Family, Life Plan

I saw this plaque in a store window in Michigan recently. I snapped a quick picture. I didn’t need the plaque, but I love the statement.

I dont’ know where the saying originated, but the most memorable time I heard it was when Jack Nicholson said it in the movie “Bucket List”. It’s a powerful and true statement about life.

It has a similar thought process to one of my favorite verses from Scripture. Ecclesiastes 11:3: “If clouds are full of water, they pour rain on the earth. Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there it will lie.”

It reminds me that

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Three Ways I Process Ideas

By Innovation, Leadership, Life Plan, Organizational Leadership, Team Leadership

Perhaps this has happened to you…

You read a Tweet…you hear a message…you read a book, blog post or article…it gives you an idea, encourages you, prompts you to want to take action on the idea…

If you are like me, that thought can soon become lost in a sea of other thoughts and ideas and, as great as it may have seemed at the time, the idea never becomes reality in your life. Weeks, months, or even years later you may even hear the same idea again and remember that you never did anything with it the first time…

I often am asked: How do you capture great ideas and make them useful in your life?

Here’s a simple system I use…there’s nothing extremely genius about this, but for me it had to become a habit to be successful. Others will have better systems, but this is what I do:

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A Week of Thanksgiving – People Who Helped You Professionally

By Call to Ministry, Church, Church Planting, Encouragement, Leadership

Thanksgiving should be more than a day.

In the United States, we set aside one day a year to ceremonially show our appreciation for all we have been given. No one would disagree that this practice shouldn’t be limited to just once day. With that in mind, I thought I’d use part of my blog this week to share a little gratitude. Throughout this week I’ll be sharing some things and people I’m thankful for in my life.

Today I want to talk about people who have had a huge impact on me professionally. I’m a pastor now. I haven’t always been one. I was in the business world for many years before God called me into ministry. When I think of the process God used to prepare me for ministry, three men immediately come to mind. There are many people along the way who have helped me, but these three made significant investments in my spiritual maturity and preparation for ministry.

Here are three people who helped me be where I am today professionally:

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The Day My Blog Was Hijacked and How to Protect Yours

By Culture, Encouragement

One day this week, I was sitting at my desk and clicked on my blog home page. What I saw was the screenshot in this post, combined with a eerie instrumental tune. I had been hacked by so-called “Turkish Hackers”. I panicked and instantly called the one who maintains my blog (Thank you Tony!) He tells me the hackers replaced my index page with their own. To fix it, he downloaded the latest version from wordpress.org and uploaded the default index.php file to replace the hacked one. (I don’t understand how to do that, but that’s what he said he did.) My Twitter feed then went wild with people asking me what I did or what they could do to protect their blog.

One of our resident tech gurus (Thanks Jim) at Grace Community Church offers these suggestions to protect yourself from being hacked:

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Could God Be Stirring Something New in Your Heart?

By Call to Ministry, Church, Encouragement, Missions

Changes…

I talk to people every week who are struggling in their current ministry assignment. Sometimes ministry produces a mindset that what you are doing now you’ll always be doing or that you are somehow less than holy if you are considering other opportunities. I don’t know that that feeling can always be supported Scripturally.

God never promised everything would be the same. In fact, God seems to like change as I follow Him. Consider the amount of movement in the Apostle Paul’s ministry. He seemed to experience a great deal of change. If you are experiencing burnout, frustration, and even a little restlessness, could God be shaping you for something else?

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Friday Discussion: Are The New TSA Travel Requirements Fair?

By Business, Change, Culture, Innovation, Leadership

What’s your opinion?

Since 9/11traveling has become much more difficult and time consuming. Our government has assumed new responsibilities as we travel. I am thankful for the diligence of people involved in keeping us safe. Their work should never be taken for granted.

The most active story on my radar this week, however, has been that of the new TSA restrictions on travel.

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