Tweet I’m so grateful for the opportunity this week in Sierra Leone. God has blessed us greatly, but there are a few things I know I won’t as easily take…
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Tweet In case you missed my earlier posts, I’m in Sierra Leone for a couple weeks. I will share more later, but wanted to give a quick update. We are…
Our children have become media junkies. The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released a study of children ages 8 to 18, which found, not surprisingly, that they are consuming a astounding amount of media entertainment each day. Children now consume an average of 7 ½ hours per day or 52 ½ hours per week of media saturation.
Daily media consumption of U.S. children:
That’s how we planted a church. We looked for people who were influencers within a circle of friends to find a core of people to start our church and we invested in them and released them to lead in the church. We continue to invest in influencer type people that come to our church to lead our ministry. I have personally looked for influencer type people to add to our staff.
The biggest question has been what we are to do while we wait to respond to this tragedy. Grace Community Church is a doing church. We have serving our community in our DNA. Our people have been anxious to do something tangible. In cooperation with local officials, however, we have been encouraged to wait. In the early stages of a disaster like this, mass numbers of people are not the greatest need. The safety of people, stabilizing the community, and assessing needs of the community is where the community is focusing attention.
Perhaps that’s your story today. The journey has gotten much harder than you expected and the days ahead seem unbearable. Some days you would just rather quit trying.
It’s a great story and I hope you will read it again. My purpose of this post is not the main theme of the story; my focus is the little boy. We tend to read this story for the purposes of David and Jonathan, and while they are certainly central characters in God’s story, so was the little boy.
This was honestly a challenging message for me to deliver to our church, but I’m afraid many times as believers we are tempted to look for the comfortable over the things that God would call us to do. Listen to last weeks message as I share some “encouragement” not to get too comfortable.
The people Joshua was supposed to be leading were not going in the direction he was supposed to be taking them. The Israelites had fallen to the ways of the world, following other gods, and choosing to reject their commitments made to God and to Joshua.
It’s Saturday…time for another dream stretch! I promise not to take this into perpetuity, but I really do believe the world needs a few more dreams. You can read more about my thoughts in the first dream stretch post HERE.