My middle daughter sent me a text message this morning around 4:30 am letting me know I’d just added an 8lb 15oz, heavy-duty, arrow to my quiver:

Don’t you see that children are God’s best gift? the fruit of the womb his generous legacy? Like a warrior’s fistful of arrows are the children of a vigorous youth. Oh, how blessed are you parents, with your quivers full of children! Your enemies don’t stand a chance against you; you’ll sweep them right off your doorstep.

Yes, I know that applies to the dad; but genealogy place me squarely at the head of the line.

I’ve got some prolific children. Miles William Gann makes number 10!

He’s extra special… he now shares the date with my queen. Yessir! Double blessing is mine today!

Maybe I just don’t know how to use it; maybe I do and it just an irritating feature that lots of folks like. Maybe YOU can help me!

In Facebook, every time someone does anything –adds a friend, changes their profile picture, blows their nose, etc.– you are informed that this activity happened. How do I make it stop?

I have far more of that coming in than actual status updates. I often feel like a mind reader out in public… I’m hearing everyone’s inane thoughts about nothing and it’s driving me crazy!

I just had to pass this along…

If you are interested in getting an original iPad, I have access through a contact. These are new units and are in the original factory wrapping, not off the back of a truck. They are from a hospital contract that was canceled due to government cutbacks.

The numbers are limited – the fellow only has twenty and they are going for less than half price, so it’s first come first serve.

He has already sold one (pic is below so you can see what you are getting).

Get back to me as quick as you can if you want one.

Three surgeons are discussing who makes the best patients to operate on.

The first surgeon says, “Electricians are the best. Everything inside
is color-coded.”

The second surgeon says, “No, I think librarians are. Everything inside them is in alphabetical order.”

The third surgeon shut them up when he said, ” You’re both wrong. Politicians are the easiest to operate on. They have no guts, no heart, no balls, no brain and no spine. Plus the head and rectum are interchangeable.”

I’ve been in hell a lot recently.

Not the figurative one, the literal one. And to be technically correct, I haven’t been physically there; I’ve been immersed in the concept of it.

I’ve been reading many authors, including those in the Bible, and am beginning to realize that I don’t know much about hell. I guess you could say I don’t know a hell of a lot about it. I find that strange because I thought I knew everything about it.

I must thank the detractors of Rob Bell and his book on Hell (Love Wins) for generating this interest.

Like so many of the tenets of belief in the Nazarene, what you may initially perceive may not necessarily be the reality. We are far too quick to shoot first and sort it all out later. This is true not just on this topic but on so many of those things we call doctrines and theology.

This has created many walking wounded. It has sent many running in the opposite direction, disgusted, abused and angry. It has guaranteed that countless others will refuse to hear the offer.

Some will not hear what I’m saying and will put words in my mouth that I’ve not spoken nor implied. That is sad.

Hell is very real. Do we even comprehend what that means? Is it necessary to make it the reason for accepting heaven? I fear that such a stance is a doctrinal faux pas.

I love it when somebody “gets it.”

Misconceptions, illusions, outright lies and then, suddenly, the light comes on. The look on their face is priceless. The change that comes about in their life is nothing short of miraculous. Keeping it can be work.

Oh, what complicated webs we can weave!

Destroying the lie of who we think we are can be difficult; living as who we really are can be downright impossible.

Unless the lights come on. And the door stays locked after the “guest” is escorted out.

I’ll be explicit… I am the Gate for the sheep. All those others are up to no good—sheep stealers, every one of them. But the sheep didn’t listen to them. I am the Gate. Anyone who goes through me will be cared for—will freely go in and out, and find pasture. A thief is only there to steal and kill and destroy. I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.

You cannot do it by yourself. Cell life. Its a necessity.

All levity aside, I am a bit concerned about Hurricane Irene.

More properly stated, I’m concerned about all the hype that occurred around Hurricane Irene. For us here in North Carolina, she is now history. Yet, they still are not diminishing their prognostications of doom for the northeast. It is rather obvious, it was not about the storm.

I am in favor of taking precautions in the face of a potentially traumatic event. We are living in a post-Katrina world and that colors everything that we do. That is understandable. That is what has given us seat belts, bike helmets and product recalls. The motive behind it is laudable, the implementation is overkill.

So it is with hurricanes, and more recently on the east coast, earthquakes.

When you close the New York subways days before an obviously weakening storm arrives; when the television spews out imagery and vocabulary indicating the end of the world in the face of a storm that is rapidly dropping from a Category 3 to a Category 1; when the President appears on camera warning of a natural holocaust when history and professional veterans of such meteorological events scratch their collective heads in disbelief; when there are runs on the supermarket, not for bread and milk but for beer … something is wrong.

The merchants of fear are in charge and they are offering up sales of historic proportions.

As the ancient sage might say, “This doest me concern…”

Living in a beach community has its perks.

It also has its downside.

One of the downsides is raising its interesting head… hurricanes. In particular, one named Irene, is “bearing down” on Wilmington, NC and the mentality here is something akin to the end of the world. A decade ago, moving into Wilmington, we were hit by three tornadoes in a row. Having been out of that particular mindset for many decades, I find it rather interesting the way the fear has been ratcheting up all over again.

We were blessed for almost a decade with very little activity, but it looks like there’s going to be a run on the supermarkets for bread and milk.

Heat, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes… maybe living at the beach isn’t all it’s chalked up to be…

I have always thought small groups were important in the church.

Ever since reading Roland Allen’s Spontaneous Growth of the Early Church and rediscovering (perhaps discovering for the first time) the growth of the church in Acts, I knew that most of the small groups I participated in came no where close to the cellular nature of what the first century church experienced. Reading the accounts of the underground Chinese church, the church behind the iron curtain and the church in Latin America, I remember thinking how sweet it would be if that were the norm for the church in the U.S.

I simply assumed that since I couldn’t find it, didn’t experience it, nor knew anyone who had, that “those times” had simply passed.

Recently reading Neil Cole’s Organic Church for a third time, I had one of those singular epiphanies that teleport your perception of everything into the future, instantly. In what might have taken years to arrive at, I saw it as clear as day. It was “cellular,” not “small.” Everything takes place at the cellular level and it is about cellular multiplication. That is where life is experienced; that is what grows a body.

Last night I remembered reading Allen’s book for the first time in 1976. I remembered the longing to experience what he was narrating. I remembered it because I was experiencing it. Nine people gathered around one who had been diagnosed with a recurrence of cancer. Nothing else mattered. He was the object of our focus and attention. In a matter of minutes we were no longer gathered around a man on a couch, we literally entered a different dimension. Seventeen to seventy-seven, sixty years difference between the oldest and the youngest, but looking at each of them as they prayed, they all looked the same – enraptured.

Over the last two weeks I’ve had three of the weekly participants tell me that what we do each week is “real church.” I’ve watched real change occur in the life of several of them – honest, profound, life-changing metamorphoses. They come to the group even when they don’t feel like it, they look forward to it, they tell others about it. Their spiritual antenna are up and twitching.

They actually want more.

Amazing.