Pastor John’s Blog

I’ve heard people say losses tend to happen in groups of three. Over the last two weeks we’ve had three senior members of our church …

Over the last few Sundays I’ve asked everyone to consider giving extra to help the church come across the finish line of the financial year …

Every culture is shaped by its legends. One story that has formed our American ethos is the moment George Washington, after cutting down his father’s …

Years ago a friend with a discipleship ministry shared the importance of developing what he called a “cathedral building” mindset. My first reaction was, “I’m …

47 year-old Pastor Justin Buzzard did something this week that most sane people would avoid: he took the field in his first college football game …

91 year old Dale Sanders shows us the value of endurance through falls in an article about being the oldest hiker of the Appalachian trail.

I remember the first time I learned about fly-fishing. I knew of fly-fishing in general, though I had never actually seen it in real life. Then I met Chuck Farneth. This guy was crazy about fly-fishing. It’s almost all he talked about. If you spent two minutes with him, he’d find a way to turn the conversation to fly-fishing. He tied his own lures (called “flies”), loved leading father-son trips, and he has spent all day standing in the river in the same spot hunting down “the’big one” (even skipping food because “you can eat any time, you can’t fish any time”). What I found most interesting about his passion was how he would practice his casting for an hour a day, in the street, in front of his house. There’s nothing stranger than seeing a guy fishing the pavement for an hour in the evening, but he didn’t care; he was that dedicated to improving his craft, because he was crazy about fly-fishing.

This week we will be looking at the passage in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says that His disciples are to be like salt and light. As we will see, that means a number of things, but one thing for sure is that a small number of disciples have influenced the entire world. Their actions and their efforts to tell others about Jesus have ended up spreading throughout the world. We are called to live in a way that the world notices something different about us. The way we act should point them to Jesus.

Probably a more relevant analogy is the hunger we see in a healthy teenager. It seemed in my high school years that food was almost always at the forefront of my mind. I could never get enough, always asking my lunch-mates “are you going to eat that?” There is a ravishing hunger that hits at that age that seems insatiable. In fact, if a teenager is not hungry, it usually points to something being wrong, because a healthy teen should have a healthy appetite.  

Now Dan found himself holding his breath while he waited for the boat and Trevor to pop up again. There were no more docks after this one so everything should have been fine. He should pop up and swim to the edge; except this time neither the boat nor Trevor popped up. They had been pushed down and trapped in the cables under the dock. Trevor was being held against the boat with the force of the water pushing against him. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what was right-side up. He didn’t know if he could get away from the boat and, if he did, he wasn’t sure which direction to swim. He was panicking and quickly running out of air.