Reading, Reading Plans, Plans, and revisions…

Hello all!

School is clicking along nicely as we plunged right through 3rd quarter and into 4th quarter!  We had this week off for Semana Santa, otherwise known as Holy Week, and will end the school year with a flourish of 8 straight weeks with merely a single Tuesday off…should be fun.  I’m not sure who will be looking forward to the end of school more, the students or ME!

I’ve been taking some high school students through The Truth Project on Friday nights.  It’s been slow going simply because there’s been so much going on with our Fridays!  I played a bit role as the male narrator in last night’s Good Friday cantata (no, I didn’t have to sing {frowny face}) and the week before was the day we left for our Crossfire (youth group) weekend retreat where I lead the 9th and 10th grade English speaking male small group.

Speaking of the retreat…It was very good.  The theme was “Sold Out” and the text was from Revelation when God was speaking to the church at Laodicea.  Yowza!  I think the sermons hit home with many of the kids and it seemed that many of them are looking to make changes in their lives that represent what they  believe…or at least it seems that way.

One can always tell the ones that are truthful about it because I’ve received some email messages about what to do, how to go about it, and a litany of other questions about biblical issues…which is awesome!  I love being the “old guy” in the crowd…no…wait…

Oh well.

So one of the ideas was simply to read the bible.  I remember John MacArthur submitting a reading plan whereby he would take a short book, or a long book an divide it up into 10-15 minute segments, and read it every day for 30 days!  After three years you’ve read the entire New Testament 30 times!

I’ve done this before with 1 Timothy, 1 Thessalonians, and Romans.  I’ve now chosen to go through 1 John in this manner as well.  A couple of my students I suggested to go through Jude because it was short and they’d have no excuses to get it done!

It’s been great because I get almost daily reminders/questions as to whether or not I’ve done my reading and I am being held accountable for my actions by the students that I mentor.  I love it!

I’ve also been keeping up on my secular, teeny-bopper reading, by the way.  I read all three books of the Hunger Games.  They were easy reads; very quick and painless to get through except for the author’s emotionally driven, hormonally driven forays into dreams that had nothing to do with the plot at all. Or the author’s obvious bias to play to the female teenaged audience with the main character’s inability to come to grips with who she was as a person and which male counterpart actually would be better for her in the long run, etc.  FYI…she ends up with the completely and totally wrong person in the end!

But I digress…

So my reading plan is going great thus far.  I’m a couple weeks in and only missed a couple days of reading 1 John so far!  I love 1 John.  John is so black or white in his descriptions of what is going on and what it required of the true believers in Christ Jesus.  It’s really amazing!  But I’m not here to spoil your fun of reading the New Testament.  I’m here to talk about revisions and in writing these plans in pencil!

So I said all that by way of introduction into what I’d like to say now!  Anyway, Allison and I have seen our trip to Panama to be one completely cool blessing after another.  We also view this as a stepping stone to……………………………

Well, we don’t know to what!  But that’s the neat thing about it.  I’m beyond convinced (hyperbole much?) that God picked up this family and carried us to Panama not ONLY for me to teach and raise the level of rigor of the courses and to hammer biblical worldview into their brains through the study of science topics…not ONLY to serve as some sort of mentor by bringing a bunch of high school students through The Truth Project on Friday nights and investing in their lives and them investing in mine…not ONLY in being a small group leader to the youth group on Wednesday nights and holding them accountable for their actions and their beliefs and answering their questions…not ONLY in helping my lovely wife set up a small group to start this coming August/September for adults and bringing them through the Love and Respect series to strengthen marriages…not ONLY to begin to learn the language…not ONLY to bring my kids to a foreign country so that they know the U.S. was not their true citizenship but Heaven above…not ONLY to do some short term mission trips to the villages of the indigenous peoples…but for something else.

I have no idea what the something else is.  If you’ve prayed about it and you know what the something else is, please clue me in so I can pursue it.

So pray with me, pray for me, pray for Ali, pray for the kids, pray for us as a family, pray for what God wants to make obvious to us for Him to simply make it obvious to us.  There are some cool options that have popped up in the last 9 months that are intriguing for sure.  But we simply want to seek God’s face and have Him speak to us about what He would have us do.  I’m convinced we are being trained right now, right where we are, for God’s work that He would have us do.  And He will have us do it in His own time.

But again, if you’ve heard the Spirit, and the Spirit is tugging at you to mention something to us…please do.

Thanks a million!  We could not be here without the prayer support of people who love us!  Keep in touch as much as possible.  And let me know if there’s anything I, or we, can do for you!

Soli Deo Gloria