For God’s Sake Archive

My wife and I recently spent a morning running errands. We emerged from our neighborhood into a thick blanket of marine fog. Visibility on Navarre Parkway was less than a quarter of a mile.

The bridge to Navarre Beach arched into a misty uncertainty. Buildings and trees emerged from the mist as faint shadows and only gradually took on definition.

“It’s over already? That was short!” said 4-year-old Killian after a recent Sunday service at COMPASS Church.

Out of the mouth of babes! Most often, the variable in the service’s length is the length of my sermon, and such was the case that Sunday.

My obsession with coffee had me driving to a market in Pensacola for a specific, locally roasted coffee when a myriad of coffee products is available around the corner.

As I entered the coffee aisle, my access to the bean dispensers was blocked by a bewildered couple in conversation with another customer who occasionally pointed to the dispensers in answer to their questions.

True confession: whenever I am in a grocery store checkout line, I read the covers of the tabloids.

This is where I learn “what really happened” in the lives of all of those celebrities in whom I have zero interest.

Have you ever made a gaffe in public that was embarrassing, like, dig-a-hole-and-climb-in-it embarrassing?

One particularly memorable gaffe that had me longing for a shovel happened at another church in the same community where I was a pastor.

I am like a kid when it comes to Christmas. On our first Christmas together, I excitedly asked my wife the night before,

“When do you want to open gifts?” She answered, “Tomorrow morning is fine.” What an adult!

“For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,” the Apostle Paul wrote in a letter from a prison. He was not disillusioned and looking to end it all. “If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me.

Yet which I should choose, I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.”

The other day while grocery shopping, an older couple hustled by me headed for the dairy section.

In addition to their spryness, what made them stand out was that they were dressed identically, tan shorts, navy top, white crew socks and identical athletic shoes. I thought to myself, “I wouldn’t be caught dead!”

A group of men from Compass Church and I have begun meeting weekly to study the book “Disciplines of a Godly Man” by R. Kent Hughes.

This excellent book is founded on the command in the Bible for Christians to “discipline” themselves for godliness. The author begins by highlighting famous, successful men, who made their craft look easy.

My idea of an enjoyable morning is sipping coffee with my wife at a café and watching the world pass by. Our favorite perch when we lived in Naples was a bagel shop in a very busy plaza.

On Friday mornings, we’d seat ourselves at a table facing the small, very full, parking lot to watch the clumsy ballet of cars attempting to enter and exit.