This past year was a good year for reading for me. I enjoy reading and have started listening to audio books while I run or work out. For those of you familiar with strengths finder I have input, ideation and learner in my top five strengths meaning that I spend a lot of time…
Don originally posted this in 2015 – his 20th wedding anniversary. December of 2025 found them celebrating their 30th anniversary! And all these thoughts are still accurate… In desperation and youth Linda and I chose to get married 2 days before Christmas in 1995. We were so very young. I finished my final, final exam…
I am back after a month long sabbatical. I have been to the mountain top, and I have returned with many words of wisdom. Or put in a less dramatic way, I am back after a refreshing break. God did impress upon me several things while I was away. Some of them more personal in…
Through the various stages of church planting, I have often had to dig deep and ask some tough questions. Why start another church . . . in West Michigan of all places? Where is this thing going? Now that we have some stability, have we arrived? Why isn’t there a good Mexican restaurant in…
Every once in a while I get the chance to go to a professional conference or an afternoon lecture for pastors. This past week Cornerstone University (where I completed my bachelor’s degree) had a conference for pastors on Mackinac Island at the Grand Hotel. It was an amazing time away of reflection and networking…
In light of entering my seventh year as the lead pastor, the board of ReCAST church decided to offer me a month long sabbatical and a bonus. I am so grateful for this opportunity to take the month of November to read, pray, and spend some time away in reflection. I do not know…
A church is a gathering of people. People need organization. Pastor’s are either very organized or very not organized. I am not very organized. So in the vacuum left by our associate pastor’s move to a new ministry and our office administrator’s move to South Korea, we had some huge gaps at the start…
The new clothes have been purchased and are all lined up in the closet. The pencil top erasers are all ready to remove some rare mistakes. The trapper keepers are all stocked with lined and ruled notebook paper. Okay, maybe not trapper keepers . . . But some of you knew what I was…
I have been a member of Anytime Fitness since January and have been there doing cardio or lifting a few times a week. Fitness and motivational speeches go together like coffee and doughnuts! And sometimes I roll my eyes and find the posters and “you can do it, rah, rah” type stuff a bit…
For a handful of us, we remember that awkward talk with our parents. THE talk. The one where many parents blushed and searched for words, mumbled some things under their breath and talked about the act of procreation. For many of us we never had that talk. We just kinda pieced things together from…
I just read a jarring headline that will be effecting my running routine for months to come. I am running low on podcasts and another pastor that I listen to regularly just resigned due to an affair. It makes me both sad and angry . . . I guess kinda “”sangry”. I am not so much…
I cannot speak to the topic of fatherhood as an expert. I do not have a degree in sociology nor psychology. But I have been a son and am now a dad. Further, I can speak to what it has meant to be a young man growing up without my dad in my life. My…
