BLeach

Robert William King

Yesterday my sister surprised our family by having her baby almost three weeks early!  Robert William is five pounds, five ounces.  He's just a little guy with blue eyes and blonde hair. 

It feels great to be an uncle.  I already got in trouble within the first hour by trying to feed Robert some Cheez-its.  He looked hungry:)

It was great to have Leah in town for the delivery.  She was planning to drive back to Pittsburgh yesterday.  When Betsy went into labor in the morning she was able to stick around a few extra hours to experience the birth of our first nephew.  Since yesterday also marked 100 days until our wedding, it was a special day all the way around:)

Back in Class

Yesterday I started the second class in my new Master's Program.  So far so good!  The focus of this class is Pastoral Ministry.  We're zooming out and taking a bird's eye view at the local church.  It's comprehensive (and just a bit overwhelming!)

The program is built around a systematic, principle based model for local church ministry.  In other words, it isn't method specific.  That was one of the selling points to me regarding this specific program.  In fact, the makeup of our cohort is an extremely diverse collection of lead pastors from a large variety of communities.  I'm one of the younger guys.  The age range in our group ranges from 25 to just over 60.

The diversity has really energized class discussions and enabled me to soak up a tremendous amount of experience.  Yesterday I listened for a few hours as seasoned pastors shared lessons they've learned in ministry.

It's priceless.  Expensive:)  But priceless!

Dreamers and Detours

On August 26, Leah and I had a great time tag-team preaching while announcing our engagement and sharing the story.  The message (The Dreamer Who Took a Detour) was just added to our podcast.  It's definitely worth a listen just to hear Leah.  She was funny and profound and even made fun of me a little.  Check it out here!

By the way, Leah's portion of the message may raise some questions for you.  Just to clarify, I did get my shots before I left for Africa.

And all the procrastinators said Amen:)

Two Men and a Baby

Any weekend is a great weekend when Tony and Jamie Sebastian are around!  Tony and Jamie are two of my best friends from college.  They've been recently approved to become career missionaries in Greece and are traveling to raise prayer and financial support.  They'll actually be living in Thessaloniki (the Apostle Paul's old stomping grounds).  You can follow their journey here.

Tony did an incredible job sharing their story at our church yesterday and I felt a fresh burden for the 10-40 window.  The bad news is that spiritual progress has been slow in the city that inspired 1 and 2 Thessalonians.  The good news is that Thessaloniki is a wide open mission field filled with opportunity.

It's so refreshing to be with great friends.  And it's inspiring to see them take such a significant faith-inspired risk.