Sometimes in life I find myself consumed with the daily responsibilities that surround me to the extent that I lose focus of what really matters. At the end of the day when I reflect on what occurred, I wonder if anyone was drawn closer to Christ today on account of me. As I grow older the busyness of life in switching from one role to the next (husband, employee, student, father) often steals my focus away from the eternal and to the temporal.

It seems that even with the best intentions and the most sincere prayers, we as children of God sometimes neglect to see the opportunities for meaningful and potentially life-changing conversations that God has placed right in front of us. My prayer is that God will extend his patience to us in the same way that he did the Israelites and continue to provide us opportunities to serve as his ambassadors, and that we will keep our eyes focused on the prize to see the opportunities put before us each day.

Today has been a mad crazy day.  I was late to work (just a few minutes, but it still makes me feel rushed the rest of the day).   Later, I was helping a co-worker with a program he has been working on for about 4 months and I broke it.  I also fixed it, but it took me about an hour and nearly gave both of us a heart attack.  I barely had time to pause for lunch – at my desk.  I spent most of the rest of the day developing a report and trying not to break anything else.  It was a long day.  And I left work 2 hours early for a doctor’s appointment.  On days like this, it’s easy to find things to complain about.  But when I stop and think about the simple things that make me happy, I realize that the day hasn’t been so bad.  On that note, here are just a few things (in no particular order) that brightened my day:

1. The “thwap, thwap, thwap” of my dog’s tail hitting against the wall as he patiently waited for me to get the door open when I came home from work  (I could probably list about a dozen things about Shark Dog that made me smile today, but this is my favorite one)
2. A good Beatles CD playing in the car
3. The Tuesday morning recap of last night’s episode of 24 with a co-worker who is also addicted to the show
4. Cashing our state tax refund check with Brian
5. The highlight of my day – spending the evening with Brian just catching up with him

I have to add one more about my dog – Shark Dog trying to sleep in my lap with his head resting on the table as I type this entry.  I hope you’ve found your smile today.

My life pretty much consists of work, church and Vienna-related preparations.  As part of our preparations, the team has developed a strategy to reach the lost in Vienna.  Brian has been working on documenting our strategy and I’ve been helping him with charts and graphs and such stuff.  I think that we have a pretty good strategy.  But it’s so easy to get wrapped up in strategy and planning and forget that it is God who is guiding us and God who is preparing the hearts of the people we will meet.

I’ve recently started rereading a book called Red Moon Rising (by Pete Greig and Dave Roberts) that tells the story of how the 24-7 prayer movement began.  I will probably share more about this book as I continue to read it, but what I read today really struck me.  It’s a little long, but worth the read.

I think there’s a danger spiritually, for many of us, that if God packed up and left town today we might not notice until tomorrow, or worse.  We have strategies and structures that can easily bypass the Holy Spirit, strategies for funding, strategic ways of prioritizing time and advancing the kingdom which were ignored completely by Jesus… He never established a Bible school and never even thought of a name for His ministry.  He prioritized people without influence, offended those with power, and apparently missed major ministry opportunities in order to picnic and pray.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to be organized.  God gave us common sense and calls us to be good stewards of our resources.  But if our techniques for time management, people management, and money management become automatic, we may well lose the dynamic leadership of the Spirit who is like fire and wind, a bird in flight, or a quiet whisper in the wake of calamities (30).

I don’t know what to say about this.  I like strategy.  I put a lot of stock into it.  But as I think back over the past two years of preparations, I realize that every good thing that has happened has been by the hand of God and not by any planning on my part.  It's exciting to see God at work.

In July of 2003 I got my first cell phone. Alisha and I each got one when we were first married and until last week we've always used those phones. That's nearly three years of use. The screens on these phones didn't even have color capability--they were black and green. So, last week we finally upgraded and now we each own a V3 RZR. She has the black, I have the silver (my heart is gold and silver is the closest, of the available colors, to the color of my heart; Alisha chose the color closest to the color of her heart). We chose the RZR because it will work in Europe and you can check your email on it, as well as text message.

Needless to say they have made vast improvements in the cell phone world from the time we bought our first phones, which means I will spend the next six months confused and afraid of a device I do not know how to operate (very similar to Jacques Chirac when he assumed the presidency of France). "If you do not master your rage, your rage will be your master." The Sphinx from the movie Mystery Men said that (actually, in the movies he was interupted by Mr. Furious so he only said the first half of that quotation, but that's a story for another day). I'm thinking of naming my phone Rage and just accepting the facts. So far I have failed four times to download "Sabatoge" by the Beastie Boys as my ringtone (I did get it to work on the fifth try).

Sabatoge was not my first choice, but it was a my fifth choice, however landing in the top five makes me content with my decision. My top five choices for cell phone ringtone: (5) "Sabatoge" by the Beastie Boys, (4) "Numb" by U2, (3) "What's the Frequency, Kenneth" by R.E.M., (2) "But there are no sprinklers here either." from the film The Royal Tenenbaums (that's a line from the movie, not a song), (1) A good Jimi Hendrix song would be cool, but unfortunately Mr. Hendrix has no ringtones.

Sometime I'll rant and rave about my failed attempts at text messaging. In the future, I hope I have information to share about our team and mission, for anyone interested in that.

Brian

I don't know if they are a fad or the next necessary method of communication, but these days it seems odd to have a webpage and not have a blog as well. So here is our team blog...for better or worse.

Here you will find information that we write about Vienna, ourselves, our families, our team, our experiences. I guess it adds a human touch to a venue (internet) that is otherwise void of humanity. I guess that is why blogs are so popular. So here is our human touch, not to be confused with the 1992 Bruce Springsteen album either (in my opinion he'll never top 1982's Nebraska and, of course, the immaculate Born to Run from 1975). For my money, it doesn't get any better than when he sings When a Man Loves a Woman...er, I mean Thunder Road. Seriously, though, is there any better rock song from the 70s than Thunder Road? I dare anyone out there to come up with a better rock song from the seventies, and if anyone names a song by Boston or Styx consider yourselves "band" from the blog.

I reckon that's all a man should write for a first blog.

Brian