Fat Pastor Friday: The Turkey Trot

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and rewarded yourself a little bit (but not to much) with some turkey and cranberry sauce. Odds are if you have implemented some kind of exercise routine you skipped it yesterday, it’s ok everyone deserves a day off and they are very good for your body. But don’t let a day off become the first day you decided to stop exercising. Do something today to exercise, take a walk, climb the stairs, do some pushups, whatever, but don’t loose the momentum that you’ve been building you’ve worked to hard to throw it away now. Take a turkey trot around the block and plan out your  next season of living a healthier lifestyle!

Stop looking for loopholes and just do what the Bible says.

The other day I was listening to a conversation about whether or not the Bible allowed someone to do a certain thing and I just had to laugh. People are always looking for a loophole in the Bible, they read something that they do not like or that challenges them to live a certain way and we try to reason our way out of doing it by finding a loophole ex: who is my neighbor? how many times do I have to forgive? Could you imagine what the Bible would look like if the authors had to write out a defense to all the different loopholes we try to super impose into the scripture? Here’s a thought…

Stop looking for the old Tiger Woods and the old You, THEY’RE NEVER COMING BACK!

I am a huge golf fan, I play it, I read about it, I watch it on TV, and I even dream about it (sad I know) Even if you’re not as addicted to the game as I am odds are you have heard about the saga of Tiger Woods if by some chance you have been living under a rock for the past year or so let me catch you up. Tiger was caught having multiple affairs while married which resulted in him getting a divorce, loosing most of his sponsors and basically throwing away a legacy in the game of golf that was indescribable. Ever since everything came out about Tiger his golf game has been atrocious he has gone from the top of food chain to the absolute bottom of the barrel. One of the biggest questions revolving around Tiger is whether or not we will ever see the old Tiger Woods again.

Everyone wants Tiger to get back to the way he was before everything happened, when he used to walk on the course and just about be guaranteed a win. I would argue that the old Tiger is NEVER coming back nor should we want him to.

Do you suffer from Messiah syndrome?

Yesterday I read a quote from Perry Noble that said: “when a leader refuses to allow his experts to be the expert…he will eventually have no experts left.” A big danger we face as leaders is believing that we are the only ones who know how to do everything. In my opinion the messiah syndrome is one of the best ways to stifle the creativity and passion of a team of people, and ultimately you end up putting God in a box because you do not allow Him to work through the other people on your team because your to concerned with coming in to save the day.

Alright God you hide and I’ll seek.

I was reading this morning in Proverbs where it says “if you seek me, you will find me.” I know for me there have been times in my life where I was playing hide and seek with God. I think we’ve all been there at some point in our lives. We are going through something and we look for God and it seems like we just can’t find Him.

Well, we see all over the bible that if we look for him we will find him, I think the problem happens when we look for him for a few minutes/days/weeks/ etc… and if we don’t find him right away we give up looking.

Let the bible be the hope that we need that if we keep looking for him we will find him.

Question: How can you look for God today?

Fat Pastor Friday: Necessito Agua

One of the most important things to remember when trying to lose weight and live a healthier lifestyle is that staying hydrated is key. Drinking water will allow your body to flush out the garbage inside of you and keep you feeling rejuvenated. If you are feeling hungry during the day…

Plug and play

Yesterday I talked about how your relationship with Jesus is going to be unique and that we need to be willing to look for Him and experience Him in a lot of different ways instead of just trying to fit Him into a form or mold. But then I also said that your methods might look different but the principles of a relationship with Jesus are the same for all of us. Here are 3 principles that we should all practice daily in our relationship with Jesus. Again, how you practice them is between you and God.

Amoeba God

One of the most important things someone must realize about their relationship with Jesus is that it will look different for everyone. God is simply to big and to artistic to put all of our relationships with Him into a structure or a mold. We need to look at our relationship with Jesus more like an amoeba, an amoeba doesn’t fit or hold to one specific shape it changes and free forms as it moves.

When you try to fit God into a structure or form of some kind you are essentially robbing yourself of experiencing one of God’s best qualities: his creativity.

Do as I say AND as I do

Something that I am constantly challenged with in leading students is the idea that I need to be modeling the type of relationship with Jesus that I am challenging others to have. It is very easy to get up in front of people and TELL them how they are supposed to live but it’s a lot harder to SHOW them. The Apostle Paul his letter the church at Philippi challenged them that whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or SEEN in me – put it into practice…

The crucial question every leader must wrestle with…

There is one critical question for anyone in a leadership position to wrestle with and answer if they are truly serious about becoming a better leader and the question is this: “Do I have access to the type of leader I want to become?” As leaders we should always be striving to become better at what we do but we are never going to be able to do that if we don’t have someone (or a group of someone’s) in our lives who can show us the way.

Our talent can only take us so far in our roles and we definitely don’t know everything there is to know about leading, so if we truly care about becoming the best leader we could possibly be we need to be sure that we have access to the type of leader that we want to become. If we don’t we will never achieve the results we want in our leadership roles. Take some time today and define the type of leader that you hope to become, and then wrestle with this question. If you don’t have access to this type of leader then do what needs to be done so that you do.

Question: do you have access to the type of leader you want to become?