A Stone's Throw

It has been a blast reading all of the comments from the Regeneration Devotional Blog. It is really cool to realize that we are all looking at the same passage and God is speaking to each and every one of us in our own ways. It is really great to see how God uses many different verses to speak to each of us differently. I pray that the Lord will really grow me as a follower this 21 days. I wrote in my journal that I really need the Lord’s help to be disciplined to keep us for the 21 days. I want that 21 days to create a habit of a daily walk with Christ through his Word. I know it is going to pay great dividends when I sacrifice to spend time in the Bible.

Here is what I wrote in a comment of day one. I also wrote this encouragement to all of us:

Great comments and insight on this first day of the CHALLENGE!! Let’s keep it up . . . and lurkers (you know who you are), register, log in and CONTRIBUTE!! Join the 21 Day Challenge journey!

We have been talking about how to really begin to grow in your relationship with Christ in our series BE. Today, we talked about how important Bible reading and journaling is to the spiritual maturity of every believer. I challenged each of

us to read the Bible for 21 days–enough tim e to create a new habit. The Gospel of John has, you guessed it, 21 chapters; so we are going to read through the Gospel of John for this challenge. We are going to begin a series based on the Gospel of John following the BE series, so it should be really cool to see how God is going to speak to our church family before we journey together in the series.

I think there is going to be a ton of power as our whole family studies John together. There is really going to be a real sense of community–especially if you want to comment on our Regeneration Devotional Blog. We had a great response last year this time with our online devotional tied into Regeneration. We are going to continue that Regeneration Devo Blog with this 21 Day Challenge. Head on over there, grab a Bible and a journal, and make sure and comment on what God is saying to you.

I have had a PowerMac G4 tower for almost 5 years without a problem. It is still plugging away for me, but it sure isn’t very portable! There are times, like this week, when I have to do work from home and have to lug around the computer to so I can be around the family. But there is a new sheriff in town boys. (See comment from Brad Daily!) This brand spanking new Macbook Pro is going to (hopefully) last me another 5 years–but this time with a lot of portability!

I bought my first Mac in 1992 from my Sunday School teacher, who was a professional graphic artist. It was a Macintosh SE with a humongous internal hard drive of 40 MB!! I actually took out an installment loan for $1400 from Empire Bank and made monthly payments for a couple of years. It helped me write many a paper in both college at SMS and SWBTS. I loved that little thing and used it in ministry all the way until we moved back from Texas in 1998.

I got a PC in 1996 when we were living in Tulsa when my Mac hard drive (all 40 MB) crashed one late Sunday night while writing a paper for seminary. Of course the procrastination didn’t help as the paper was due the next day. Needless to say, the paper was a week late and we had an unexpected expense the next week. But once you go Mac, you never go back. Honestly the pricing was the major issue in not purchasing a Mac in seminary. My pastor at the time was a huge Mac guy, so the church I was serving in had several Macs in use and my SE (with new external hard drive–a whopping 100 MB variety) was my work computer.

I had a laptop at Hopedale when I was youth pastor, but it eventually died after we launched Finley Crossings. I had a lady walk up to me in the library a couple of weeks after that and gave me a check to go buy a new computer to do “whatever we needed it to do.” At the time, we really wanted to be able to do video and graphic design, so the Mac was the choice. The laptop version that would do what the desktop would do was way too expensive, so I gave up portability for power. It really is awesome to get the portability and flexibility back.