Latest Update

I thought I’d give you a little update on our status. This is for those friends who want to stay in touch with us and know where the Lord is taking us. 

We moved from El Paso, Texas to Homosassa, Florida, a rather drastic change. We’re settled into our house, but there are still boxes all over the floors and nothing’s yet hung on the walls to decorate anywhere. Lynn has been looking for a job. I haven’t been looking yet, because I’ve been busy with my online master’s degree studies.

My first eight-week session is over. I took two required courses and got two A’s. One course was all about writing and being an online graduate student. The other was on biblical hermeneutics, the art and science of biblical interpretation. I didn’t want to take either, because I want to get on with the “deeper things.” But both were useful courses. In the writing course, I learned a lot of good stuff about writing more effectively, and also gained a little more understanding of practical things like doing online research and even how to make a YouTube video, something I’ve put to use on this website!

The hermeneutics course wasn’t something I wanted to take, because I’ve already done courses on that subject, and felt I knew pretty much about it. But our assignment each week was to take a passage of scripture given to us by the professor and meditate on it, reading it over and over. Then we had to write ten observations from it, ten things we saw about the structure of the writing, the words used, the way the author put it together, the connections between sentences and paragraphs, etc. From those observations we were to write ten “interpretive questions,” asking what was meant by the verses, why the author probably wrote them as he did, what they implied, and things of that nature. Then we were to answer two of our own questions and write an application for believers today.

Some of those applications I have posted on this website and you can read them. I’ll let you guess which ones they are! One thing I learned from doing this I want to pass on to all of you.

It’s amazing what you can get out of the Word of God if you’ll just spend some time with it. Martin Luther once said something about how light and warmth don’t penetrate well into rushing waters, but they do penetrate and warm still waters. The point is that rushing through the Word yields some light and some warmth, but meditating and taking time with the Word yields so much more!

Doing my observations made me again thankful that I’ve been a pastor and Bible teacher, because that has made me spend time with the Word and enabled me to learn so much more from it. But it also made me feel a little guilty that I don’t do it more, even when I don’t have to teach or preach something from it! Any passage you select and meditate upon will yield light if you give it time. God speaks through His Word more than in any other way. People run around to conferences and such, trying to learn how to “hear the voice of God,” when actually, the voice of God is right there in the Bible if we’ll only calm down and read it, savor it, meditate and ponder it!

We’ve had one week off from studies, but I’ve already received my books and syllabi from the next 8-week session, which starts next week. I’ll be taking one course in spiritual formation and discipleship and one in Old Testament History. Stay tuned, and I’ll share what I learn from those courses. It’s interesting, this studying online. One of my professors was in upstate New York, one in North Carolina, one in Virginia, and now, I’m going to have one who pastors a church north of San Francisco!

Our greatest prayer request is for jobs and finances right now. We gave up a salaried position to go live in the swamps, totally disconnected from everything. Only God can provide for us here, but we’re trusting He’ll do that somehow.

Oh, one more thing. We’ve visited Hal Hester’s Vineyard church, about 30 miles or so from here, and we enjoyed it. (He used to work at Vineyard NE.) But we’ve been attending a tiny little country church about five minutes from our house with about 15 people the last few Sundays, and we’ve enjoyed that. We’re not sure where we’re going to end up, but God has His people all over the place.

Thanks for reading this little update. We hope to stay in touch with you and that you’ll email, call, or text. You can even comment on the website itself. May God’s richest and best be yours!