Tag Archives: walk

Celebrating the New Life of Believers Baptism

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Cornerstone Church at Lee Scott Baptism Celebration Event

We had our second large outdoor baptism celebration last Sunday, and it was an amazing time to see new life rise up. Scripture has a lot to say about believers baptism, the most common probably being Matthew 28:29-30, but this isn’t our only call to baptism, and it isn’t our only example of people stepping out in faith to be baptized. One of my favorite baptism stories in Scripture comes from Acts 8:26-40 when Phillip is explaining a passage from Isaiah 53:7-8 to the eunuch. Phillip “told him the good news about Jesus” and the eunuch’s response was an exclamation point, one where you can almost see him jumping up and down with joy saying:

See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized? (Acts 8.26)

This shows the joy of following the commands of Jesus in baptism, not as a salvation sacrament, but as a step of public faith in the death and resurrection of Christ that we now share (Romans 6:3-6). That is the joy to participate in the baptism of Christ, and it shows when you look at these faces from our celebration below. I love the expressions on their faces, the joy of Christ radiates through their experience. Each time I watch people raised up into a new life in Christ I recall my own baptism with Deborah in Birmingham, it was one of those events in my life I will not forget, and I’m guessing these folks won’t either.

The full set of images from the day will be posted on our Flickr page soon and I am going to upload several more to my Facebook gallery soon.

Intentional and Consistent Time in God’s Word :: Friday Feet

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Friday Feet with the Word

Normall for my Friday Feet posts, which I know has been a while, I like to take a shot of what I was doing out and about during the day. After being outside for about 30 minutes in this heat I realized I wasn’t going back out again. Something that has been on my mind is this notion of being intentional about spending time in God’s word.

I use to get sick of hearing pastors tell me I should be reading the Bible, that is until I actually started reading it for all it’s worth, then I totally understood what in the world they were talking about. The Christian life, our daily walk, must have some component of daily strengthening in our relationship with Christ.

If praying is God’s way for us to talk to him, God’s word is His way of talking to us. How would our relationship with our spouse or children be if we listened to them as often as we listened to God through reading his Word?

Yesterday it hit me when I read this tweet by D.L. Moody (and The Resurgence). Then after that, still yesterday, I received a video from a friend of mine who basically said everything I was already thinking, so I stole his title and wrote my thoughts down as I tend to do.

While the conclusion Moody was probably making in the tweet may be true, the reality of 1% of men reading the Bible is… alarming, tragic, pathetic, pitiful, ridiculous, or whatever other adjectives you want to use here for us men.

It just made me wonder how can we truly lead our families without being grounded in God’s instruction? This isn’t a condemnation of everyone else, I have struggled with this for years. Every day I pray I have an overwhelming desire to spend time in God’s word.

There is no better time than today, right now, and it has never been easier in the history of the world to read God’s word. We have more access to the Bible and read it less than probably any generation before us. If you are busy, like most of us are, YouVersion’s selection of reading plans is outstanding. As far as online, web, mobile, and Internet resources that give you countless ways to read the bible, YouVersion has no match.

This morning, right before I took the photo above, I finished the Psalms in 31 Days YouVersion plan, which I have read a few times this year. Since going to work for the church in 2008 I had never had a more difficult time trying to stay grounded in God’s word, until I went through a spiritual disciplines study in one of my seminary classes in 2009-2010. Since then, I have been very intentional about spending time in God’s word every day (with a break on a specific routine in Saturday).

This was not something that was a light switch event, it took time, it took effort, and it was far easier to let it slide a day or two here or there, but now it has become routine, and when I miss a day, I really long for that time back. It’s no longer a dreaded, oh now I have to read, it’s a desire that makes me look forward to this time every day. I truly believe this desire to read came from my prayer for God to give me that desire, so prayer to read is important as well.

I am personally a canonical reader, I have a specific personal reading plan to read through the entire Bible each year, and this year I finished that in June, so I decided to just start over. I do this using three different reading plans on YouVersion, one for the entire bible called the Canonical Plan, one for the NT called New Thru 30, and one for Psalms I listed above. I do not use the time frame on the plan, just the order to keep me on track, but there are hundreds of plans to chose from. Trust me, there is one that fits within your schedule. If you don’t want to use YouVersion, there are countless other resources available, just pick one, and create a habit around it.

Anyway, there you have it, I wholeheartedly agree with those pastors who say daily reading of God’s word is important, very important. After all, your wife probably expects you to listen to her today, right? And God is supposed to be ahead of everything. There is no more important time in the day than the time we spend in God’s word. It affects everything else we do throughout the day and into the evening, even if it’s just a short time amount of time at first, it adds up over time.

It may not seem like it at first, but being intentional and consistently spending time in God’s word will strengthen your relationship with Christ, but also with your family, your spouse, your coworkers, and those who still haven’t heard the Good News.

Alabama Devastated by Storms This Week :: Friday Feet

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This week was one that won’t be forgotten any time soon in the state of Alabama, especially not in Tuscaloosa, Birmingham or Dadeville, but I think in many ways the storms took so us by surprise. At the moment there are at least 320 people dead from all the related storms and tornadoes and the news just seems to just keep coming even days after the storms have passed. It took about 24-48 hours for people around here to even realize what had happened but the videos from Tuscaloosa and Birmingham are just incredible. The Big Picture has a few images from the storm at Tornadoes kill over 200, and they are bound to have more soon. Some of those photo really are worth at least a thousand words.

I am reminded that even among all the damage, the flowers still blooms, the plants still grown, and God is in charge, even if we like to think we really are. A man at a gas station tonight was showing me photos of his cousins mobile home that took a direct hit from a tornado in Dadeville and there was nothing but an empty spot on the ground with a mailbox. He made the remark to me that “what would have taken months to clear by bulldozer a storm did in 30 seconds”. Yes, the power of man is no match for the power of nature.

I took these shots today on my iPhone as I walked around our property. While we did have a tree or two go down we were basically untouched by any of the storm damage and wild flowers were blooming and corn was growing in the fields. Such an amazing contrast for just 30-40 miles away from here. Our church is taking a collection up on Sunday to deliver to Tuscaloosa, if you are in the Auburn area and would like more information please visit Tornado // Disaster // Relief. All of the photos above were taken with my iPhone today except for the one of the rain, which was taken the day all the storms hit as we were driving back from Columbus, GA. I almost didn’t make it this Friday but with 90 minutes left in the day, this is my Friday Feet post. Have a good weekend everyone.

God Displays His Majesty Even in the Back Yard

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The photo of the day today was from a shot I took on my iPhone yesterday while I was walking in my backyard.  Walking later in the day when the sun is going down is often where I can meet God and just stare at His awe.

It’s often hard to capture or describe the beauty of the sun radiating through the clouds but this was about as good as my phone could do yesterday.

How Do You Make a Maximum Impact on Something?

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After using tumblr for two plus years i finally figured out what it is good for, rough drafts or incomplete thoughts. Where my blog is for more polished and complete thoughts, tumblr makes a great place to throw out the unpolished. Below is an unpolished, incomplete thought process of a blog post i am working on right now.

This question above is something i have been thinking about and struggling with for years, perhaps more than a decade. How do you do something that will make a lasting impact, that will make the maximum impact? The short of it is i have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter what it is you are talking about, it can be making an impact on anything, your work, missions, an individual, a blog, financially, or playing a video game.

My answer. To make the maximum possible impact you have to make small, incremental, continuous progress towards a stated, or unstated, goal, which continues to an almost unspecified length of time. This is how Dave Ramsey would tell people to build wealth, this is how you build a community on your blog, this is how you make a difference in a person’s life, you do it one small step at a time and keep working at it on a continual basis. What doesn’t work? Doing what i call dart-board ministry. Throwing darts at a board and either doing something only once, or continually changing your methods, objectives, and goals. This is the fastest and easiest way to kill all momentum and progress.

Perdido Key National Seashore Photos :: Friday Feet

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sea gull on the gulf coast

friday feet

bike ride in the gulf coast

plant in the sand

scott and deborah

parasailing

Today was our first and last full day on the gulf coast.  For January, the weather was beautiful but very very windy.  We went to one of our most favorite places in the Perdido Key area, the Gulf Islands National Seashore. We never really stay for more than a day or two down here but you pay for a 7-day pass ($8) and have access to one of the most wonderful white sand beaches on the Alabama/Florida gulf coast shore lines.

Every time we have been here the 5-7 mile stretch of beach has only a handful of people (today almost no one) and it seems to be one of those few areas in the country that still has pristine beaches and little sign of city life.  Our other favorite area like this is over on the Outter Banks of North Carolina which also has some of the most untouched beaches in the country. So for my Friday Feet post today, here is my feet image, and also a few more.  Tomorrow is it back to Auburn and back to work.

Can Technology Yield a Better Prayer Life?

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Prayer on Twitterscoop

In short, I would say, no.  There are so many things technology can do, especially with networks like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and all the others we know and love, but I am not sure if prayer is one of them when you look at the traditional definition of prayer, communicating with God.  There are sites like WeTheChurch that use technology with a basis of prayer, but aren’t they ultimately communicating with other readers about what they have already communicated with God?

How about Twitter.  Prayer, praying, and pray are all pretty active on Twitter and show in the graph from Twitterscoop.

Another one I like to look at is Google trends.  Anything that is technology certainly has Google’s mark on it somewhere.  But this is a stretch, most of this is talking about prayer, not actually in the act of praying.  The graph looks much different if we compare it with two terms most popular in the world, prayer, money, and sex.

Google Trends on Prayer

Prayer is a conversation or communicating between us and God, right?  If so, that means (for purposes of this post) that all created technology is basically a means of communication between people.  It may be between our wallet and the bank or the TV station to satellite to our living rooms, but more times than not, it seems to be a means of communication between ourselves.  We could stretch it and look at things like the movie Contact, or the SETI Institute (which does employ about 150 scientists) but so far we have been unable to use technology to communicate directly with God.

I have been going through a book given to me by the author called Six Prayers God Always Answers (I love the tag line, “Results May Vary”) and in one passage she talks about what constitutes prayer.

It seems our prayers well up around the things we love–a child, a spouce’s beauty, our own lives… then consider these expressions:

“God, help me.  I’ll never do it again.”
“God, are you there?”
“Save me, God”
“Please God”

People thoughtlessly invoke the name of God into the mundane (“Oh my God!”) and the profane (“Jesus Christ”).  Believers are offended–convinced it is disrespectful, even blasphemous.  Nonbelievers toss it up to a slip of the tongue… but what if these were really prayers? … Could Jesus see these outburtsts as a cry of a wounded brother or sister?  How do we know what is in the heart of those who utter such words?  Do we even know our own hearts?  God is the judge of these prayers.

This passage has nothing to do with technology in prayer, but it opened up my thinking a bit to what we here on earth consider to be prayer, so why can’t we use technology in prayer.  We use all kinds of technology in church and prayer is a big part of church so they must come together at some point.

What do you do that you consider to be prayer.  In one of the shorter verses of the Bible we read in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 (NASB) “pray without ceasing” or even shorter in the NIV 17 “pray continually”, so there has to be more than just the Sunday version of the Lord’s Prayer to be able to achieve this command.  What is so great about prayer is that we can pray anywhere, anytime, in a ton a different ways.

We can certainly use technology to bring us to prayer with God, like writing a blog post or in a journal, (many prayers were/are written down) but they don’t communicate directly with God alone, because prayer comes from the heart.

How To Do a Photo Walk in the Backyard with Creativity

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Feather in Barbed Wire

Have you ever heard of a photo walk?  A photo walk is very simple.  Usually a group, consisting of a walk leader (usually an advanced or pro photographer) and those interested in participating in the photo walk.   You choose a location that can be walked in a certain time frame and then you shoot what you come across and interests you photographically in the walk.  An example of the results can be seen at the DPS Las Vegas photo walk which took place during the BlogWorldExpo in September.

They can take place anywhere you want to have a few photographers get together and pound the pavement (or dirt) to get those creative minds moving.  For a photo walk tutorial or more information on how they are generally done, see 10 Tips For A Great Photowalk.  This basically is what I did for 2 years at UAB while I was studing photography.  We would just go out and shoot at a predetermined location and all look at the results the following class.

There are a few differences but it now has a fancy name, and we have things like blogs that can be used for show-and-tell.  Whatever you want to call it, it is always a good learning process and helps open your eyes to what interesting photographic elements are around us all the time.

My Own Photo Walk in the Backyard

With all that said, you can always do a photowalk in your own backyard.  I have done this for many many years and it doesn’t matter if you live in a high rise in NYC or on a farm in Alabama.  There is always something you can call your backyard, even if it is the MARTA station outside your house or office in Atlanta (or MTA station if you are in NYC).

I try to get in a little exercise each day, so I usually walk in my backyard but now that the sun is setting around 4:30pm each day, I have to get out there a little earlier to be able to see where I am going.  Yesterday I decided to take my camera bag with me and do a fast photo walk before the sun went down.  I really only had time for two different shots.

First I came across this swarm of gnats flying through the setting sun.  Have any of your photographer out there tried to get a acceptable shot of a swarm of gnats?  Wasn’t as easy I had initially thought, but the second shot above was the result.  This was shot hand held in manual everything.  At least the wash of sun gave me some good color on the fall leaves in the background.

Next I came across this feather that was stuck in the barbed wire fence that runs along the length of our property.  Probably something I walked by every day and just never noticed.  One of my most favorite types of photography is marco photography (or closeup), so I took out my macro lens and shot the first image above as the sun had set.  The sun was all but gone at this point so depth of field was interesting to preview, but it was an image I walked by every day and never noticed until I did the photo walk.

Moths in the Alabama Fall

By the way, for those writers or painters out there it works the same way.  Just take your canvas or journal and get out of your office or normal environment and see how creative you can be by changing your surroundings.

Any time you think there is nothing to shoot, just try taking a photo walk in your backyard.  You might be surprised by the results.  Anyone else tried this?