Just recently I bought a new watch. I'd been looking to replace my old one for a while (a little large, plus it had water damage from a dip in the Jordan River this summer). I've really missed wearing a watch, primarily because I don't have to go digging around in my pocket just to figure out what time it is. But along with that, and this may sound really weird, I have really missed the ticking of the second hand. In the quiet of the evening, I've missed hearing that little tick-tick-tick next to me on my desk. Some days it can really get on my nerves, and some days it can lull me into a restful sleep. Today I want to talk about a couple of parallel parables that can really speak volumes to modern culture. These come right near the end of the largest grouping of parables in the Gospel of Matthew (in fact, it's the only grouping of parables in Matthew), and they add up to a grand total of three verses. Yet these three verses lay a crushing blow to today's society and the way we value things. In Matthew 13:44-46, Jesus says to His disciples, "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. My girlfriend Shannon and I will have officially been dating for 17 months two weeks from today. I still can hardly believe it's been that long, it seems like the time really has flown. It has been very obvious from the beginning that we have many differences in our interests and personalities. This particularly comes out in regards to music. I went to school specifically to study music, and I love analyzing the music I listen to. I'm even about to start a career (Lord-willing) of working with music in the church, and I am constantly listening to new music to determine if it's well-suited for congregational worship or not. Shannon is very different. She has an excellent singing voice and even received a scholarship to study music at The Master's College, but she doesn't enjoy studying music at all. Her real academic passion is in literature. She rarely listens to music unless she needs to practice for a choir piece or I give her a mix CD. (:P) This past Sunday I had the opportunity to share my testimony with my home church. One of the key parts of God's work in my life was my diagnosis of having type 1 diabetes. As I described last week, it caused me to rethink many things in my life, particularly in regards to food and health but in other areas as well.
It's been around 6 1/2 years since I was first diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Since then I have had to learn how to live with this, and in some ways I feel like I'm just starting to get a handle on it. I used to think that all I had to do was give myself the right amount of insulin for whatever I was eating and then I was fine. To a certain extent that is true, but at the same time I still tend to have issues controlling my blood sugar levels. Despite calculating the right amount of insulin, it may not have been enough for the kind of food that I was eating.
As many of you probably know by now, I was out in Minnesota for about a week and a half interviewing for a job as the worship leader of Beacon of Hope Church in St. Paul. It's been a couple of weeks since I returned to California and I have kept myself busy: visiting friends and telling them how my trip went, preparing to lead a couple more Sundays at my home church in Redlands, cheering for the Red Sox in the MLB postseason and (more importantly) waiting to hear back from Pastor Steve and the leadership at Beacon about the position.
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AuthorA simple servant of the Master. Archives
February 2016
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