• Dateline: March 2, 2006–The first day of the year that Waco breaks the 400 degree mark. And the air conditioning is out in my car.
• My sermon page is now much more accessible. Check it out. Thanks to my good friend, Dan for hooking me up. Now, I’m going to bug him about setting up categories.
• My fantasy baseball draft is Saturday night. I better do some studying.
• I thank all of you for the comments regarding my recent post on loving more and judging less. I have had an interesting email conversation with one reader. I would name her but I haven’t got permission yet. I want to share some excerpts of my side of the conversation. Hopefully this will help to further crystallize my thoughts:

I guess where I am at is that our role as Christians is to preach and
proclaim the “good news” and “the Truth.” That is Jesus.
Not our
understanding of what is or is not sinful, but Jesus Himself.
He is
the Way, The Truth and the Life.
When we start preaching our laundry
list of do’s and don’ts then we veer dramatically off-course from what
He wanted us to be about.
Can we “come alongside” people and BE
Christ without upbraiding them for their behavior? I wrestle with
this. For everything in my raising says that you must tell them where
they are wrong. But everything that Jesus says is so different from
that.
It is about community, loving, nurturing, compassion. It’s His
job to convict, not mine. Right? I don’t know. I don’t have this
figured out. I know I feel a lot better this way than the old
evangelism as car sales technique that I had been taught.
I look at the life of Hosea. God says “marry a whore.” Not denounce
her, not point her out for ridicule, but love her, marry her.
I
guess where I come down is to let Christ be the light in me. I don’t
have to attempt to shine His light for Him but allow Him to do the
work.
I think you are right, we don’t trust love enough to do the
trick. And as a result, we don’t trust the power of Christ to change
lives. I don’t have to go around trumpeting what is and is not sin. I
can allow Christ to be the arbiter of acceptable behavior.
Christ is the bottom line to me. It all has to come from, through and back to Him.
Am I wrong? Help me here. You know that I am not the most social
person in the world. But when I began to pray 18 months ago that God
would lead me to love people more I never anticipated that I would be
led to where I am at. It’s not comfortable but I feel I am heading to
the right place.