a pastor in Austin
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A few events have me reflecting on where we are at right now:
This month is the fifth anniversary of this blog. I haven’t been as consistent in sharing my thoughts here as I was in the early days, but the thoughts I’ve shared and comments of others have made this a significant part of [...]
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About a year ago, three of my friends experienced a hard drive crash within 10 days of each other. Inspired by their defeat, I made sure I had a good backup. And a few days later, my hard drive crashed too.
I’m reminded of this, because my friend Chris Marlow just walked into the coffee [...]
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A new friend recently contacted me via the Austin Mustard Seed website. What he read about our church community resonated with his own hopes, so he asked to hear more of our story. It was meaningful and motivating for me to recapture it. While pieces of my story have been shared on this blog, I’m [...]
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When our oldest daughter turned five, we gave her money to loan on Kiva to begin teaching her about poverty and generosity. Her first loan was to a woman named Nkechi to help buy supplies for her paint shop in Nigeria.
That loan was repaid about a year ago, so last January, Macey got to [...]
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It’s been about five months since we moved into our house in Austin, and about three months since we first started gathering people together to form Austin Mustard Seed. I’m often asked how things are going via email, iChat and phone calls, so I thought it would be good just wrap together some reflections on [...]
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As we’ve been getting settled in Austin, I’m trying to learn about the city through its history. While I’ve yet to find a thorough book with the history of the city, I’ve been able to pick up bits and pieces here and there.
Inherent to the culture of Austin is a long rivalry with Houston. It [...]
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We’re in the process of getting our 501c3 status with the IRS, and one of my tasks at hand it write my job description. With that in mind, I read the quote below from Richard Hays’ The Moral Vision of the New Testament. If you replace Paul with John and Mediterranean with Austin, I think [...]
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I’m doing some freelance design work, so I’ve launched Strange Idea Labs. I’m specializing in simple content-based websites (mostly using Wordpress), some branding and print media, and web hosting.
We’ve decided it would be best to be bivocational rather than put unreasonable financial pressure on Austin Mustard Seed early in the life of this church [...]
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“You should really connect with Kester Smith.”
I’m not sure how many times I heard that phrase in the last few months as we have transitioned to Austin. Kester and I have a number of mutual friends (but maybe that is because Kester has about 340973 friends on Facebook). I can think of at least six [...]
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As Austin Mustard Seed prepares to move into our first gatherings, we have been asking friends and supporters to join together in 24 hours of prayer over on our support team blog. This will take place next Saturday through Sunday evening, and we’ve filled about 70% of the half hour slots. If you’d like to [...]
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I spent much of the last week putting together the website for Austin Mustard Seed, the new church community we are part of in Austin. I love this creative part of the process — taking ideas that have been developing for years and shaping them into words within a layout.
There is a part of [...]
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While on my very very very very long drive from Seattle to Austin last week, I was reminded of the first time I went rappelling…
Early in the morning, we parked our church vans full of students near the base of the cliffs. After our guides went over some safety precautions and got it all set [...]
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One of these days, we might once again have a place we can call our own.
Last week, the same day we left Seattle, someone looked at our house. They liked it enough to put an offer on it. After a few shenanigans, we reached an agreement at the end of the week. Monday, we [...]
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About ten years ago, I went with a team of other pastors to the Philippines to help do a conference for students. During the trip, I got a little lazy on the shaving side of things and was surprised to discover that my facial hair could actually connect around the sides of my mouth. My [...]
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I made it.
Monday afternoon, I dropped the rest of my family off at the airport, and my dad and I started driving toward Texas. We finished the 35ish hours of driving late tonight (Wednesday).
My butt hates me.
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