Category: From The Desk of Pastor Gene

Fog of War Sun Tzu was a Chinese general, military strategist, writer and philosopher who lived in ancient China in and around 500 BC. Sun Tzu is the author of The Art of War, an influential work of military strategy even to this day. Even though Sun Tzu described it in his book, mainly how to cause it, the...

Bubble Church My grandchildren are crazy about bubbles. They like to play with anything that involves bubbles. They like blowing bubbles, bubble bath and bubble wrap. They blow bubbles and chase bubbles and watch bubbles ascend toward heaven. It fascinates them and they run around and laugh and scream like a bunch of crazy people. In...

Priority of Worship We have a few phrases that we use to describe what we do on Sunday mornings. Some say, “we’re going to church.” Others say, “it’s time for Sunday services.” The remaining few will say, “it’s time for worship.”  Regardless of the term we may use, I think we’d all agree that our priority on...

Happy Thanksgiving  Thanksgiving is upon us and Christmas is approaching. All of this comes with a range of emotions, memories and expectations. The emotions are impacted by the joy of new birth and the grief of those loved ones that have past on and can no longer sit around the table and eat and laugh...

Aspen Groves  Fishlake National Forest in Utah is the home of the largest organism in the world. This organism, thousands of years old, is named Pando, Latin for “I spread,” is a massive grove of aspen trees. Aspen trees are not like oak or maple trees growing in your back yard. One aspen tree is only a small part of...

There is a noticeable drift in the local church toward “church club.” The church experience has become more about image, entertainment and what’s trending rather than worship, fellowship, serving and making disciples. After all, clubs are typically all about glorifying the individual through an event experience. In contrast, the authentic local church is all about...

It’s time for harvest! The farmers are battling rainy and wet conditions to bring in the harvest as the combines are in the fields bringing in the grain. They’ve worked hard since early Spring in anticipation for harvest. They’ve disked, planted, removed rocks, irrigated, cultivated, sprayed insecticide, dealt with various varmints and I’m sure many...

Community Are you lonely even in a crowd? Even though we have smart phones, world-wide internet access and various social media platforms where we can interact and communicate with people, loneliness among Americans seems to get worse not better. What we’ve discovered is a social media “friend” doesn’t guarantee friendship. The General Social Survey found that the...

Availability Cheri and I were able to spend the weekend with family. We had family visiting from Ohio, and we all got together with our sons and their family in Omaha. You might say it was a small family reunion. Some of us even went to the Buckeye vs. Husker game and that was an...

Plugged In and Powered Up   A couple of weeks ago my wife called and said, “my computer is completely dead. It has a black screen and it won’t power up.”  At that point I thought to myself as I rolled my eyes, “oh great another unplanned expense. Fabulous!”  And then I said, “make sure...