Going Full-Time

I got back into my study on Colossians this week, after a hiatus while my sister was here. My modus operandi is to study on my own, check out the Greek words, look at it within the context of the surrounding scripture as well as tearing it apart phrase by phrase, and then when I’ve exhausted my own study, I turn to commentaries (I like Matthew Henry) and books (for this study I’m using Treasures of Wisdom: Studies in Colossians & Philemon by Homer Kent Jr. and Be Complete, Wiersbe’s “be” book on Colossians).

My pastor recently started a Sunday morning series on Romans. He likes to do book studies and it will probably take him two years to go through the book. Romans is so “meaty”! Since we are rarely at our home church, we’re trying to get the messages on CD to listen to later in the week. Yesterday after we dropped my sister and her girls off at the airport we stopped in Ann Arbor on the way home. I picked up a nice fat journal at Barnes & Noble to use for my note taking as I listen to his messages on Romans. I know it will take a really fat journal! But I’m really excited, since I love the way my pastor preaches/teaches AND because it’s the book of Romans. Good stuff!

Ivan officially finished at The Manor this morning. We started out 19 years ago as houseparents in one of their group homes. We had up to six mentally and emotionally impaired teens at any one time. Some stayed just a month or two, but we had others for several years. Nine years later, when our church called Ivan to be a part-time associate pastor we moved out of the group home and into the parsonage. Our boss at The Manor asked Ivan to stay on to maintain the facilities. They had ten buildings at that time, but over the years they added several more, and Ivan went from being the lone maintenance guy to supervising a crew of three others. It’s been a good job. They’ve allowed a lot of flexibility over the years which allowed us to do more in ministry.

But it’s time to move on, and we realized if we wanted to get to Argentina in February or March, we had to spend more time building our support team. So now we’ll be “doing” deputation full-time. It will be great to have more time for one-on-one meetings with pastors. And we look forward to a lot more traveling, spending several days helping out in a church rather than just blowing in and out for one service. There might be some additional changes coming up as well, but I’ll wait to see what happens before I say anything about that. Regardless, some major changes and adjustments coming up!