September 20 – “Almost fishing”

I had a little fun in church this morning.  The teaching was about David wanting to build God a temple.  The passage sounded like he was sitting around on his deck daydreaming, so I set up a "deck" with lawn chairs and a Pepsi and some Nestle Crunch bars.  Then I came into the room in my bathing suit, sandals, a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses.  That's how I did the teaching.  It was fun watching reactions.  Always is when I do something off the wall.  We even had one of the families of a Seaside Christian Academy student there.  They stayed for lunch and helped set up for school, too.    We had dinner on the grounds, so we didn't leave for quite a while.  When we did, I got a strong hankering to go fishing.  I haven't been wade fishing since before the storm.  And the beach has been flat all week.  After lunch I told Chris I needed to go to WalMart.  I did need to look for some movies our English teacher asked about – The Thirteenth Warrior and Beowulf.  They didn't have either one.  But my real purpose was to get my fishing license.  That they did have.  So now I'm all legal, and there was nothing to stop me for heading to the beach.  Except when we drove by to check it out on the way home, it was starting to get really choppy again.  Just in time.  Almost fishing.  That I'm getting good at.   Since fishing was out, Chris and I spent the afternoon picking up tree branches in the back yard from our beginnings of chopping down the magnolia.  I got to use the chain saw, so that was a definite plus.  There was a lot of wood out there.  We were lamenting the loss of our chiminea.  It would have been a lot easier to just burn all of it instead of hauling it out to the front yard and waiting for the trash guys to pick it up.    We decided at the last minute to go over to First Baptist to the contemporary service they asked Kel to start.  There were about fourteen or fifteen of us there.  The pianist has an amazing voice.  She was the worship leader.  Kel and two other guys had "speaking roles" in the service, and another guy was in charge of the tech stuff.  It went pretty well.  I think over time the core that knows him and accepts him will grow, and his confidence will follow.   Mark 1:17-18 says, "'Come, follow me,' Jesus said, 'and I will make you fishers of men.'  18 At once they left their nets and followed him."   Father, thank you for using Kel in ministry, even in the most surprising of places.  Amen.