San Francisco #3

Tuesday was cold and blustery.  So anticipating the same on Wednesday, Bev said, “Let’s do indoor things today.”  We decided to go tour the new and improved de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.
The de Young is a huge museum.  Their website says it has 293,000 square feet.  It’s not large like the Louvre, but [...]

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San Francisco #2

Tuesday began with a long breakfast at the hotel restaurant.  We ate late, so we called it brunch, and then we set out to begin our foot tour of San Francisco.  Bev found some interesting toys on sale at a toy store.  I got a new belt.  We strolled aimlessly toward the Embarcadero.  At the [...]

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San Francisco #1

Bev and I are away for a few days in San Francisco.  It has been nearly 2 years since I’ve had a break, so this a welcomed respite.
We got a really good deal on our room at Hotwire dot com.  Considering this is in the middle of the tourist season, the price we got was [...]

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Leadership

Our BNI leadership team met today to discuss an upcoming Visitors Day that we are sponsoring.  We should be sending out about 400 invitations if everyone gives us the requisite 20 contacts.  In the course of preparing for this we asked our district representative to talk to us about recruitment, and she gave us some [...]

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Missio Dei

Fred Peatross, from Huntington, West Virginia, is a friend of mine that I’ve never met in person.  Our relationship is facilitated by e-mail.  I live in California.  We became friends because of Jim Henderson who lives in Seattle, Washington.  West Virginia, California, and Washington—this is a great picture of our times.
Fred’s new book, Missio Dei, is [...]

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Four Weddings and a Funeral

Last November I met a pastor from Chicago’s Willow Creek Church.  We were both at a conference in Seattle.  He told me about a project he had started called “Wedding Pastors USA dot org.”  He also invited me to put my own page up on the site.
The impetus for Wedding Pastors is that many pastors are [...]

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A Misunderstanding

Bev was looking for a new dress to wear to the Chamber of Commerce dinner and installation.  We went to Turlock because Bev likes shopping there, and we ended up in a Kohl’s.  I found a chair in the customer service area and took up residence.  Why stand when you sit?  I had a book [...]

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Ignorance is not a good thing!

“The only thing worse than training your people and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.”  Henry Ford.
 
 Organizations that do not train their people are poured in ideological and methodological concrete.  In some respects they are like a university that never allows research or thought that is dated after a particular [...]

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To the Next Level

Yesterday Jennifer Krumm, COO of the Greater Merced Chamber of Commerce, and I went to an all-day seminar at the California Chamber of Commerce.  The seminar was entitled “Taking Your Chamber to the Next Level,” and it was sponsored by Superchex, a Chamber group that provides training for local Chambers to help them offer better [...]

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Joy

In his book, Letters to Malcolm, pages 92–93, C.S.Lewis wrote the following:

Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for ‘down here’ is not their natural place.  Here, they are a moment’s rest from the life we were placed here to live.

I have been working on a summer sermon series about the Fruit of the [...]

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