Well, sort of…

It’s actually my blog’s birthday.

davidsbucket.com turns five years old today.

Five years ago today, I started this little side project in order to, “work out the chaotic ramblings of my soul.” At least that is how I expressed it back then. The truth is that when this whole thing started I had no idea what I was doing and that confusion extended beyond the blog alone.

In short, a lot has changed in my life in five years.

That’s not to say that I have anything figured out, but I’m not the same person I was five years ago which is a good thing.

This blog has been my companion on that journey and along the way, I hope some of what I have shared has been a blessing to you as well. I continue to write today because this is an important part of my own growth, but I also write with the sincere desire for this to be a source of hope and encouragement for others…

I hope I can say the same thing in five years.

Until then, I hope you’ve been blessed by this post… the 1,211 one I’ve written over the past 1,825 days.

I love the way Mark Buchanan describes the frustration we sometimes find when we think about, “our job.” If this connect with you, I hope you will join us in person this weekend or online at www.firstmethodistmansfield.tv.

You don’t like your job.

It may be a great job. It may be engaging, rewarding, varied, with a fine balance of thrill and ease, intensity and serenity. It may be a job that calls for your creativity but doesn’t overtax it, demands your vigilance but applauds it even more, requires your diligence but pays for it lavishly. It may give you a sense of power and virtue and importance and provide for your sleek cars and exotic rugs and handcrafted furniture and trips to warm places while everyone else is scraping thick rinds of ice from their windshields.

Still, you don’t like it, and least not always. Some days you do, that’s true. Some days you stretch out into it like a wild horse loosed after a tethering, thundering across open plain, gaining fresh strength with each stride.

But some days it’s not like that at all. You’re more like a wild horse, haltered, corralled, backed into a stall. It’s more like dressing in wet denim, like having a root canal without anesthetic. You have more of these days that you like to admit – when the work is fistful of thistles, and you dream of being someone else, somewhere else, doing something else.

Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God, pg. 13

This new series kicks off this weekend! Here’s a brief synopsis of the next three weeks.

In the first century, the Apostle Paul writes to the Christians living in Rome, “Take your everyday, ordinary life… and place it before God as an offering.” Ordinary may be the perfect way to describe what your typical Monday looks like. When the work week begins, we all find ourselves at different places filling different roles, but our experience of that first day of the week is often very similar. The work week officially begins, and it hits us like a brick! Monday often pulls us back to reality, and the reality we often find ourselves living is less than the significance that we had hoped we might one day find.

Is it possible that in the midst of the rat race many of us finding ourselves running we might truly live this instruction in Paul’s letter to the Romans? Can the monotony of our Mondays and the work we provide for a job or our family really be an “offering” to God? And if so, is that where the significance we are all searching for has been hiding all along?

During this three week series, we’re going to be talking about Making Mondays Matter, and the calling we have on our lives as followers of Christ to present all our lives before God as our gift to the one who has given us life.

If you are looking for something more from your Mondays, don’t miss this series.

Last week, I started a new blog series that I’m calling Friday Rock Stars. Each Friday I will be highlighting one of the individuals or groups whose service makes the ministry of our church possible. Here’s what I think sets them apart as Rock Stars.

A Rock Star is not only someone who shows that they can be the best at what they do, they consistently bring their best to everything that they do!

This week, I want to highlight our team of volunteers who each week prepare the worship bulletin’s that every person receives when they attend one of our weekend services. Here are a few pictures of these faithful volunteers.

Cindy Brown who is the Editor on our church staff had this to say about her volunteers!

My volunteers are Jo Stone, Edna Lang and Michelle Brown. Edna and Michelle arethe new kids on the block . . . Edna has been helping since Easter and Michelle started about a month ago. Jo has been my super volunteer ever since I started handling the weekend bulletin, but she has actually volunteered at the church since it was over on First Street over thirty years ago.  She would come in after work and run the mimeograph machine to produce the bulletins when the church staff was just the pastor and a secretary.

Don is a great volunteer also.  He has been helping me for several years and through several redesigns of the bulletin.  He comes in every week to run the worship order inserts and the GPS inserts.  He also has to cut the worship order cards with the paper cutter and fold the GPS inserts with the folding machine, so he multi-tasks!  And he is my last line of defense for mistakes . . . he’s caught a few boo-boo’s I’ve made before they get copied!

I appreciate the faithfulness of these volunteers in showing up every week.  So many people have no clue what has to happen to get the bulletin ready each week.  The best part is they really enjoy helping, plus they get their fair share of visiting in too!  I absolutely could not do my job without them.