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March 30, 2009
March 29, 2009
Recommended Resources
Here are the books I highlighted today. You can order them by clicking their image.
March 28, 2009
Opening Day Celebration!
Maybe we get get it right on the 101st try!
March 26, 2009
March 24, 2009
Embracing Your Season
Craig Groschel had a great post today on embracing your current season of life. It was applied to ministry, but the leap to the rest of life is easy.
Read the post...then find some time to reflect.
Identify some aspects of your season of life.
What is unique about it...one time, never again?
What will you miss when the seasons is over that you may be missing right now?
Ask yourself, "How can I better embrace this season?"
I'd like it if you'd write some of your thoughts. It may help someone else too.
Here's his post:
Proverbs 20:4 says, “If you are too lazy to plow in the right season, you will have no food at the harvest.”
In ministry it is so important to work with God’s seasons. Instead of always wishing for the next season, we should embrace the season we’re in.
Here are a few examples of how to work with the seasons:
If you’re a church planter, you won’t be any more of a real church when you have a real building. Enjoy the ride in portable facilities. You’re in a special season.
- If you’re 50 years old and not naturally a cool person, you’ll look silly trying to act and dress 28. Embrace your season and be a mentor instead of a buddy to the next generation.
- If your church is debt free and strong, don’t pretend like everything you have is for you. During this season, your greatest calling might be to fund the next generation’s vision.
- If you had a singles ministry that worked for 9 years, but is no longer effective, celebrate the 9 years of success. Close it down and do something different. Don’t keep something on life support once its season has passed.
Because I was 28 years old when I started Life Church, I always felt like I was the young guy with everything in front of me. I’m not the young guy any more. (It happened so fast.) Now rather than just building our church, I embrace this season of lifting the next generation to do more than I’m able to do.
How can you better embrace this season?
Ready for a New Buck?
Here is one of the side benefits of letting China own our debt...they get to call the shots!
BEIJING -- China called for the creation of a new currency to eventually replace the dollar as the world's standard, proposing a sweeping overhaul of global finance that reflects developing nations' growing unhappiness with the U.S. role in the world economy.
The unusual proposal, made by central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan in an essay released Monday in Beijing, is part of China's increasingly assertive approach to shaping the global response to the financial crisis.
Zhou's proposal comes amid preparations for a summit of the world's industrial and developing nations, the Group of 20, in London next week. At past such meetings, developed nations have criticized China's economic and currency policies.
This time, China is on the offensive, backed by other emerging economies such as Russia in making clear they want a global economic order less dominated by the U.S. and other wealthy nations.
However, the technical and political hurdles to implementing China's recommendation are enormous, so even if backed by other nations, the proposal is unlikely to change the dollar's role in the short term. Central banks around the world hold more U.S. dollars and dollar securities than they do assets denominated in any other individual foreign currency. Such reserves can be used to stabilize the value of the central banks' domestic currencies.
Monday's proposal follows a similar one Russia made this month during preparations for the G20 meeting. Like China, Russia recommended that the International Monetary Fund might issue the currency, and emphasized the need to update "the obsolescent unipolar world economic order."
Chinese officials are frustrated at their financial dependence on the U.S., with Premier Wen Jiabao this month publicly expressing "worries" over China's significant holdings of U.S. government bonds. The size of those holdings means the value of the national rainy-day fund is mainly driven by factors China has little control over, such as fluctuations in the value of the dollar and changes in U.S. economic policies. While Chinese banks have weathered the global downturn and continue to lend, the collapse in demand for the nation's exports has shuttered factories and left millions jobless.