I’m working on several online projects, the main one being a complete redesign of UMSource.net. I was hoping to be able to make it ‘live’ before now, but, I feel like there are a few more things I would like to do to it first. Hopefully it will be up and running in the next few weeks.

The reason why I’ve not posted is just being involved in other things. I’m doing a couple of shows over at talkshoe.com and that is keeping me busy. Once is the Two Middle Aged pastor’s podcast and then I just started doing a new one called What Would Jesus Podcast. I do it along with two other guys. We look at news stories from “a Christian perspective”…whatever that means.

I’m also trying to keep up with my doctoral studies. I hope to post on that pretty soon over at the InnerJourney page. Other than that, not too much is going on….oh yea…I’m trying to keep up with the kids with soccer and all too.

Over the next few chapters, in fact, Mark will show us what Jesus meant when, in chapter 10, he radically redefined kingship. This is not to be the sort of royalty that either Israel or the rest of the world were used to. But the passage already raises questions for us in our own following of Jesus and loyalty to him. Are we ready to put our property at his disposal, to obey his orders even when the puzzle us? Are we ready to go out of our way to honour him finding in our own lives the equivalents of cloaks to spread on the road before him, and branches to wave to make his coming into a real festival? Or have we so domesticated and trivialized our Christian commitment, our devotion to Jesus himself, that we look on him simply as someone to help us through the various things we want to do anyway, someone to provide us with comforting religious experiences? In our world where most countries don’t have kings and queens, and where those monarchies that remain are mostly constitutional offices with the real power lying elsewhere, have we forgotten what, in biblical terms, a true king might be like?

Perhaps the trick is to find those people who have been touched and transformed by Jesus and who still have their hearts open and receptive to what he is wanting to to through them and understand that. If you can get those folks together it would be powerful.

Of course, the other side of this is to discover ways to draw all in the church to a deeper relationship with Jesus so they will begin to understand their part in the kingdom of God.

The bad thing is, I tend not to get a lot done when this happens. I was able to get my sermon written this morning but my big plan was to get quite a bit of the first draft of my DMin paper finished. That has not happened and is not happening. Not sure what tomorrow will bring. Today is kind of lost for the most part.

I’m thinking that maybe later tonight I can spend some time at least thinking or research some of it.

With that in mind I wanted to post on what has been keeping me ‘busy’ over the past week or so. Through a series of ‘odd’ happenings, I discovered David Allen’s concept of GTD (Getting Things Done) which has given me an odd type of hope. I can’t remember where I first saw the reference (perhaps 43Folders.com) but it has changed how I’ve been doing things.

GTD is a productivity system. I was a bit skeptical at first. The one thing that ‘hooked’ me is how GTD believes that all the ’stuff’ rolling around in your head all the time steals mental energy from what you are presently doing. I could relate to that. I know that even when I’ve mentally placed something on the back burner it ends up taking energy from my current activities. I keep thinking about things that I should be doing, but I think about them when there is no way I can do it. I head out of town and of course remember that person I was going to visit…but now I cannot.

One of the activities of GTD is getting everything ‘out’ of your head and deciding what needs to be done with it. So basically you don’t have to keep thinking about all the ’stuff.’ Once you write it down you can concentrate on the activity at hand because you know you can deal with what you wrote down later. The rest of the GTD is the process of making _sure_ that none of the stuff you wrote down falls through the crack.

Anyway….as of today I’m much more organized than I have ever been. For the first time…ever (I guess) I feel fairly good about what I did this past week. I wrote things down, put things on the calendar, filed things away where I could find them and actually did the things I was suppose to do! My INBox is at Zero and I’ve gone through all my mail. This is not the way I usually operate.

It has only been two weeks…and I keep figuring that at somepoint I will ‘fall off the wagon’ but I don’t want to. We will see. I’m posting here…in a way…to keep me accountable. Perhaps in the future I can post updates and also some of the tools I’ve found helpful.