{"id":72,"date":"2011-03-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-04T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/fearofwhales\/2011\/03\/today-was-a-good-day.html"},"modified":"2011-05-16T15:49:38","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T19:49:38","slug":"today-was-a-good-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2011\/03\/today-was-a-good-day.html","title":{"rendered":"Today Was A Good Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>People often ask me what an &quot;average day&quot; looks like for me as a minister at KSU. My answer is always the same, &quot;there&#039;s no such thing&quot; In the field, every day is different, and in the line of service to the cross I have done everything from preaching to a congregation of octogenarians on Easter morning, to dressing up as a giant chicken and throwing candy around.<br \/>\nSomedays I mess up and end up hurting people, some days things work out and I end up changing people&#039;s lives. Somedays I wonder if I ever accomplish anything at all. But today was a good day, So hopefully if I tell you about it, you&#039;ll be able to get some idea of what sorts of things go on. (better than if i were to tell you about a terrible day where i was stuck in the snow for most of it anyway)<br \/>\nToday I woke up at the crack of noon, and promptly went back to sleep. No appointments, might as well take advantage of the opportunity to oversleep.<br \/>\nAt about 2 I got out of bed, checked e-mail, and started cleaning my basement apartment. Administrative duties; Organizing receipts to deduct, creating a list of follow ups, dishes&#8230; that sort of thing. By 4 I was at Bluestem, my local haunt, the Coffee Shop where I go to mingle when I don&#039;t have anywhere in particular to be. I wrote out my Ministry update letter, and sent out a vulnerable e-mail to my Sunday Night Group, asking for some help with it.<br \/>\nBluestem is always filled with acquaintances, Baristas and other locals chat, and hang out, A Statistics Prof, gives me advice on my shorthand poker game while two other friends discuss the finer points of acknowledging one&#039;s ex&#039;s birthday.<br \/>\nAround 5 I make a trip to the Verizon Store because I&#039;m going over the limit on text messages. I&#039;d had a conversation earlier this week with two students over text about the differences between Men and Woman, John Henry Newman&#039;s seminal work, and Die Hard and it put me clear over the top.<br \/>\nBy 6:00 I&#039;m back at Bluestem finishing a Blog post. And I got a call from another student wanting to know the &quot;name of that kind of study we&#039;ve been doing&quot; He and I have been leading a manuscript study for the last couple of weeks, and he wanted to know the name of it, because he was going to try it with his house church&#8230;AWESOME!<br \/>\nLong story short, I end up attending the gathering, where I get to see one of my leaders lead others, into leading an inductive study of the bible. I get done just in time to make it to &quot;Theology on Tap&quot; a ministry of the Episcopal Canterbury to talk about God in a pub. I brought a non-christian friend and we both loved it. Most of us were ministers, all of us lean left of center (pub and all) and the conversation was great. I got the number of a potential new mentor. My friend got to see Christians being christian while recognizing their own mistakes.<br \/>\nWhen it was over at about 11 many of us stayed and began to dream about a place open 24 hours where you could go to connect with people. We discussed the next generation, and what the world will look like when they&#039;re in charge. We discussed what matters in life, and came to the conclusion that helping people matters, and not much else.<br \/>\nAt 1 am we went back to his house, at&#160; 1:30 we were searching the internet for some 24 hour prayer ministry we had heard about at 2 we arrived there, and found it empty, so we decided to hold down the fort until 4 when the next shift arrived, and then we prayed with them for another hour<br \/>\nMy night wasn&#039;t over until after 5 AM this morning.<br \/>\nI&#039;m sleeping in again<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People often ask me what an &quot;average day&quot; looks like for me as a minister at KSU. My answer is always the same, &quot;there&#039;s no such thing&quot; In the field, every day is different, and in the line of service to the cross I have done everything from preaching to a congregation of octogenarians on&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[283,285,284],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campus-ministry","tag-average-day","tag-diary","tag-life-as-a-missionary"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Today Was A Good Day - A Fear of Whales<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/fearofwhales\/2011\/03\/today-was-a-good-day.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Today Was A Good Day - A Fear of Whales\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"People often ask me what an &quot;average day&quot; looks like for me as a minister at KSU. 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