Not Yet Finished

As I come to the days more toward the end than the beginning, I realize that there are some things about the beginning which never really disappeared.  When I went to my first appointment back in 1971 at Stapleton, I asked if the local county newspaper would be interested in a weekly religious column.  When the  editor of that county paper said "Yes," it was the beginning of a writing ministry that would continue to this day.  In every appointment except for the one in Columbus, I wrote columns for the local newspaper.     

Before I retired I started writing JourneyNotes which I envisioned as a weekly ministry to keep me in touch with my congregation.  I did not imagine back in 2008 that it would turn into what would be a daily spiritual offering for people I knew and for some I would never see.  What is interesting is that something which was more of a peripheral part of my ministry in the beginning is now the mainstay of the ministry God has given me.   There was a time when I thought there could be no ministry apart from preaching.  I was wrong.     

The one constant in my ministry through the forty plus years of serving churches and now in the years of retirement from the pulpit has been writing.  What was in the beginning continues in the now.  Perhaps, my high school English teacher saw a boy in her classroom who would make a living and find purpose working with words, but I surely could not have conceived of such a possibility back then when I was diagramming sentences and learning a few things about grammar.  I am grateful for the writing ministry and ministry opportunity afforded to me through this blog and am amazed that God has through it reminded me that He is not through with me yet.