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I always look forward to New Year’s Day.  The start of a new year (and a new decade) makes me smile.  There’s promise in the air, opportunities that have yet to be written, a chance to start over in some ways.  Life seems full of boundless possibilities.

I usually spend the first day of January looking over the past year.  I’m tend not to dwell on the past too much, but I do like to remember accomplishments, significant milestones, and other events that seem to have meaning to me.  Here’s a partial list from 2009 (in no particular order):

• Seeing my elder daughter make first band both semesters of her senior year (she’s now third chair in first band!!!) and get her letter jacket
• Seeing my younger daughter make the drum line in middle school and stay first chair for most of the first semester)
• Another full year of being employed by only one company (a major achievement for those who know me well…)
• Another year of singing with the choir at Community Bible Church (one of the true blessings in my life)
• Another year of working with Puresound, our church youth choir (fantastic kids with a powerful ministry)
• Business trips to Honolulu, San Diego, New York, Baltimore, and Las Vegas
• Visiting with Tim Eagerton while in San Diego (one of the few benefits of business travel is when your trip takes you to places where your friends live)
• Visiting with Bill Van Loo of chromedecay  in the Ann Arbor area (Bill is a true Renaissance man and inspires me in so many ways.  Thanks for the trip to the record store, Bill!  Looking forward to my next trip up!!)
• Seeing Star Trek reimagined and brought to the big screen again by J. J. Abrams (sure, not momentous for you perhaps but a huge event for this closet Trekkie)
• Finally seeing my friend Gabe Gibitz’s CD “Spirit of Elijah” released! (Sorry it took so long, Gabe, but the end result was worth the wait for me! This next project should be even better!!)
• Opening our new office in San Antonio (a big improvement over the old place) in June
• Finally getting furniture for the new office (in December!)
• Making new friends and renewing old friendships with so many people

There’s so much more I could say, so many more things that happened that are worth talking about.  But I’ll close this post with the following observation:

No matter how great or poor a particular year has been, I thank God for the rich life and abundant blessings that He continues to pour down on me.  I am truly a broken man but made whole through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for me, a sacrifice that I will never be worthy of nor able to repay.  It’s my wish for 2010 that I am able to share that salvation and redemption with others.

Goodbye 2009.  Hello 2010!  Nice to see you, and I’m looking forward to another full year!!

So much to write about.  So little time to do it.  Yet that’s a cop out, isn’t it.  We all find the time to do the things we want (or need) to do. 

My biggest challenge is that I find myself these days spending more time in Covey’s Q3 rather than Q2.  I hate it.

My life needs a good spring cleaning.  But it’s already October.  What to do…

Last night, we had our final rehearsals for our Christmas presentation at Community Bible Church here in San Antonio.  It has been a lot of work to learn the music, but the end result has been worth it.  The choir loft was full, the orchestra was packed, and we had what seemed like hundreds of kids on risers.  Magnificent!

Please join us on December 13th or 14th for this presentation. Even if you don’t attend church or aren’t in the holiday spirit, I guarantee this event will give you comfort and joy. And it will surely give you hope. And perhaps that’s something that has been in short supply in your life.

Don’t miss it!

I am catching up on some blog reading that I’ve been putting off for several weeks.  Every year it seems that the rush toward the holidays gets busier and busier.  I’m not sure why, and perhaps it’s my own fault for overcommitting myself to work, church, and personal activities and projects.  I haven’t had a lot of “think” time recently, so today I took some time off to just read.

And this quote struck me:

“Instead of demanding that our culture act more Christ-like, let’s start demanding that of ourselves.”

As my elder daughter would say… “Um, yeah…”

The quote comes from a posting on Collide magazine’s blog entitled ‘Tis the Season by Scott McClellan.  The article talks about how we should act in the face of attacks on our belief in Christ and on Christmas.  And it stopped me cold.

I was brought up in the Southern Baptist church.  I loved the pastor, I loved my Sunday School teachers, and I loved Jesus enough to commit my life to him at age 11.  I learned what was “Christian” and what wasn’t.  I learned to run away from things that didn’t fit my belief system and, unfortunately, from people who didn’t fit my mold of what Christianity should be.  And yet I knew, as do all Christians, that Jesus hung out with the very people I was taught to avoid.

In later years, as the conservative Christian movement started to grow, I started believing that the battle was between me and non-believers.  Especially those non-believers who were stridently vocal about it (atheists, humanists, pagans, etc.).  It cost me some friendships, and I became much more like the narrow-minded rabidly conservative pack that I care to admit.  At the same time, I became much more conservative politically and in many ways typified the young Republican Christian that Ralph Reed came to represent.

Thankfully, God continued to love me even as I became more like Saul than Paul, more like the Pharisees than the disciples.  He continued to place people in my path that were different from me, both politically and socially, and yet who were just as committed to the Kingdom as I said I was.  He continued to bombard this good little Baptist boy with the message that “I gave my Son for everyone, not a select few, and certainly not just you.”

When we moved from the Dallas area to San Antonio almost five years ago, we visited a lot of churches (all of them Baptist naturally).  And I found a couple of churches where I could have been perfectly happy attending.  They were much like my previous churches, structured and conservative and staunchly Baptist.  And then we attended our current church, Community Bible Church, which immediately put my concept of organized religion into a tail-spin.  Yes, the place was full of people just like me.  Yes, it’s what I would call an upscale mega-church.  And yes, I’m sure that it has just as many flaws (maybe more) as the churches I left behind.

But in the midst of the mega-size and mega-choir and mega-everything, there was a realization that there were a lot of people there seeking Christ who were decidedly not like me.  And I discovered that I was attending church with a significant number of people who had never been in a church before.  And God was welcoming them and offering them the same salvation through His Son that I had received 30 years prior.  And my faith was renewed.

My life has changed inexorably because I finally got the message, that it’s first and foremost about love.  About God’s love for us, so huge and so incomprehensible that He came to us in human form to die on a cross, alone and in pain and suffering, so that we could be His forever.  And Jesus commanded us to love others just as we love ourselves.  Period. 

To love others even if they dressed differently or attended different schools or listened to different music or lived in different neighborhoods.  To love others if they read different books or watched different TV shows or had different skin color or voted for a different presidential candidate. 

To love others even if they didn’t believe in Christ.

And so I’ve begun to live this out as loud as possible.  I still have my moments where I judge and condemn and look askance at “those people”.  I still slip into old habits like flipping on conservative talk radio occasionally.  And I still struggle with how to embrace those who ridicule me for believing in God and salvation through his Son, Jesus Christ.

But I’m free.  And with that freedom comes the enormous responsibility that I have to love every single person I come in contact with just as much as I love my wife, my kids, my friends, and myself.  I have to show Christ’s love for me by loving those He loved, by helping those He helped, and by acting as He would act.  With compassion and forgiveness and humility.  And having a heart that is big enough and open enough to accept every single solitary person for exactly who they are.

And never forgetting that my hope is in the Lord.  That my salvation is in Christ.  That my future is secure not by what I think or do or own or consume or how I vote or dress.  But my future is secure because Jesus gave His life up so that I could have mine and so that I could be Him for others.

Christ demands everything from me.  How can I demand less from myself?