nickel for my thoughts

  Heyo, welcome back! Over the last few weeks, we've done an overview of the whole Bible. We have walked through the overarching story and how it all points to Jesus. The next part of our semester focuses on doing different deep dives into the sections of the Bible. Last week, we started with the prophets.  The prophets were a group of men who relayed messages from God to certain people groups during different centuries. They spoke on behalf of God to reveal His character and inform the people what was to come. The story of Jesus is all throughout these books as they prophesy about his first coming and his second coming. He has already fulfilled hundreds of prophesies, and will fulfill the rest when He comes back. But, I digress...  The Old Testament has seventeen prophetical books: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, & Malachi. Some prophesy to the Northern Kingdom o...

Hey guys, it's me again. That's right, twice in ONE week. Wild things. I'm spending the year at Bible school and have learned a lot so far, and I thought I'd pull you guys into the journey. If the phrase "Bible school" put a bad taste in any of your mouths, just wait. Seriously. Hurt comes from all places, and I know the church and church body has not been innocent, but I also want to implore you that it is the human representation that is at fault. Our God is a Holy Healer, and I hope if you have not already met Him, you meet Him one day. That was a little tangential to the rest of the post, but if you leave with any questions about the Person or Character of God, please reach out to me. I'd love to talk and I'd love to wrestle with your questions, and that applies to anything you want to know about this post. In all honesty though, the rest of this post does not deal with any heady theological topics. Instead, we're going to learn how to study th...

Welcome back to the BLOOOOG. It has been a while. Far too long if I do say so myself.  Today, I wanted to tell you about one of my favorite experiences of senior year and, dare I say, college. During my final semester, I enrolled in a class about William Shakespeare. We read The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, and some others. Then, we jumped into the bulk of the course: studying and memorizing Julius Caesar so we could perform it at the end of April. So let's just get one thing straight: I am not an actor. But, I acted. I played four characters (all small parts): the Cobbler, Cinna the conspirator, the third plebeian, and Lucilius.  I loved all four parts, and they all invoked something different. Cobbler was a comedian. My job as I played him was to get the crowd going and excited for the rest of the play, as his scene was the opening, Next, I worked as Cinna with Cassius and Brutus (and the other four conspirators) to assassinate Julius Caesar. Cinna...