Greatest Joy

I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth. – 3 John 1:4

I’m a father. At the time of this post, my kids are 4 (Josh) and 2.5 (Jake) and T-1 month (Sam). With each new child God blesses us with, we conjure up new hopes and dreams for each one. We picture what they will look like when they get older, what kind of profession they might have, what sort of music they will like, or what sorts of things they will accomplish as they get older. I can identify with John here though, that my greatest hope for my children is that they will grow up to follow the Truth.

Beyond our own offspring, our “children” include those to whom we’ve provided spiritual leadership – our spiritual children. There’s a great amount of joy associated with seeing those who we’ve mentored running after Him as well.

Lord, we pray for our children – whether by blood or spirit – that they will walk in the truth and follow after you.

Don’t Set Aside His Grace

I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing! - Galatians 2:21

Today is my 7th wedding anniversary. I still don’t have it figured out.

There’s a lot I still get wrong, just ask my wife. I believe God designed marriage to help those of us who need a little more help understand Him better. One thing He’s taught me through our marriage is that harmony in our relationship depends a lot less on not messing up in our actions toward one another, and a lot more on forgiving each other when we do mess up. In other words, the bridge building goes on in the opposite direction you might think of it happening. It’s tempting for us to think that we have to work hard to get to God, when in reality, He’s been working on the bridge from His side for a long time.

Let’s set aside trying to earn our way to Him and not set aside his amazing grace.

Back in the Game

Back in college, I thought it might be cool to syndicate some thoughts I had about what I was learning in my devotional times. I actually managed to get 200 people to “subscribe” to my devotionals. Of course, back then, we were all using plaintext email clients and there was no such thing as a spam filter. Nowadays, if I tried to send an email to 200 people simultaneously, no one would receive the email, or if they did, it would surely show up in the black hole of the common Junk Mail folder.

Of course, in this new “Web 2.0” world, we have blogs for this purpose. I’ve been thinking/praying a lot recently about starting this practice back up. I already have two blogs – one at http://pcreehan.spaces.live.com where I post the whatever stuff, and I have one at work: http://blogs.msdn.com/pcreehan for more technical stuff. Neither of those seem appropriate locations for this content. I wanted a place where this content wouldn’t be lost amongst the other content I post to those pages.

So, if you’re interested, subscribe on your RSS reader, add a favorite, or set this as your homepage. I’m going to try to post to this more regularly than to my other ones, and I’ll keep comments moderated, but I welcome constructive participation in the comments sections.

Blessings!