As Time Goes By

It is February now and it seems that the days continue to fly by. Part of that is because I have stayed fairly busy doing several different jobs and tasks lately. The bulk of my time right now is being spent on preparing lessons for the Thursday night youth group though. We have started a series that deals somewhat with apologetics and how to share our faith with friends. This has proved to be a gi-normous task on my part. I am spending a good deal of time reading and formulating my lessons, but thus far I have been very happy with the way it is going. My end goal is to teach them how to think about their faith in a more mature way and give them more confidence in sharing that faith. Some of the topics are quite deep and I do at times find it challenging to make these ideas accessible to both Jr. High and Sr. students, but I am learning from this process as well.
Earlier in January I also got to give a talk for a bi-monthly Saturday service we do. We are doing the 7 deadly sins so I got to talk about lust. Trust me, this is no easy topic to discuss in a relevant and truthful manner in a group that consists of students and parents and men and women. That was another challenging message but I got positive feedback and I think I handled it as well as I could.
Life here seems to be going along just as normal in a lot of ways. I have a weekly routine that includes teaching a few students weightlifting, weekly Bible studies, and some softball on the weekends. We actually have a tournament coming up just like the one that I traveled to back in October. I am looking forward to that again and having fun competing in a tournament.
Finally, a brief weather report. My outside thermostat states right now that it is about 100 degrees in the shade. The nights are not as cool as they were a few weeks ago, and so I pretty sure that our "cool season" is officially ending. That means I can only look forward to much much more sweating!
Until next time keep on truckin'.