Is he still alive?

I'm not one to deceive myself into thinking that I have a huge viewing audience just sitting on pins and needles waiting for a new post from me...

However, I imagine that there might be one or two regular readers who have started to simply wonder if I've dropped off the face of the earth... No, I am still alive and well!

I won't bother list off all of the lame excuses for why this blog hasn't seen any updates in the last two-and-a-half months. Nobody probably cares anyway! :) However, I would like to tell you a bit of what I've been up to.

Our Christmas celebration as a church was wonderful--I'm very glad that we didn't consider cancellation or major changes to our Sunday schedule just because it landed on Christmas day. We had one of our largest attendances for a Sunday service that we'd had in a long time--with a number of visitors coming to join us for the first time.

Shortly after New Years Day, I had to be in San Diego for a two day meeting--I spent as much time travelling as I spent at the meeting. On the way home from the airport, I found myself in my 15-yr-old 2WD Ford Ranger in the middle of a blinding blizzard at midnight. Common sense should have prevailed and I should have gotten a hotel room for the night, but the desire to get home and be done travelling was overwhelming and I pressed on. I made it home safely--although I did land in the ditch once during the journey.

(We have since replaced our 15-yr-old Ranger with a 2006 Dodge Dakota--but at the moment that's having recurring electrical problems, and has already made two visits to a Dodge dealer to try to diagnose the problem. That's a whole blog entry in itself...so no more on the truck here!)

I did get an iRiver MP3 player for Christmas, with a line-in jack, and I've been investing quite a bit of time and energy to recording sermons, offering CDs to church folk, and making those sermons available online for download, streaming, and podcasting. It's been quite a learning curve, but things are just about finished. I still want to develop some "bookends" for the podcasts, but that will come soon enough.

You can find the underlying sermon blog here. However, the blog is also syndicated at feedburner, so if you have a podcatcher (iTunes, iPodder, or your favorite aggregator) you can subscribe to the sermon feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/JonTwitchellSermons. Each week you'll get the latest sermon automatically delivered to your computer. If you try this, let me know how it works for you--just in case I didn't set it up quite right!

In other news, our church has launched out on "The Quest," which is a 40 day journey of discovery about the Holy Spirit. Between sermons, daily readings, and small groups, the congregation is being brought together for a common purpose as hasn't happened in some time. It's exciting to see people come to Sunday School who haven't been for some time, and others committing to daily readings of The Power to Be Free: Discovering Life in the Spirit of Christ.

We will continue this journey through the Lenten Season, finishing up with a celebration Sunday on Palm Sunday. After Easter, I intend to return to the lectionary, at least through Pentecost.

Also remember that if you're ever up between Midnight and 5:00AM (ET) on weekdays, you can catch me on the radio--mostly introducing music and sharing snapshots of life. You can stream Positive 89.3 online at www.positive.fm. Also, Joe Polek and I bring you "The Zone: Music that Rocks" on Saturday nights from 8:00 - Midnight (ET). If you tune in, be sure to send me an email.

So, that's a bit of what's been going on in my life. I'll get back to lectionary blogging soon!

May God bless you as you serve Him today,

PastorJon