Tieche Pinch-Speaks, Drives in Two RBIs...

This weekend was tough. Saturday, about 1:30, I got a call from our head Pastor, Pastor Bill who has been in the Mediterrean on a cruise (not Tom) for the past two weeks celebrating his 30th wedding anniversary. At any rate, he picked up some sort of icky cold or infection or something, and was hacking his lungs out, so when he called, he sounded like he'd taken up chain smoking.

So, in short, I had to give all four weekend sermons. Luckily, I was intimately familiar with the sermon, since I'd helped write most of it. Saturday night was a bit rough, but Sunday morning went swimmingly. It's weird; my buddy Russell said he really liked the sermon, which didn't register with me because overall, I didn't feel particularly good about it. I thought about this and figured that the sermons I get the most pumped about are the ones where 1: It's hysterical and people are laughing uproariously or 2: We milk it and have a real emotional moment, and people cry a whole lot. For me, being highly emotional, it's about emotion.

But if those things are absent, it doesn't necessarily mean that the sermon wasn't good. I think back to the times when I've been like, "Wow" in a sermon. Often it was because someone said something that made a light go on. It was necessarily funny, or even moving emotionally. It was just deep, and changed the way I thought about God. Most of Mere Christianity is an exercise in this. I never laughed once during that book, but it's vastly impacted the way I think about God.

So, I was thinking that really, the goal of all my sermons are to help people exxperience at least one of the three:
1. A quiet moment with God
2. Feel a deep emotion
3. Change a way of thinking about something (take something confusing and make it crystal-clear, usually with an analogy)

Anyway, overall it was a fun experience, and I think it went pretty well (the first sermon, Saturday night, was a bit rougher) but it's Monday morning now and I'm really tired because I also had to speak at Take2 last night, which made 5 times in one weekend. When you don't have the weekend to rest, it makes it tough.

Plus, I'm getting mildly sick again. Curses!