Ponderings from the RidgeRunner

The past few weeks have been a little chaotic - had a couple of financial challenges, work has been crazy, and we have a potential move back to Lakeland coming up soon as well.  In addition, I have been involved in a couple of projects I have been working on, and those have required great investment of time as well.  no rest for the weary, and a man's work is never done...but, who's complaining, and who would listen anyway, right?

Our move to Lakeland is an act of divine intervention, as both Barb and I feel it is something we need to do.   Although I have been in Pinellas County now for 13 years, things have not gone as smoothly here as they should have, and the conclusion we have both gotten after much prayer and soul-searching is that we just don't belong here.   Although Lakeland is a fairly large town (75,000, as I recall reading) it doesn't have all the drama and craziness of Pinellas County or Tampa, and it is also more affordable for us to move back there than to stay here.   Of course, that leads to another objective:  I have been trying to get my graduate studies done for a long time but with little success, and now my alma mater, Southeastern, is offering graduate programs, which fits perfectly into this whole picture.   Granted, Southeastern is obviously not the school I graduated from in 1996 anymore - it has gotten fully on-board with the Rick Warren/"Emerging Church" agenda, things I have no part of personally - but its academics are unequalled, and there is still a spiritual covering over that area that we could use.   In short, for the first time in a long time, I feel as if I have a clear directional signal, and that has galvanized me.   As we make the move and get settled, I will either keep you abreast here or on my Facebook page.

Graduate school and moving have led me to initiate work on a couple of projects too that have been dormant for a while.  As I was doing some packing up in my home office, I rearranged a whole box of large documents I have been wanting to organize, and the lawfirm I work in gave me an idea - I have undertaken a project to do a GBC binding on these docs to make them more accessible and readable.   Essentially, the documents are largely the product of one special area of study, and that is the Catholic Apostolic Church movement of the 1830's (wrongly called "Irvingites," after a clergyman involved in the movement in Scotland by the name of Edward Irving).   The CAC was a forerunner of the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, and its importance to ecclesiastical history cannot be underestimated.    However, for years resources on it were hard to obtain, but thankfully one of my good friends, a German bishop in the surviving remnant of the CAC by the name of Harald Scheffler, sent me a whole library of documents on a disc, and those are the focus of this project.   I myself am one in doctrine personally with the CAC, as they believe much of what I believe, and Harald and I have been in discussion for several years now about my potential ordination into the CAC, something I am seriously taking into consideration.   Should that happen, I would be the main American representitive of the movement, and it would be my responsibility to disseminate material on the CAC to American colleges and universities, particularly Pentecostal/charismatic institutions.  That being said, the focus of my graduate work will be reading and research on the movement, which I will also be doing a series of articles on my other blog, "Sacramental Present Truths," in the coming months on the CAC and its history, beliefs, doctrines, and how they relate to today.   It is something I am very excited about personally, and that along with my studies on Appalachian Holiness/Pentecostalism will be two specialty areas of my own teaching and study.   More on that to come as well.

Our whole packing experience now - and mind you, this isn't my favorite job, as I hate dismantling my office like that - has been an excursion into some things that have brought back some long-forgotten memories and other things.   Looking through old memorabilia has also been used by God, I feel, to bring us back into focus of where we need to be, and there is so much that can be elaborated on with that.   Sometimes it is good to go back in order to move forward, because we often forget some of the best and most valuable parts of ourselves as the cares and snares of life get the best of us.   Consider this to be God's little reminder to stay on track, and the message has gotten to me loud and clear.

I want to get back on this page with writing some personal history on myself too, speaking of which.  There are a lot of amusing anecdotes and stories to share, and I want to begin sharing those with you here.  For a couple of years, I did post a lot of those stories on my Facebook page, and they were generally well-received, and people have been asking for these again.   So, once I am settled, be looking for more of those!

And, on that note, I bid you all adieu for today, and will visit with you again soon.  Have a good week all of you, and hope and pray your needs are met and your lives stay fulfilled.