Anyone who watches sports–football, baseball, you name it–sooner or later will hear the announcer say about a ball thrown by the pitcher or the quarterback, “Boy! I’ll bet he’d love to have that one back.” But it’s gone, for better or for worse.

One of the best features in having a website is being able to go back into something you’ve written and posted for all the world to see–and brother, do we mean all the world!–and edit it.

What we call tweaking. Fine-tuning. Improving, amending, correcting, fixing. You get the point.

I suppose the process is similar for others who do this sort of thing, but sometimes you reach a point where you feel, “That’s all I can do for this article,” and you quit tampering with it and go ahead and post it. My son Marty showed me how to post these things a couple of years ago, thus cutting out the middle man (himself). It’s good to be able to do that. (If I sound like a 1940 model pleased that he knows how to do something in this technological age, I plead guilty.)

Then, once it gets on the website, the writer is able to read it as others do. That helps the writer see it more objectively and it’s how the flaws often stand out. A sentence doesn’t read right. I used the wrong word. Used a word twice in the same sentence; need to find a different choice for one of them. What did I leave out? What did I include that should have been left out?

The process of editing calls for me to back out of the blog and go through another series of clicks to enter the editing room. I read back over the manuscript (so to speak), and tweak it. Add a comma, shorten a sentence, and so on. At the end, click “save,” wait until it assures me the changes have been made, and voila! the article on the website has been improved.

At least, that’s the plan.

Continue reading →

The church I belong to is expecting.

Finally, they are nearing that long anticipated day when the pastor search committee will present the man they believe God has led to us. Last Sunday morning, I made a few suggestions at the monthly men’s breakfast about this crucial time in our church’s existence and encouraged our guys to pass this along to other members.

1) This is no time to quit praying.

Over a year ago Pastor Tony Merida resigned to become assistant professor of preaching and dean of the chapel at our New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. One of the first acts of the leadership was to call the congregation to prayer.

Over the past several months, each Sunday morning, interim pastor Mark Tolbert has called a member of the search committee to the platform and led in prayer for their work.

Now that the committee has announced a date at which they will introduce the prospective pastor, there is a tendency on our part to feel a great sense of relief and thank God for answering our prayers, then to stop praying. But if anything, this is the time to intensify our intercessions.

I’ve heard that tightrope walkers find the most hazardous part of their routine to be the last step or two. They’ve been out on the rope, they’ve performed their death-defying act, and the crowd is cheering. A sense of relief floods over them as they step toward safety. This is the danger zone. Veterans learn to be vigilant and cautious at every point until they are safely on the ground.

2) This is the time to trust your leaders.

Continue reading →

This most dreaded of all seasons begins June 1 and goes through December 1. Weeks ago, the National Hurricane Center or a department of the University of Colorado or someone came out with their forecasts for this year. The fact that their predictions for the past two years have been dramatic failures does not stop them from issuing a new sets of prognostications and the news programs and papers from reporting them. But no one I know pays much attention to them. There have to be better ways of predicting these storms.

As though they are finally getting the message, the hurricane “experts” are hard at work in search of more reliable indicators. We hear of attempts to measure the temperature of the ocean underneath tropical depressions and of robot airplanes which will be sent into the storms closer to the ground, something the weather service’s airplanes cannot do safely.

Such information would be no help in predicting the number and intensity of storms but could give us advance knowledge of what a storm already formed might do.

Are we safe? Is New Orleans protected from a storm? Has the relentless levee-building which the U. S. Corps of Engineers has been engaged in since Hurricane Katrina, nearly three years ago, produced stronger, more reliable levees?

Good question. The only sure answer is: we won’t know until a storm hits.

Continue reading →