I Am Tired... In a Good Way

a life update

If you saw my sermon post and wanted to read the text instead of watching the sermon, the post has been updated with the summary and highlights. You can access that here:

Fullness of Joy in the Presence of God

One more housekeeping thing: we had our yearly Friendsgiving service on Sunday, which means we didn’t have Bible class, so I won’t be posting an audio on the Minor Prophets this week to YouTube. Also, my Tuesday morning class had an excellent question on Romans 11:25-26, so I also won’t be publishing a Daniel audio this week or next because of Thanksgiving; instead, I’ll share the audio from the class on Romans 11 later today (November 19). You can find that on my YouTube channel around 3:00pm central time.

Why I’m Tired

So as you know from my posting activity across YouTube and Substack, I have several things I’ve been working on simultaneously: my weekly series on the eschatology of John (which probably takes up the most time), a weekly sermon post (almost fifty-two in a row), two Bible classes a week, and shorter video series on YouTube.

But what you might not know about is the flurry of things that have been going on over the past few weeks:

1. We had our yearly trunk-or-treat at church on the night before Halloween.

2. I travelled to Long Island from November 14-16 to speak at the Blue Point Bible Church.

3. We had our Friendsgiving service at church on Sunday.

4. I’ve been planning all of my sermons for next year and working with my friend Corri to craft and promote a theme to go along with those sermons.

5. I’ve been meticulously planning our youth retreat that is quickly approaching in February.

6. And I’ve been trying to be the best husband, father, friend, and musician I can be.

Let’s focus on three of these.

2025 Theme

I’ve seen these gospel symbols around for sometime now. I really like the idea behind them as a way to present the gospel in its entirety. I also love the centrality of the resurrection in the graphic!

In designing this logo, my friend Corri (she has a blog!) and I played around with different arrows, and I pitched a new design for the resurrection symbol. I want it to look more like an empty tomb. The symbol in other designs looks more like a rainbow to me (like in the one below). I wanted the direction of the arrows to mean something as well. The last arrow, for instance, represents a “second coming” that is much more than a one-time event.

After looking at the symbols for a while, I thought about putting the word “LOVED” underneath. I just liked the way it looked, and I think the message is the whole point of the good news, to tell people they are loved.

One night after we had decided this would be the theme, it hit me that love could be an acronym. So I came up with…

Left heaven
Offered himself
Victory for all
Entered the holy place
Defeats Death

With the help of Corri, we made wristbands, designed t-shrits, made cards to pass out, and designed a few other decorations and things to go around the church building.

I also took out the Revised Common Lectionary and used it to plan out the titles for every sermon next year as well as pick which gospel symbol went best with each sermon. It turns out that the gospel symbols and my acronym fit perfectly with the flow of the liturgical calendar.

L - for Advent and Epiphany
O - for Lent and the crucifixion
V - for Easter
E - for Ascension Sunday
D - for Ordinary Time (how shall we live in light of Jesus’s complete work?)

So next year you’ll be able to follow along on my blog as I write sermons for the gospel of Luke that center around the idea that you are LOVED.

Blue Point Bible Church

This year I was blessed to return to the Blue Point Bible Church to speak at their Advancing the Faith Conference. I don’t have copies of the lectures yet, but once I get them, I’ll share them on one of my future posts along with my slides and notes.

I decided to fly up a night early this year because in the past I’ve had to balance travel fatigue and speaking all on the same day. One year I was stressed because I had traveled all day, lost my luggage, and still had to speak, so this year I went up late Thursday night.

This turned out to be an excellent choice.

On Friday morning, my friends encouraged me to visit New York City, something I had never done despite being just an hour away over the last few years.

So I set out by myself Friday morning, rode to train to Penn Station, and spent a few hours visiting Times Square, the Rockefeller Center, Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (what the cool kids call the Met), and riding the subway here and there on my way back to Grand Central Station to catch the Long Island Railroad.

In the pictures above, you’ll see the Temple of Dendur. It was an Egyptian temple built just a few years before Jesus’s birth. In the sixth century AD, it was consecrated as a Christian church, which means Christians gathered, took communion, sung hymns, and prayed in an Egyptian temple!

For lunch that day I met with my friend Summerlee. Summerlee is an expert on the tree of life. We actually had a great conversation about it a couple of years ago.

After lunch, she graciously (albeit somewhat forcefully) put a metro card into my hand and pushed me onto the fastest subway to the Met, despite my natural rural reluctance to crowded subterranean trains. She’s the one who told me all about the Temple of Dendur, and without her guidance I don’t think I could've navigated the subway, even though my destination was only two stops away.

During lunch we talked Hebrew imagery, sacrifice, church growth, and the current state of the church. We ran through our individual histories over the last couple of years and shared a few laughs. I wish our lunch could have lasted longer, but we had to part so she could catch a train to her church’s retreat center and I could finish my sight-seeing before needing to head back to Long Island before dark.

After successfully making it back to Long Island, I drove to the Blue Point Bible Church, put a few finishing touches on my presentations slides I had been meditating on during my walks around the city that day, and delivered my lecture as well as listened to an intriguing and encouraging presentation by Pastor Steve Magua.

Another day of lectures, worship, break out sessions, and great food later, I was on my plane home.

Lecture, Breakout Session Illustration, and a Rick Welch Selfie

Music!

The other cool thing that happened over the last couple of weeks is that I was able to play mandolin for my Papa’s 80th birthday.

There’s not much to write about it, but here’s a picture:

Kenny Townsend, Daniel Rogers, Gary Waldrep, and Donna Townsend

That’s about it!

There’s a lot more to type, but that’s about it for this post.

If you want to donate to our church’s youth trip, you can send money to our church through PayPal. Just be sure you put that it is for “Winterfest” in the memo line. The teens are doing a fundraiser, and they would be encouraged by any amount you could give.

If you want to know what I’ve been reading lately, you can watch this update video below: