I'd rather be outside…
Remember the early days of the internet? The constant “Did you get my email?” calls and the excitement around search engines? AI is currently at a similar stage and it’s poised to become increasingly ingrained in our lives, acting as a powerful toolkit rather than a sentient being. So what is the key takeaway?
Don’t fear AI, embrace it.
I’ve been in bi-vocational ministry for over a decade now, which means in addition to doing pastoral work ministry work of some kind, I’m also doing other things to round out the income and fill in the rest of the gaps. I’ve done quite a few different things over the years to do this.
I’ve done professional speaking between my vocational pastoring and transitional pastoring. It works very well in one sense because it is quite lucrative, and if I didn’t hate traveling so much, I’d probably still be doing it. I have written some books and spun off some courses from those books, and that has been from time to time quite lucrative. It’s actually an area I could probably do a lot more on. I’ve done affiliate marketing. I have done marketing for other speakers and other industries, and still tend to go that way, which I enjoy very much.
Then in the last year or so, I started experimenting with something I kept bumping into as a skill people suggested, not for bivocational ministry, but for people who like to work at home or want to get out of the regular grind and that is trading. Trading crypto and trading stocks.
I hate the use of the word hack for everything under the sun, but I’m going to use it here anyway: an afternoon energy hack. I’ve worked this issue over many different ways in my life. For instance, I know enough not to go to a Chinese buffet for lunch on a day when I need to work inside in the afternoon. That is just a recipe for napping on my seat or on my feet. It just does no good. What I eat at lunch makes a big, big difference.
Today I have some thoughts on how to plan your year, but with a little bit of a twist. If you follow my Priority Pastor podcast or my content at all you know I’m fairly big into planning and goal setting and quarterly planning, all that kind of stuff. But one of the most strategic things I do as a part of planning my year is to simply write out a prayer for your year. In this prayer, I write out all the things I’m asking the Lord to do in my life, my family, my ministry, in the high level areas that I concern myself with.
This can be done in the new year, at your birthday or in the middle of the year if you have not done it yet, so really whenever you plan your year. I typically do this near the beginning of the new year, and then tweak it a little bit and make sure it kind of covers everything I want it to cover. Then for the first few weeks of the new year, I will review it and pray it over and then I’ll forget about it. I have this actually in a file I do every year called seeking and then the year number. So this year it’s Seeking 2023, and it’s basically seeking God.
Today I want to share with you a teaching I did for 12Church ministry on the whole issue of pain while we’re engaged in ministry. How do we continue in ministry when we’re experiencing pain? How do we carry on in ministry when surrounded and immersed in pain, especially working with people in pain? How do we do that?
Here are some thoughts: Can we engage on mission with Jesus when we’re in deep pain?