Jesus at times seems to go out of His way to connect with one person...

enjoying my study on Mark 5! So at the end of chapter 4; we see the disciples, Jesus, and other people load up boat to cross the Sea of Galilee...Then the storm hits and Jesus calms the storm! Crazy stuff! But if that wasn't crazy enough, when they land the ship; they are met by a crazy demon possessed man! Jesus intervenes and sends the legion of demons into a herd of pigs; and then we see them get back on the boats.

Now here is where it gets interesting for me; because it is all left up to interpretation and assumption. From the passage, I would calculate that to cross the sea they went anywhere from 8 to 13 miles (depending where they launched). Then the only thing we read that happened was that Jesus changed a man's life. Wow, it is almost like Jesus was on a divine path to reach out to a man that people feared and shunned! Could have he done other things on the other side of the sea, possibly. But from my reading of Jesus life, He does this from time to time (woman at the well) and goes out of the way to impact an individual's life!

Being in the Community

Yesterday, was just another reason I love to be in the community as a pastor! I spend lots of time at coffee shops, the gym, and other places where I can be an impact. While biking home yesterday, I notice out of my peripheral a teen sitting on a picnic table and on the table what looked like a bag of weed. Yes, I'm very observant; had to be, I have worked with at risk teenagers that needed constant super vision. I did a 180 and went back to the teen. He had no time to put his bag away, and denied it being anything but herbal...Spent some time talking to him about not going down that path, and that I came back to talk to him because I cared enough to make sure he wasn't, and would hope that someone would have done the same for me when I was a teen...

The more I spend time in the community, the more I tend to see and have a chance to interact with. Stuff like this happens around us all the time, either we are too busy to notice or we just don't care or we think it's another persons problem; whatever the issue is there are hurting people all around us! What are you doing in your community? I have recently found out that in Green Bay, there are over 900 kids that are homeless! There are kids that during the school year that eat lunch at school on Friday and their next meal is the following Monday at school! And these are just two needs within the community...