Author: pastorfeltz

Perfectly imperfect for each other…

/ pastorfeltz / 2 Comments

For those of us on the single side of married, marriage is kind of a weirdly pieced together picture. Each segment of the picture is kind of hidden, and looks like a blank slate. It’s tempting to look at marriage and fill in those blank segments with all kinds of different things. You get it in mind how much time you’ll spend together, what your spouse will do for you, what the kids will be like, and everything else. Each piece is, in many ways, it’s own ideal picture that come together to make your perfect marriage.

There’s just one problem.

No marriage is perfect.

Perfect Continue reading →

The Army is the best and worst roommate ever…

/ pastorfeltz / 2 Comments

1915510_516127485571_5770102_n

I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people about what it’s like being in the Army. There’s an air of mystery and lore around what being a uniformed service member is like. In college, for example, I had to spend every Fall semester telling dozens of curious students that I had not, in fact, gone to basic training, nor was I an expert marksmen. I also wasn’t Jason Bourne in the flesh, capable of using any and everything as a lethal weapon. I was just a student who had learned some fun stuff, but more really boring stuff. (By my senior year, I was completely okay with letting them think I was a Green Beret-Ninja hybrid who could kill them with a paper plate since that meant fewer questions).

Being a vet (soldier, sailor, airmen, marine, or coastie) is difficult to explain. The best illustration I can come up with is that being in the military is like having a roommate who follows you everywhere, and does some weird things at weird times. Oh, and that roommate lives in your thoughts, and not actually in a spare bedroom.

I’ve named my roommate ‘Joe’.

Continue reading →

Baptized by tears…

/ pastorfeltz / 5 Comments

Baptism

I had an incredibly interesting weekend last weekend. And I suppose this post is a part of my processing it.

The weekend began on Saturday morning, where I was busy running around getting the little things taken care of for a seminar for the worship team at my church. After the seminar, my fiancé and I went for a fairly long walk where we talked about what felt like everything. We came back to my house and planned out the rest of our weekend. I was going to need to rehearse my sermon while she was going to continue her job search. That was, until I got a message that said I needed to be at the nearby (45 minutes away) hospital right away.

Something terrible had happened. I knew someone young had passed away, but the details were lost on me. Everything in between leaving my house and walking in the room with the family was a blur, because of what I walked into, in the room.

There in the most private, intimate room the ER could spare, was a parent mourning the loss of their seven-week old child. It was a moment that I was admittedly unprepared for. I can’t tell you what my immediate thoughts were, primarily because it’s uncouth of a preacher to use that kind of language. Suffice it to say, I was at a loss.

Continue reading →

Succeeding enough to know I’m failing…

/ pastorfeltz / Leave a comment

failure2-michael-jordan

When I was really into running, and training for a marathon, I learned the power of the ‘little things’. You might have never known you had a bad stride, or a weak core, or poor hydration because you never ran enough to find those things out. But as you improve in your running, those little things begin to matter more and more. As you grow as a runner, you’ll begin to see those areas of weakness you were blind too before. Success has a tendency of exposing failings.

The church I pastor has grown steadily over the last few months, which is great. Numbers aren’t the end goal, but “more people in worship” means that we can look forward to doing bigger, more impactful things in the community, and more lives can encounter God, which are the real goals.

This growth has also exposed me to two of my biggest weaknesses as a leader. And I hate it.

Continue reading →

Too Close for Comfort…

/ pastorfeltz / 1 Comment

Recently, I had four of my closest friends over to my house for a weekend (along with their two spouses and two dogs, it was a full house, and loads of fun). We spent the weekend playing board games for, quite literally, sixteen hours (it was probably more than that, but I wasn’t timing). Now, my house has the room space for this kind of shindig – kind of. I had one friend who was crashed on my sofa, but everyone else had their own room and bed/air mattress.

These friends know me fairly well. I’ve lived with them, gotten angry at them, laughed until I cried with them, and been my most ridiculous with them. One of them even tried to choke me one time (I must admit, I had asked him too). The level of intimacy we have with one an other is incredible, and it’s honestly why I value their friendships so much. (That, and the fact that they simply know too much about me, and it takes too long to break in a new set of friends).

Continue reading →