The secret’s out about the easy life of professional clergy:
“Church, to some degree, has become industry. It’s become an easy ‘desk job’ for intelligent men who don’t want to work with their hands, but who may not necessarily have a vision for changing the world with this powerful message of the gospel.”
You may want to listen carefully to this three-minute video by Leonce Crump II, Pastor of Renovation Church in Atlanta.
Here’s a recent self-portrait while sitting in my car, where I spend a lot of my time.
Greetings to those who still continue to visit The Thin Edge, even though my time and energies have obviously been focused on other things for the past three years. Yes, we moved back to the United States three years ago this month. The time has flown as we have watched our family grow: three grandchildren have quickly multiplied into nine over this short period of time.
My American heart doctor confirmed that I had suffered a heart attack in Wales in March 2008, so within a few months of returning, the VA (Veterans Administration) took great care of me and completed stent surgery at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. Five stents later, I immediately felt a huge difference Continue reading
I just recently downloaded a Kindle version of Mere Churchianity: Finding your way back to a Jesus-shaped spirituality by the late Michael Spencer, aka The Internet Monk. What a refreshing and stimulating read thus far!
Our son and his family is currently visiting us from Sheffield, England, over the Christmas holidays. On December 23rd, his in-laws are making their first visit to the United States. We’ve not had all four children together in the same place for Christmas in about eight or nine years. This afternoon we’re have family portraits taken: four children, a daughter-in-law, two sons-in-law, and six grandchildren!
Well, it’s been just over four years ago that I began this blog. It was excellent therapy for me and it gave me a platform to talk about things that I felt, at the time, to be important and relevant. To me, it didn’t really matter whether anyone read my posts or not; however, I discovered that a lot of people were singing out of the same songbook and a few people probably became convinced that I had completely lost my mind or my faith.
I have been back in the United States now for eighteen months and, like every other American, I have sadly been forced to scratch and claw my way to sustain even the most austere existence possible in the current economic climate. It took eight months to land a full-time position and we almost went bankrupt in the process, so I’ve had virtually no time to blog in any meaningful way. I’ve settled for a more convenient approach via status updates on Facebook, so if you really want to keep in touch, please search for Bill Lollar on Facebook and send me a friend request with a brief note explaining that you have been following my blog and wanted to stay in touch. I’m a little bit eccentric about “friend requests” so if you don’t write me a personal note, I’ll probably just delete your request.
Thanks for the interaction over these past four years! I really miss writing and maybe one day I’ll return to blogging in my retirement years, if that ever becomes a possibility for me.
Take care! Unless I change my mind this blog will disappear on December 25, 2010.
Blessings!
Bill Lollar
Some of my subscribers and regular readers may be wondering, “What happened to the guy who once wrote this blog?” It’s been more than a little crazy since we returned to the states in late May 2009. I started working really long hours at an AT&T call center, then they decided after five weeks of training and five weeks of OJT that I didn’t have the right kind of statistics for a long-term position. And I was fired! It was my first experience and, sadly, I was ineligible to draw unemployment benefits since we had lived overseas over the previous five years.
Thankfully, another promising position surfaced during that first job and it s-l-o-w-l-y simmered on the back burner over many months. I thought it would never come to fruition, but after four and a half months of unemployment I began working on November 23, 2009, as a special investigator retained by the U. S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government’s HR department. I’m doing background investigations, primarily for the Department of Defense (DoD) that lead to security clearances for members of the U. S. military and defense contractors. The most common background investigation looks at every place a person has lived, worked, or attended school over the past ten years. Every single day I get to do my part towards insuring a strong national security. An average week consists of interviewing people and gathering background information from courthouse records, real estate leasing companies, high schools and universities, all sorts of job sites, and neighborhoods.
Things are settling down slightly, so I hope to resume a little more writing than the past eight or nine months. That’s not an ironclad promise, but an aspiration. I have a lot to share, but not nearly as much time to write, which is very frustrating for me. Thanks for hanging in there! I’ve been amazed that my blog stats have not wavered very much at all, which means that a lot of new people are finding the content that I’ve built up over time. Hopefully, they’re enjoying what they find. Anyway, gotta run!
