Tag: salvation

It’s official: Today I received confirmation of my affiliation with Canines for Christ.

This follows on the “Pet Therapy Team” certification that I earned on October 9 as a canine handler for “Jasper” through Alliance of Therapy Dogs.

My wife was kind enough to shepherd me along in this process — patient with this, my first time, as she paralleled with Jasper as well for her own x-numbered qualification.

Thus begins the next chapter in our lives, serving our Lord in yet another way. Praise Jesus!

Confession: I’m only to the halfway point in my own Who’s Your One? undertaking — started January 25, not always (obviously) exercised one for each consecutive day.

I’m also late to the party. Moreover, I delayed my own start for a number of months after my home church presented it for a second time to our congregation.

And, while I’m at it, far from following recommended guidelines ….

If all of this has effectively torpedoed perfection as prerequisite, then I have hit my mark. Who’s Your One? is a tool and encouragement for Christians as they are, where they are, to help them help those who they’ve identified as personally important, as individuals they’d like to have with them in Heaven.

When I covered this for Saline Journal a few days ago, I opened with an experience I’d had while attending not my own local place of worship, but the regionally familiar mega-church, NorthRidge. Two decades prior, while attending a “Discover the Church” session, Senior Pastor Brad Powell said, in effect, Don’t ask me to get together with your unsaved friend and bring them to Christ.

He likened it to asking him to ask someone to high school prom on your behalf, spend the evening with her there, then ask her — because that’s where you’re interested in taking things, ultimately — to marry you.

It’s that kind of too personal.

A call to the eternal salvation of some that dear to you is surely no less so.

That’s the subtext behind the piece I titled, “Baptist Church has fostered over 50,000 connections to God’s Word through personal prayers for each parishioner’s ‘One.’”

Never one to finish an initial phase before contemplating a next, I put the question to our table during a recent Men’s Breakfast gathering of Brothers from the church I attend. “What if I have another ‘One’ come up? Are there more Scripture sequences I can call up, to keep avoid moving by rote for Round 2, and Round 3, et cetera?”

“That’s not the way it works,” one guy told me. “You don’t get it. You’re just supposed to do it once. Part of the process is to pick one person.”

We’ll see.

This is the second time that Senior Pastor Frank Radcliff of Oakwood Church graciously accepted my invitation to share his thoughts with readers of Saline Journal.

Yesterday he addressed “the essentials of following Jesus Christ, and what ‘Christianity’ means as a call to action.”

More than simply providing an opportunity to extend his voice, I should make it clear that I wholeheartedly agree with what Pastor Frank has written here. Further to that point, I make no claim and have not dilusion of perfection in walking this talk. But that does not keep me, nor should it keep others, from aspiring to do so.

And, yes— I still often miss being in the second or third row of pews right-of-center when he preached.