Author: Mike Desotell

There is nothing like the frustration of a blank page. Especially when I have to write something. The little cursor line just sits there mocking me with its blinking. Even now, it just blinks at me, taunting me. Daring me to push it across the page with letters and words that are strung together and make some sort of sense. When writing is as big a part of your ministry as it is for pastors, the blank page is your enemy. In life though, getting a blank page is not always a bad thing. There is an old pop Christian song by Chris Rice called “Smellin’ Coffee.”  When I get frustrated with a blank page there're some lines in the chorus that really help me to avoid banging my head against the wall. It goes like this: “I’m smelling coffee, the birds are singing just outside, here comes your [God’s] mercy streaming with the morning light…” When we read about the mercy...

I am afraid to try and calculate the number of minutes I spent on the phone on “hold” this week. Our family recently switched cell phone and cable companies without realizing that it would require oodles of time on the phone with customer service people in order to get everything set up and the billing information correct. I think I had to call at least four times just for them to get my email address right. But I noticed something though in all of those conversations that kind of broke my heart a bit. Almost every time the person on the other end of the line started a new sentence, they said: “please bear with me a little longer.” At first, I thought it was just one particular representative. And then I noticed it was happening with all of them; it didn’t matter if the call center was in Dallas or Mumbai. They also apologized a lot and thanked me for...