Joseph F. Radosevich

Every school child used cheap fountain pens at school 60 years ago. Something like a Shaeffer School Pen. I suggest that every person should get a cheap fountain pen. Nice fountain pens aren't for everyone. Nice fountain pens aren't even for most people. I have several cheap fountain pens, a couple of $20 fountain pens, and one very nice fountain pen that I got as part of the inventory when I bought a friend's fountain pen business. I'm not in the fountain pen business anymore. I sold out all my inventory and did not replenish. I found that my favorite fountain pens are the cheap ones. They're the ones that I enjoy using all the time and carry with me most of the time.  What makes them fun?  I don't worry about them. I haven't broken any of them. If I did, it wouldn't be a big problem. I can carry them with me all the time because of this. They are easy to slide into my my notebook cover. They write smoothly. They are even some of my smoothest pens, and ...

Two or three months ago, I unsubscribed to most of the podcasts that I listened to. At the time I was subscribed to like 50 or 60 podcasts. I normally had 10 episodes lined up. If I was bored. I'd look at my podcast feed to see if there's anything new that I wanted to listen to.  I realized that podcasts were requiring too much of my attention. I listened to them while I worked in the garden, while I rode in the car, while I did the dishes, and while I worked out. I started listening to podcasts when I got a smartphone to have something to listen to in the car and when mowing. I rationalized it that I was gathering illustrations for preaching and teaching. There was no down time, though, for silence or for listening to audiobooks, the Bible, or music. I realized that I needed to cut back. I unsubscribed to almost everything. I kept some soccer podcasts. It made looking at my podcast app much less interesting. It also meant there was a lot less that I felt was urgent or importan...

I preach a historic sermon for our sunrise service every Easter. This year I preached a sermon based on a Charles Spurgeon's sermon on Philippians 3:10 on knowing the power of Christ's resurrection. When I was reading/studying to prepare, I wondered what made Spurgeon's mind work the way that it did. What did he read and think about that allowed him to see with such uniqueness, power, and clarity? I understand that he was unique. I don't seek to match Spurgeon's gifts. He was a prodigy as a young man, and God did something special in his life. I don't want to match Martyn Lloyd-Jones' gifts or J.C. Ryle's gifts. But I think it is worth seeking to see the way that they saw. When I was in seminary, I took at class on C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. We read most of what each of them wrote. I've said before that the biggest value was in learning to think like they think. I can read Spurgeon, Newton, Ryle, Lloyd-Jones, etc., and I do. I now want to go f...

  It's finally past the last frost (today is actually the official last frost, and we were close this morning). Weather can be up and down all spring, but I think April will finish pretty warmly. I thought I'd do a garden update. You can see red onions and Victoria Rhubarb in the picture above. Rhubarb has done really well this spring. The onions look like rows of soldiers. The larger onion in the picture is a holdover from last year. I let it go hoping that it will go to seed--onions only produce seeds in their second year. We also have radishes, carrots, and lettuce growing. I planted some warm-weather seeds in the ground over the weekend so that they have a few days to germinate such as National Pickling cucumbers, Green Light F1 cucumbers, Jade bush beans, and Blue Lake pole beans. I'm also hardening off some red lettuces, all the tomatoes and all the peppers.  I overseed the lawn every spring and fall. We just haven't had great weather in spring or fall for oversee...

Someone asked me what is new at the church recently. I sputtered and stuttered about some new things I was working on. They weren't my priorities. They weren't what I was excited about. I got sucked into the question.  It happened again last week. Someone asked what was new. I tried to find something to say. Here is what I wish I had said: There is very little new in pastoring. Pastor is faithfulness to the basics with creativity and energy.  The basics of pastoring don't change--preach, pray, love people, and suffer. We equip the saints for works of service. That hasn't changed in 2000 years. It would be a problem if the job changed.  What does change is that we do the same thing with creativity and energy. I picked up this nuance from a Paul Graham post called " The Right Kind of Stubborn ." He isn't a church leader and isn't writing for church leaders, but he explores the difference between stubbornness and persistence. He says energy and imaginatio...

Being in my forties has changed my reading priorities. I read 50-70 books per year. That means I will likely read only 2800 more books in my lifetime. I will only read 1500 more books before I reach retirement age.  My approach was pretty haphazard from my 20's to my 40's. Unless it was required for school, I read whatever caught my eye and often was just the latest books that came out. That made my reading really random. If I heard a great interview with an author, I added it my list of books to read. I enjoyed that randomness, but I decided recently that I didn't want to be quite so random. One of the ways that I have reprioritized my reading is that I want to read the classics in my fields. What I mean by fields is my areas of responsibility and interest--often career and hobbies but probably family as well. My fields are career-related (pastoring, biblical studies, and preaching), Christian-related (theology and devotion) and writing (literature and writing). I've s...

 

I heard many years ago about gratitude journals or being thankful every morning. Even now it sounds like a ridiculous new age meditation practice to me, but I have made thankfulness a priority and everyday practice. Several years ago, my counselor assigned me to write down 10 things everyday that I was thankful for. I only do seven now (the number is doable but still significant), but I do it everyday. During our family bible time on Sunday nights, we take turns saying things that we're thankful to God for.  I have found two reasons that thankfulness is so important in the Bible.  First, thankfulness protects us from anxiety. Philippians 4:6-7 " Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.   And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." Thankfulness (and putting our needs on God's to-do list) has a protect...

I almost gave up on Hebrew vowels last summer. I took two semesters of Hebrew in college and two in seminary. I still didn't understand vowels and vowel changes. I just took them by faith and where possible memorized them by force. Then I went to the Greek and Hebrew for Life Conference at my alma mater last year, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. I went to a breakout session by Dr. T.J. Betts where he explained in 30 minutes what I had never learned about the vowel system and why words change the way that they do. I had taken Hebrew at Southern from a teacher using a different method than Dr. Betts and Dr. Adam Howell use. I also picked up a new Hebrew grammar by Howell (Dr. Betts' student) and have been working through it.  There are so many language learning apps that promise to help you learn a language (even biblical language apps). I've tried a bunch of them. Here are some hacks better than any app that I'm using to help as I work on my Hebrew (and Greek ...

Our local library has tables with recommended books on all sorts of topics. One of my dreams in life is to curate one of those tables.  A good book is worth so much because it can change your life. I'm starting this series as a digital version of those tables. I'm going to take pictures and share a few words about books in different categories.  My first in this series is on fiction worth rereading. This is literary fiction. All of these are books that I first read in college. I've reread all of them in the last three or four years, except O'Conner. We only read some of the stories of Flannery O'Connor in college, but I have read the whole book recently. These are not necessarily uplifting books or beach reads, but I've enjoyed all of them at least twice.  Cry the Beloved Country is probably my favorite from these right now. It's a beautiful book. Very hopeful too.  The Plague and All the King's Men  are the most cynical and jaded. I still think of the...

I remember the first Honeycrisp apple I ever ate. My wife and I were newly married and somebody in our church told us about this new apple that we should try. It was the largest apple that I had ever seen and cost more than I'd ever paid for a piece of fruit. When we cut it up and I took one bite, my world changed. I tried eating apples off and on over the years. I remembered eating good apples. If I got an apple at the grocery store, though, like a Red Delicious or a Golden Delicious, it was always soft and gross. The Honeycrisp apple changed that for me. After that giant, sweet, crunchy fruit, apples were not just apples. I looked for names. All these years later, I still look for new apples and try different ones at the grocery store or the local orchard if I can find one. I can tell you about Cosmic Crisp, Mutsu, Opal, Envy, Wild Twist, Ludacrisp, Winecrisp, Evercrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Snapdragon, Sugarbee, Lady Alice, Ruby Lee, and Crimson Crisp. That apple changed more than ...

I attended a seminar on pastoral burnout several years ago by mistake at Exponential Conference in Orlando. The organizers changed the topic without notice. I don't remember what seminar I expected, but a pastor got up and said that he was asked to speak on burnout. He shared that he recently (as in that week) finally hit a wall in ministry after being warned by a good friend for along time that it was about to happen. He described his life as a pastor and confessed that he had no authority to speak on the topic assigned to him. He asked his friend (also a pastor at his church) to share on that topic. Everyone seems to be talking about pastoral burnout. There are books, podcasts, seminars, etc. I find it revealing when the pastors with big platforms give interviews where they explain their breakdown after they spent the last 10-20 years telling pastors how to pastor like they do. Brian Croft and James Carroll share an original insight into burnout in their book Pastoral Perseveranc...

Last year, I started preparing sermons four weeks in advance. Now that I've done it for a while, I thought I would write on why I started, how I began, and what I think about it. I decided to try it while reading Paul David Tripp's book Dangerous Calling . He writes in one section about the seriousness of the pastor's calling to preach and warned against preaching without meditation and personal application. He strongly advised preparing further out.  I never did the Saturday night rush sermon. I thought I was doing well since I prepared on Monday (all day) and Tuesday (morning). That felt as far out as I could do. I decided to try it anyway and see what the results were. I always use a checklist for sermon prep. I have it broken down into 10 or so steps. I decided that I could do the first half of my checklist four weeks out and then the second half the week I will give the sermon. The first half of my sermon prep involves translating, outlining, rereading, studying notes,...

Emma recommended A Place to Hang the Moon by Kate Albus after she read it to the kids as part of their school. I wrote down the recommendation, but thought I would read it on vacation this spring. Then, I noticed that my little ones listened to it three straight times after my wife finished it for school. I thought something must be up that they love it so much and decided to read it. It is a sweet, beautifully told, meaningful story set in World War II England about three orphans trying to gain a family in the evacuation of children from London. I thought about it for days. It even inspired some conversation around the dinner table tonight. I can't believe it didn't win the Newbury Award in its year.  It would be a great book for bed time, family read-aloud, or vacation. How to Learn Any Language by Barry Farber describes a system and several methods to learn a language. It's not about one language but about the skills involved in any language. I sounds too good to be tru...

Mid-February is late winter around here. We can still have cold weather and snow for at least two more months, but the worst of the sustained winter weather is now behind us. We will probably have up and down weather in March and April. It was really pretty today, though. Someone asked me this morning if I was ready for gardening, so I thought I'd write about gardening topics. I finally got around to cleaning out my tomato plants from last year. I was really busy with church and family things from early November on. Since we had such a warm fall all the way until the temperature dropped like a rock Thanksgiving weekend, I never got a chance to clean that part of the garden out. It was an ugly sight every time I looked at it. I'm happy to have that cleared out now. The rest of the garden had layers of mulch with oats planted as a cover crop. It is good to be caught up now. Right now, we have taps in our maple trees for gathering syrup. We had two good days of collecting, before ...