So grateful for the incredible community of intercessors and givers that keep me and my team in business! Thanks for your prayers for our weekend in St. Louis. Here’s our current team minus Jake (Kansas Univ) and Tom (Iowa State). We took a few minutes early in our weekend to ask the question, “Are we thankful servants?” I had brought a four-page spreadsheet (pic below) – 12 columns wide and 519 rows long! I handed it out and had the staff look at it (impossibly small micro-dinky font in order to fit on one page-width). Every active donor this team has recruited was on that spread-sheet (519 of them). If you’re reading this your name might be ON that sheet! The columns? July 2024 through June 2025, a year’s worth of giving by our entire team’s donor base. It’s overwhelming to look at it. And you need to know this team is sooooo grateful for every donation. And we’re grateful for every thought and every prayer. Thank you so much!

NaKhia Grays is an InterVarsity staff director in the D.C. area (center picture in the gallery above). I have gotten to know her this past year – she’s a ministry coach for a new staff member I am encouraging in fund-raising. NaKhia made the mistake of mentioning to me during a coaching call that she is a Working Genius trainer! I invited her to take my team through Working Genius. We burned 3 hours Saturday morning with NaKhia before we knew it! We had to zoom Tom in from Ames.

Hope you had a great weekend. My Saturday was terrific! We had a GCF brunch – Belgian Waffles and Sermon on the Mount. Then I went on a monster bike ride in 95 degree weather! 33.5 miles with a massive bought of cramps in my quads as a reward when I got back. I was writhing in pain on the living room floor till my quick-thinking wife pealed a banana and shoved it toward my gaping mouth! Slept pretty well last night.

Have a terrific week. Thanks again for your support!

Click here if you want to see some cool study tools for the book of Micah!

Coming to you in this post from The Mercy Center in St. Louis. My team will be arriving later this afternoon. I’d love it if you could think of us this week and pray for our 48 hours together. Here’s the schedule if you’d like to see what we’re up to.

Working Genius and A Year with Mic.

Two of the “big rocks” going into the jar this weekend will be a workshop on a thing called Working Genius, and we’re going to spend some time with the Old Testament prophet Micah (you guessed it, MSS Study). If you need an intro to Working Genius you can go their site and check it out yourself. Working Genius is a little like Strength-Finder. You answer a 40 question survey and the tool tells you what part of a planning and execution cycle you’re best at (and what part you’re NOT good at). Here’s a snapshot of Tim Perry:

Tomorrow my team will spend the whole morning with a Working Genius facilitator. She will take us through a map of how all our Working Genius profiles intersect and overlap. I’m looking forward not only to how the profile will help my team mates individually, but also what we can learn about being a more effective team.

A year with the prophet Micah!

Really? YES, we’re kicking off a team adventure in scripture for the coming year (we’ll see how long this actually takes). If there ever was a message our planet could use at the moment, the restoration oracle of Micah 4 would be it!

You would be more than welcome to join us on our Year with Mic if you’d like. Here’s complete Micah manuscript that is loaded with study resources. And here’s a quite time guide for Micah 3-4 if you need some questions to stir your spiritual formation.

I’ll give you an update after the weekend. Thanks for your prayers for me and my team!