Second Stage Ministries

Every story has to start somewhere. About a month ago, a friend and I started a book called "The Story" written by Max Lucado and Ryan Frazee. In this book they zero in on the great story of God that runs through the Bible. It's a story of amazing love, forgiveness and grace.  In the first part of the story, we see the Earth as a formless void and the words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” – Genesis 1:1-2 (NIV) But as we read the first 25 verses of Genesis 1 we start to see a pattern in HOW God is creating the heavens and the Earth. Throughout those verses we see these three words… “….GOD SAID…” [1] So I picture God looking down or “hovering” over the Earth. Then God begins to speak. “Let there be light, sky, dry ground, seas and oceans, trees and plants. Let there be sun, moon and stars.” [2]

As I was thinking about what to write for this post, I was reminded of this little story in Luke 10: “As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, 'Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!' 'Martha, Martha,' the Lord answered, 'you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.'" - Luke 10:38-42 NIV This was me this past week. I was focused on many things and was feeling a little stressed just like Martha. I needed to homework, work on a lesson for church, help the kids, work on things around the house, write a blog post or two and g

There are some exciting changes coming. One of those changes is that I am going to be doing a short post for the videos that we also do through this ministry. If you didn’t know about the videos – check out the information at the end of this post. There are also NEW links at the top of this page. Last year at this time I posted my very first blog post here. At that time the blog was called “Breathe”. I had a lot of overflow from what God had been teaching me over the summer of 2016. God showed me a lot and I needed a place to put it all. So I sat down and started to unload my mind and the blog was born. I just wanted to give the people who read my blog and little breath of God to start, end or lift their day. This is still true today. I am sharing the different things that God has taught me, things I have discovered along my journey with God, and things I have learned through others. Over the last year, we have had many different posts on many different topics. We even went t

The word masterpiece has taken on a new meaning to me over the last several months. I want to share this thought with you and I hope reading these words will give you the same a-ha moment that I had. This is the definition of "masterpiece" found in the dictionary: [1] "a work of outstanding artistry, skill, or workmanship. an artist's or craftsman's best piece of work." I would now like to draw your attention to a verse in the Bible and we are going to look at the verse in a few different translations. I believe that the different translations of the Bible are there to help us understand what God is trying to say to us. First we are going to look at the verse in the New King James Version: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them." - Ephesians 2:10 NKJV In this version of the Bible we see the word workmanship - which is in the dictionary definiti