I haven’t been using any weight loss products in my effort to drop 80 pounds, and I’m proud of that; all I’m doing is calorie-counting, and so far I’ve lost about 20 pounds, meaning I’m 25 percent of the way toward my goal.

However, it’s a bit tough to watch the scale waver on my week to week. I’ve stalled in dropping weight the past several days and have even gained a couple pounds back.

I wish it were a clearer path toward getting back down to about 170-175, but it wasn’t a quick, clear path reaching 252, so why should dropping it be any different, right? Hard work ahead; glad I have Yeshua as, among other things, my weight loss counselor!

Can you believe what some people surf the Web to find? I mean, there’s a site out there with eczema pictures! C’mon, discussing Messianic theology just HAS to be a bit more pleasant, right?

Anyway, in the end I wrote five sermons on the parables of Yeshua; that’s a pretty good basis for a series on the parables. Trouble is, I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance to complete it, unless I just do them without delivering them.

But the truth is, it’s more important for me to pray and seek the L-RD and his direction on my life, right now. Ministry is hard enough when the L-RD is with you and leading you; it’s just about impossible any other way, at least if you want to do it in the right, appropriate and God-pleasing way.

Not all churches or pastoral/rabbinical careers are handled that way… but I want mine to be one that is.

Toward the end of December, I’ll have the privilege of preaching a full-length sermon… Not once, not even twice, but three times. Well, one of the messages will be preached twice … once each in two different locations … but it’s the most responsibility I’ve been given thus far and I’m certainly looking forward to it.

Of course, I have three commentaries to write before that, but I’m almost done with one and well-studied up on another, so it’s not going to be long before I can zero in on the sermons.

I’m contemplating doing a two-part message and then doing a condensed version of it at the second location. But I’m not sure yet. Several ideas have already occurred to me, including Making It Real, a study of Jonah and a couple other ideas. None of those ideas involve Anilox cleaning, but hey, you can’t have everything, right?

But seriously… I’m leaning right now toward Making It Real… a very ripe topic when it comes to living out one’s faith, rather than just professing it.

Tonight, my wife threw me a nice, quiet, somewhat belated birthday celebration. It was just a few close friends, no RV insurance sales people or anything like that.

We went to the excellent kosher deli in Saint Paul, Cecil’s, and I enjoyed their brand-new pastrami and schmeer (cream cheese) sandwich along with some raspberry lemonade. I had hoped to try their pineapple lemonade, but they were out. Oh well, maybe next time.

At any rate, it was mostly men from my Torah study and their wives. It made for a lovely evening and a very thoughtful event planned by my beautiful and talented wife.

I have some Messianic friends who don’t believe in celebrating birthdays because they’re not commanded by the L-RD. But I have a different view.

The feasts of the L-RD are commanded by the L-RD, and they are His special times to spend with us. If God’s relationship to us is to be our model for a healthy marriage, than we need special times between a husband and wife as well. God doesn’t command any of those specifically, but what better time for a husband and wife to celebrate as a marital “appointed time” than celebrating with each other on the day we reach another “new year” of life?

Makes sense to me.

I ran into a resource recently where emergency dental care is available to people through a ministry in our metro area here in the Twin Cities. And these are good dentists, too, on par with that implant dentist Plano everyone’s raving about.

For uninsured people, dental care is one of the hardest things to find. I have, for example, a chipped front tooth while my wife’s mouth is a wisdom-teeth nightmare. It can be quite the expense, and it can also be challenging enough as it it. So it’s nice to have a ministry like that available; it’s something we don’t need ObamaCare for us.

I need to start exercising more. I need to drop fifty pounds to stay healthy and make the most of my life in this world.

I go back and forth on my commitment, though. On the one hand, my body is a temple of the Ruach haKodesh and I want to treat it as such. On the other hand, I don’t want to slip into pride and vanity.

However, whether it’s walking, swimming or doing ellipticals, I don’t think pouring some time into losing weight would be a bad thing. It could even help.

On the other hand, all that time working out is time I’m not studying Torah. See the problem? I need a better balance, though, before this extra weight really costs me something.

My wife and I care about Mom and Dad, and due to Mom’s faith, as weird as it sounds, even though Mom is the one dying soon, we’re more concerned about Dad. As confident as we are about Mom’s eternity, we’re just not sure about Dad.

As he faces Mom’s end, his instincts are about as reliable as a well-used Cisco system – which means, not very. His current plan once Mom is gone is to move in with a neighbor we barely know because she has a room for him, and he doesn’t want to live alone.

We’re trying to get him to move in with us, because at least we’re family. But it’s a tug-of-war. At 86, it’s hard for a man who’s live in one place for over 60 years to suddenly want to move to an all-new area where the only people he’d know initially is us.

Ultimately, though, we can’t force him or make the decision for him. He’s of sound, even if of grief-stricken, mind, and so all we can do is encourage him to live with us, pray, and wait for God to move him in the right direction.

Death tests your faith.

Once you are facing the end of your days in this life, you quickly find out how deeply you believed all those praise songs and Bible verses and sermons. Either your faith is rooted deeply or you quickly find out it was all just surfacey, good-time-rock-n-roll bull.

I suppose there are some who capitalize on grief, and if one has no conscience, they could find a lot of small business opportunities in the grief business. However, I believe now that there is definitely a place and time for grief-oriented services.

My wife and I are being cast as the strong ones in our family, the ones who will sacrifice everything so that everyone else can sacrifice nothing. Add all that responsibility to the loss we’re suffering and although we’re holding up well under the time of crisis, we have agreed we need to seek out a support group so we can work things through once Mom passes.

Marriage, like faith, takes effort and work and I’ll glad I have a wife who’s as willing to put in the effort it takes as I am.

My Dad’s way of dealing with my Mom’s approaching death is avoidance. It’s not that he doesn’t love her; it’s that he loves her so much he just can’t face watching her slip away.

“I’ve seen one person die in front of me, and it never leaves you,” Dad told me today. “I don’t want that to be my last memory of Gert. I’d never get over it.”

This is a perfectly reasonable and understandable rationale, but it can seem cold and uncaring to some people. All I can say in response to that is, wait until you’ve been married to the same person for fifty-five years and then we’ll talk.

So if Dad would rather help a neighbor with a paper route once in a while than be at Mom’s bedside every single second, or dream of Las Vegas travel instead of staying in a hospital all day long, I think that’s his perogative.

As Mom herself said, we all have our own ways of dealing with things and we’re all doing the best we can under the circumstances. Judging one person’s way of coping as better or worse than another’s isn’t going to help anyone.

Yet that didn’t stop someone today from telling Dad, “Mom’s in the hospital and is going to die of cancer because of you.”

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Mom’s cancer is no one’s fault except perhaps her own for spending her whole life smoking. She’s received a generous 78 years, which is a lot more than most folks who smoke.

You don’t tell a man who’s losing his wife of 55 years that he’s at fault for her death. Some things should never be said. It is the very definition of laShon hurrah.

On Friday my wife and I got the call that mom had been taken out of the home and moved into the hospital. Her stage four cancer is advancing quickly and we’re now definitely in her final days… probably her final week, at best.

While we stayed Friday night for Erev Shabbat Service in order to charge our spiritual batteries for the long, difficult time ahead of us, we were on the road home the next day and fortunately found very good hotel deals on short notice; on a weekend no less!

It’s difficult to be talking so plainly about Mom not being with us anymore in a few days; ironically, Mom is handling it better than any of us. She is a strong believer and the strength of her faith at a time like this – a time when most people would feel more like cursing God than praising Him – is humbling and an inspiration.

I never expected it when I began, but in the bar/bat mitzvah lessons I’m writing for my students, I’ve been doing a character study of David and, even without hardly trying, I’ve found no less than 11 lessons when breaking down the passages that pertain to David in I and II Samuel.

Eleven lessons is much longer than I thought I’d be able to go with this, but David’s life is a much richer tapestry than most people ever hear about in their church or synagogue. Everyone remembers the tale of his battle with Golyat or his fall into sin with Bat-Sheva; but there are many more episodes out of his life, and each is rich in insight, lessons and meaning that can be applied to how we live out our lives of faith today.

It might sound a bit odd, like a random offer of foreclosure help, but I honestly think that David’s life hasn’t been studied nearly enough. Even though I extracted 11 lessons for my bar/bat mitzvah kids from the Tenakh, I skipped a lot and highlighted only the most applicable main events that would carry relevancy for the kids I teach.

Next time through, I expect I could easily double the number of lessons.