 God has been creating me in my ministry, which has been somewhat of a late-comer, a late-bloomer, because I didn't accept a call until I was beyond six careers. And so the Lord has used me as a change agent in many ways to go and minister to the poor, to help those who are lost, to bring to the fold life, renewed life. And so over these past years that I've been serving, I've had the opportunity to serve in the urban community, at the same time serve in cross-cultural appointments, where I've had a vision that all of God's people should indeed be together as one. I'm often reminded of the Pentecost and how all of God's people came together and spoke many languages and all understood one another because of the Holy Spirit. And so my hope for this time and throughout my journey is that this will come to fruition here on earth. One of the ways that God has been creating over the course of my ministry has been admissions. Although I have long had a passion for prison ministry and ministries for the homeless, being ordained has given me ways to live into those and other mission opportunities. I've been blessed to be part of Kairos Outside, a ministry for women who have a loved one in prison or who have themselves been in prison. And then through the dedicated work of Reverend Holly Bandell and Lady to Craig Jacobs, First Plano is a member of Family Promise in Collin County. And I've been privileged to spend the night on many of our rotations with these families and see both their ordinariness, any of us might be in their shoes, and also their extraordinary dedication and flexibility as they get back on their feet. We and I have been blessed through these and other outreach opportunities that enable us to see the world beyond us and attend to the needs of those who are hurting, whether physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. After graduating from seminary and doing an internship and spending three years as an associate pastor, I thought that I was really ready and knew everything there was to know about being a pastor. When I arrived in Maybank, my first pastorate, it took less than 48 hours for me to realize that I didn't know come from Sycambe. Over the next 40 years, God used countless laypeople in each of the churches where I served to show me how to live as a Christian and then how also to be a caring pastor. So my advice to any of you who are beginning your ministry, watch, listen, and learn from the laypeople in each of the churches you serve. After about six months of phone calls to Bill Crouch back in 1994, 1995, asking him if he had a church that I could be assigned to, he told me he did. It was a church of misfits, he said, you'll fit right in. And it was that kind of church, Richland United Methodist Church, but gloriously so. During eight years there, at what became Cornerstone, we sold two church campuses and built a new church at a third location. And for one who was most happy walking amongst the wildflower fields, now I finish in Mesquite, a community, a microcosm of America itself, undergoing rapid demographic and cultural change, frustrating and fascinating both, because God is in that change, just as God is in each of us. And in the spaces between us, that knowledge affects the way that I see everything and everyone. The light is in all things, all people. God's been creating in me ministry from the very beginning, sending me wonderful people, laity, clergy friends, like Roger Morris, who was a large German in my first church, always sat on the third row in front of the pulpit and fell asleep every Sunday, my first year in preaching. And I was determined, I was determined to keep him awake, and by the end of the second year I was doing that. But other wonderful people, laity, clergy friends like Jordan Grooms, mentors like Ted Dotts, have been sent by God to help shape me in the ministry that I do. And I continue with that, paying that forward as a part of the life that I live in ministry. The people of God, the people of God, we come in with our little bit of knowledge thinking we're going to show them the way of faith, and the truth of the matter is that they show us again and again and again. So I have seen God working repeatedly and consistently and continuously through the lives of the people that I have been blessed to call to serve for churches over 20 years, and God has never failed to teach me through them what a life of following Christ is like. Well, when you ask about how God's been creating in me in my ministry, I have to say, God had to start with raw material. It was 51 years ago when I was a junior in high school that I began to serve my first church, and then over the next two or three years I served several other small rural churches. I was never happier in that setting. And then I moved to the big city of Dallas to go to seminary, and that's when God opened my eyes to the plight of poverty and people who lived in marginalized communities. So I had the joy of working in what was then called the East Dallas Cooperative Parish with John Thornberg and Bill Bryant and others, and it was just such a great time. Then I went from there to an affluent growing suburb of Flower Mound and to Pastor Treach, and I was there for almost 18 years, and then I went from there onto the conference office to become a bureaucrat for Jesus and help start new churches in the North Texas Conference and help with revitalization. So I guess when I look back I realize I didn't know what the heck I was supposed to do, any place I went to do it. It just took God's creativity and a lot of loving lay people and the churches who helped shape me and mold me and raise me up and be patient with me and forgive me for all the mess ups that I made as their pastor. God has been creating in my ministry even before my birth by sending a young pastor, Reverend H. Grady May to his very first church, College Mount in 1916. Years later in the neighborhood I grew up in, a family invited me to go to church. They not only invited me, they took me with them, even out to eat afterwards. That family was the grandson of H. Grady May. Now there have been other people in my ministry that have greatly affected me, like John Poe Hensley, Fred Durham and Reverend Linwood John Roberson. He had a vision of 12 youth who would be called into the ministry. I was one of the first of those 12. Later on it was Dr. Gordon Cassad of Walnut Hill United Methodist Church who put me back on the road of licensed ministry. I'm ending my ministry with that same church that H. Grady May began his ministry, College Mount United Methodist Church. After 29 years I indeed believe God has called me into such a great ministry of touching people's lives and their touching mind in so many ways. It's a very odd thing to find oneself standing at that strange place where active ministry meets the retired relationship. So now as I look back at the diversity of the settings and the unique challenges and opportunities of those places to which I have been appointed and those communities to which my family has lovingly gone, I can only praise God with a heart of deep gratitude and with a profound hope that I have not only heard but also tried faithfully to live into my understanding of ministry as loving God by loving others in God's name. As doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with God, God's presence with me and gifts to me have changed my life in ways beyond my ability to name or number. But I do know that the change has been transformative. As a kid from a small town on the western edge of the conference, has now spent his entire adult life 47 years under appointment by the North Texas Conference. To places we once called foreign but learned to love as home. To settings in all four districts of the annual conference and even on the conference staff and in the Episcopal office. So to the question then of how God has been creating in me over the course of my ministry, I think I simply want to say that God has been creating in me a wideness for God's mercy and that in whatever small ways I have been privileged to share that good news with others. In my ministry I have learned several things. I need to say I am learning several things because you never quit learning, hopefully you never quit learning. But God has been teaching me that whenever something really seems to be a tragic thing happening, something unexpected and looks like it's going to be just a complete disaster, don't panic. Just wait and start looking because something wonderful is about to happen. And God's going to do the most amazing kind of things and there's going to be transformation in the situation and in me. This is a wonderful lesson that it applies everywhere and every part of your life and every part of your ministry because God is the one that does the transformation. God used some very lonely decision points when I had to decide which way to go so often I'd be in prayer and God would be nowhere nearby. And I found if I took the world denying path, God would meet me around the corner and lead me into great life and great ministry. So I found out that God was creating me by a call that was a yes after a yes after a yes. And that still continues. One of the biggest yeses was in 1983 because of reading Luke's Gospel and Sojourner's Magazine and also wanting to be an urban person and realizing that being an easy middle class person in America was not the Gospel life for me. I asked for an inner city church and the district superintendent said he could still hear my feet on the stairs when that appointment was made. I didn't even make it to my car. That was a big change and through all of this creating of God and active God in my call and ministry, I've been trying to answer the question we ask all those interns at the end of their evaluation. What is your theology of ministry? I had to make up a word to make mine. As a minister, I'm the story keeper. I don't live the strongest discipleship story, but I'm near the lay people who do in the theological education, which belongs not to me, but to the church helps me polish their story of faith and then link it to the old, old story, especially in communion. So I'm the story keeper. My ministry has been a journey of self-discovery, some of that through introspection, some of it in connection with others and most of it in the context of work in the local church. I've come to know myself better, what my gifts and graces are and have grown in my relationship with God and for me that is all a part of growing into the new creation God is creating within me and leading me toward. A certain and much utilized prayer of confession in our worship around these parts when taken out of confessional language and used for in positive, more positive language would say something like this, let us love and let us love and do our God's will. Let us receive and live out of our Christ's law of grace and let us hear and respond to the cry of the needy and I think expressed like that that sets the stage for any consideration I do about what, how God over these years has been creating new things in me, kingdom things in me and I think the word or the idea I would use is that God's great work I think in that in my life and in ministry has been becoming more and more a builder of bridges and less and an erector of walls.