Terry Pruitt's Blog

Someone asked me recently, “What do I think of the surge ?” The current situation makes me think of me watching the Super Bowl . I'm no football fan and I really do not know the teams. I can, like anyone else, appreciate the athletic abilities on the field when I see them. But I don't know the players. I don't know the coaches. I don't really understand what is going through the players heads as the prepare for each play. I'm not a football player or fan. So what do I do when it comes to Super Bowl talk? I talk what I know, which is the cultural aspects of the celebration of this American sport. I have a hard time even picking a team to root for. So when it comes to football I just need to stick with what I know. When the media covers the war in Iraq and Afghanistan they are sort of like me talking about football. They sort of don't understand the story to begin with so the concentrate on aspects of war they understand. Instead of talking about milit...

What do I like about George Bush? 1. He is realist with a dash of optimism. 2. He sees education of the America as a priority. 3. He tells the American people what he is trying to accomplish. Transparency is a good quality in a leader. 4. He has chosen some well qualified leaders who also happen to be minorities. 5. I believe he is true to his convictions.

There is an excellent article in Leadership magazine entitled Curing Souls: the Forgotten Art by Eugene Peterson. Peterson, faimed for his paraphrase of the Bible called The Message, contrasts the institutional CEO mentality of ministry with one that is curing the soul. Probably the best insight is that if I count my job is to solve organizational and personal problems then there is no end to doing that. When do we take the time to seek God during the trying parts of life if we are continually fixing it ourselves? Growing up in rural Missouri, Theron McCloud was our minister of the gospel. He spent a lot of time visiting the sick and shut-ins in the community. He was not a CEO. Our people could not relate to a CEO since most of the people were farmers, farmer's wives, people who worked with hands but lived in town. Yes there were some business owners and such in the congregation, but sophisticated organizational structures and programs would have been smaltzy. Instead Th...

My daughters bought me a couple of CDs for Christmas last year (2005) by David Crowder . My CD player in the car was working fine. The Lime was immediately my favorite. The Collision just did not make sense. However when I put Collision on the iPod, it became a whole new experience. The experience of Collision is too subtle for an aging stereo in a car with tad bit of a muffler problem. The songs are not simply a collection of songs of a single genre. The album has a flow to it that is intriguing. There is a mixture of techno-sounds, rock guitar, ethereal high pitched women singing (who may be synthesized, the voices not the women), Amer-Indian chanting, and blue grass banjo. Who would have figured? Collision is worth the time and few bucks to buy. There are themes of Collision are death and the afterlife, great themes from certain genre of Christian music my friend Lynn Thomas used to call “suicide Christian music”. David Crowder Band explain on their website that the Davi...

Today I had to go to a committee meeting that I promised to attend. So I also took the day off from work. I decided to also reconnect with a friend from high school. We discussed our work, our children and how the years have gone. It was good to reconnect. He is now working at a Christian college and would like all of his children to be educated there as he and his wife were. Clearly in my mind, he was my best friend in high school. I'm not sure why I did not stay in touch better. Regrets.