Who won the first week? Thursday, September 02, 2010 Just like Muleshoe’s own boys of fall, the Muleshoe Journal football contest is off to a great start. Last week’s game had 53 players, all ready to win the $25 weekly prize. I missed a few players to the early deadline. So just to remind you the Journal office closes early at noon on Friday, so your entries need to be here by noon. Sorry no exceptions to this rule. We are providing several ways to get your entries here. They can be brought by the office and if we are not here, just put it in the black contest entry box on the front of the building. You can send an email to adsales@muleshoejournal.com with your choice of winners and the score for the tie breaker game. You can mail your entry or you can fax it to 806-272-3567. Mailed entries must be postmarked by Friday. Faxes must include the date and time. Just make sure it gets here before noon on Friday. Also be sure your name is legible and you have made all of your winning picks and added the tie breaker score. Last week’s contest had two players to guess the winners to all games correctly. So the Muleshoe verses Shallowater tiebreaker game was used. The player with the guess closest to the combined scores of the tie breaker game wins the week’s contest. Gabe Toscano had all the games guessed correctly and he chose the total combined score of 40. The actual game score was Muleshoe 27 to Shallowater 13. So Gabe’s tiebreaker guess sent him home with the money. Rudy Gonzales guessed all the games correctly but he didn’t beat Gabe’s tiebreaker guess. You don’t have to be a football expert to play this game. You have 50/50 chance to guess the winning team just like those experts. Sometimes an upset will even leave those football experts wondering how they picked wrong. We would like to encourage you to play each week to increase your chances for the grand prize. Get the your family, coworkers and friends in the game. It’s fun to play and free to enter. You or someone you know has a chance to have an extra $25 of fun money this week. We will post the top players of the week. See if you are on this week’s list: Gabe Toscano, Rudy Gonzales, 10; Jill Waggoner, Angela Lutz, Conner Harrison, Joe Abeyta, 9. We had several players guess eight games correctly. Your score for the week will be the amount of games you guessed correctly. The person who has the most correct guesses at the end of the contest will win $200. So play every week to increase your chances for the grand prize. Full Story

Focus on Faith: Christian ministry in the future which is now Thursday, April 29, 2010 By Curtis Shelburne On my desk for months has been a little book I’ve finally opened. It has been eye-opening. In the Name of Jesus was written by priest, professor, and writer Henri Nouwen and includes his “Reflections on Christian Leadership.” Originally published in 1989, the book was Nouwen’s look ahead to Christian ministry in the twenty-first century. Well, here we are. And the future is now. When Nouwen wrote the book, he was in his fifties, and his ministry was undergoing serious change. For two decades, he had been teaching and writing at the Menninger Institute, Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. He was very well-known. In 2003, seven years after his death, a survey named him as the first choice of authors for Catholic and mainline Protestant clergy. But after all his success, Nouwen found himself feeling empty. In a “very dark place” in his life, he began to realize that ‘burnout’ was a convenient psychological translation for a spiritual death.” At that point, he felt led to make a complete change, and he accepted the invitation to move from Harvard to the L’Arche “Daybreak” community for mentally handicapped people near Toronto, Canada, to serve as pastor. From daily association with the brightest and most “upwardly mobile” of society Nouwen found himself daily ministering in very physical and “non-glitsy” ways to the weakest of the weak, the simplest of the simple, who could read none of his books nor understand his former lectures. The only thing that impressed them was love. It’s a depressing time (1989) to be a pastor, Nouwen wrote, a time when increasingly people don’t feel a need for God, the church, and a minister. Ministers see little real change, attendance is down, apathy is on the rise. For care, folks look more to psychologists, counselors, doctors, often seeking a “do it yourself” fix in which God and spirituality enter in not at all. Nouwen thought it would get worse. In an effort to be timely, he said the church and her ministers would face three temptations, the same basic temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness. Worship and prayer would be devalued and forced to bow to “relevance,” the “worth” of churches and ministers being based on their production of social services. Selfless leadership in ministry would give way to “self-made” stardom among rock-star “ministers.” Full Story