Hello, everyone.
I am sure you are wondering what has taken me so long to make an update or release the first episodes of the podcast. The simple answer is that I have been busy with many activities in different areas of my life this past week and have spread myself too thin to get everything done at once. This is a common problem since I have so many activities and interests that I try to squeeze into a single day or week.
I am nearing the end of my Doctorate program, and my current course has been rather demanding. However, I also have been scheduling interviews with various ministry workers across the globe. I have been sending them to my ministry blog as part of my preparation. This blog, however, was created in 2010, and I did not do much to update it for the modern era. As a result, I spent lots of time rebuilding and redesigning the blog to be more modern last week. I think the result looks much nicer and cleaner: https://davidshields.name.
Additionally, this last week, I have been wrestling with some spiritual things related to what I intend to do once I complete my Doctor of Ministry degree (spoiler alert: I am still not sure). This caused me to spend a lot of extra time pursuing spiritual concerns. I was so entrenched in this work that I contacted three spiritual mentors for feedback. And, of course, I updated this on my ministry blog. That is a lot of back-and-forth communication with people, which takes time.
As if that was not enough to handle, my current client had a significant personnel shift (no, I can’t tell you about it!) last week. That shift has caused many work items to be rearranged and a fundamental review of various work tasks related to said change. You can gather how much of an impact that has had on my ability to work on the podcast.
Lastly, I consider my job as a father and husband to be vastly more important than any other job I could do. Last week, I had a few family-related activities and focused on family time over working time. Yes, it was worth it!
The good news is that I have had some extra time openings during my typical work week due to some scheduling adjustments this week. I intend to use this time to catch up on a few tasks, including working on the third episode edits. I feel confident I can finish the edits this week and publish the episode. If that changes, I will share an update here on my blog.
Stay tuned!