Sunday

I guess there's a first time for everything. I was at a church in Coacoyul, the first church my parents' planted, last night to speak. The church has grown over the last several years and they have 3 different services, a lot of people pick 2 and go to those that week. Anyway, I was asked to speak at their evening service and it was an honor to be able to speak again at the church where I spent my childhood years. So what was different was that, after giving an explanation of how I had grown up in the church and been mischivieous in kid's classes and how I am evidence that there is hope for rowdy children, the pastor's wife then asked me to come up and play drums for the offering...drums. I'm like, "what song are we playing?" She says, "just start playing anything that we can celebrate our giving to God with." Did I mention I'm on the drums? Anyway, I started playing some good ol' 2/4 drum beats and a few drum rolls and the musicians were just kind of making noise on their instruments. We did that twice because first they had the men come up with their offering and then the women with theirs. Like I said, there's a first time for everything.
I spoke about our call to persevere in following Jesus and how it's necessary to know how to rest, both physically and spiritually, in order to be able to be faithful to the end...So I basically shared some Sabbath principles that will bring renewal and refreshing to our lives if we trust God enough to rest.
Tonight we've got a 4 hour or so church service to bring in the New Year...then at midnight everyone and their cousin will be firing off their weapons and fire crackers...So we pretty much won't plan on going to sleep until well after midnight.
Tomorrow we'll be at the beach all day with the church! That'll be fun.
Later.

Fishing

Yesterday we went fishing and had a great time. You can read more about it on Sarah's blog, as she beat me to it.
On another note, I was able to finish reading Only Believe by Hannu Hauka. It tells the story of how he and his wife began came to know Jesus Christ and how they went on to lead one of the most powerful Radio and TV ministries into the USSR. That ministry has now grown and is doing many other things, you can read about them here.
I also finished reading The Dream Giver which is an allegory about pursuing the vision that God has given you. It was an interesting story and I walked away with a couple good things from it:
- God gives people visions, but not everyone pursues them.
- When you begin to follow the vision God has given you there will be difficulties and opposition.
- You'll find the vision God has given as you begin to move towards the fulfillment of the vision.

That's about it about vision. Pastor Russ had some great thoughts about the process a vision and visionary go through and I will try to post that sometime.
Well, Sarah and I are going to watch the Cat in the Hat and then later tonight the teenagers from the church down here will be coming over. Later.

Mexico Week 1 - Pictures

It's been a great week of relaxing and spending time with my family.
I just uploaded some pictures. Check them out here!

On a completely unrelated note: I've been using Linux instead of Windows since Sunday and I'm wondering why it's taken me so long to consider switching...I like it!

Perfect

Sarah and I have been in Mexico since Thursday afternoon. We were blessed to be able to spend our first 2 days at a hotel (the funny thing is that getting the 2 nights was a better deal than the ticket by itself, I like that kind of deal!). We've been at my parents' house since Saturday night. I spoke in church last night and it was a great 3 our service/Christmas program with an AMAZING potluck afterward.
Everything has been great so far and we will be spending some time at the beach today if we make it there after preparing the food for the Christmas Eve celebration tonight. Tomorrow we will more than likely stay home and play games and on New Year's day we will be at the beach with the whole church. Besides that, I'm not really sure what will be going on in the next week, I may just use the time to get a lot of reading done.
May God Bless you as you spend time with your family and friends in the next few days!

Party!

Today is the Radiate Christmas Party! I'm really looking forward to it. Then I've gotta run home and pack everything I need for the next 2 weeks into suitcases 'cause we'll be leaving for Minneapolis around 3:30 in the morning! (yay for early mornings...ok so not really, but it'll be worth it when we get there).

Christmas @ VCA

Last night was our annual Christmas Program. The children of the church did a skit about the night before Christmas that had some hilarious outfits that I unfortunately have no pictures of. There was an instrumental that everyone did very well on (Pat A Pan)...Then we followed with a skit called "Mark and Harold's Angel Swing." It was fun. And it was all wrapped up by a beautiful rendition of the song from the Prince of Egypt, "When You Believe."
On a sadder note the two fundraising concerts we were going to have today had to be postponed because of inclement weather in Chicago for Tom Netherton to travel. We're in the process of rescheduling for February.
Here is the only picture it's letting me load from last night:

Missions Addiction

I finished reading The Missions Addiction this week...Wow! I would definitely recommend that book if: you've never been on a missions trip, you have been on a missions trip or think you may someday, you feel called to the mission field, you think that you're living in a mission field OR you don't want to have anything to do with missions because it makes you think of tasks or fields because it makes you think of work...if ANY of those describe you then you should take the time to read the book! :-) I've owned it for about 5 years and I kept putting it off because I "grew up on the mission field," what's more my emphasis at Elim was in MISSIONS! Why should I need to read a book about it!?! I was wrong. It will go into my list of AWESOME books about living the Christian life.
So if you just read all that and thought to yourself that it didn't apply to you, I can put it to you another way: it deals with what it does and what it should look like to live as a Christian in the 21st century...both here and around the world. Quite an exciting book as far as content...the chapters felt a little long, but what you were getting was powerful.

Cold!

Man it's cold! It was colder than -18 this morning when I went to try to lay brick at ONE24...it was too cold for the bricks to stick because it was so cold outside!
As I type this it's -9 and should reach -10 tonight before it starts warming up for this next week...man, I sure am going to miss this cold when I'm in Mexico over Christmas :-)

College Christmas Party

Here are some pics Suanne took on Tuesday night...you've gotta love ugly Christmas outfits!

Planet Wisdom

ONE24, or more specifically students from some of the churches that are a part of ONE (Valley Christian, Faith Church, and Inspiration Church), went to Planet Wisdom in Minneapolis last week...here are some pics:

Most of the Crew

My Beautiful Bride & I

Here they are again

Ghostbusters! dada-dada-dada ---- dada dada da da da
(yeah, this is one of the cleaning pics, I'll post more on Facebook)

Pat, Chris, and Dan were awesome!

Deacon Christmas Party

Every year Russ & Becky throw a Christmas party for the Deacons & their spouses at their house & Sarah & I help out. This year we thought it would be a good time to give them a goofy game so they could have some fun too (it's usually us doing the goofy things). Anyway, in this game they had to roll dice 'till they got a 7 and go put on mittens, a scarf and a hat before tearing through boxes upon boxes to get to a gift. Enjoy the video and pics. I videotaped the whole thing so I wouldn't miss anything...look for Dana's boxing moves :-)


Chuck (Worship Deacon) helping my Grandma (Adult Discipleship Deacon) with her hat

Yup, they're gamblers...come on SEVEN!

Kim (Children's Education Deacon) showing off her Snoopy gift card and sled ornament.

Hypocrisy

Last night we talked about Hypocrisy. We looked at Matthew 23:1-31 where Jesus lays into the religiosity of the Pharisees with 7 different "woes." I came out of that thinking about how easy it is for us as followers of Jesus to become like the people Jesus opposed the most, the religious, by doing like they did and worrying more about the "outside of the cup" (our appearances) than the inside (our heart). It's so easy to get caught up in the game of acting like something you're not or worrying about your appearance (spiritually, physically, professionally, etc.) and completely overlook the true condition of that area.
I'm not sure if it's connected to this, but something God has been making very real to me lately, the phrase just came to my mind several months ago, is:

If you ignore the Spirit's correction you won't hear His direction.

Let's be real with God and with each other!

Ugly Sweater

Tonight the college groups are having an Ugly Christmas Sweater party hosted by Josh and Sarah Hardie. I had to go out to the thrift shop to find one, but I'm ready now...I'll try to post a picture of our ugly outfits later...

I Miss Mowing The Lawn

I never thought I'd think that, but after today I'll take lawn mowing ANY day over shoveling snow. There was like a foot of snow on the driveway and sidewalk. Sarah and I had kind of cleared out one side of the driveway on Saturday night, but then the plow decided it was a good idea to fill 1/5 of the driveway back up with snow...so that ended up packed down. Anyway, I definitely got my exercise for the day...they say there's supposed to be more snow tomorrow...on the plus side this just means that it's snowboarding time!

The End of the World As We Know It...

Well, not exactly. But I did finish reading a book called "Till Jesus Comes," by Charles Holman. It's about the origins of the Christian apocalyptic expectation. It's about as deep as you would expect a book written by a Professor of the New Testament (he taught at Regent University until he passed away recently). You know it's going to be deep when you realize that it's an expansion of his doctoral thesis! Anyway, although it was written in a fairly complex way, the concepts were pretty straight-forward: The Israelites had an expectation of the coming reign of God that grew out of the reign of David and Solomon and took shape in the following thousand years. The Early Christians writings, including the Gospels were written during this time of expectation of God's Kingdom and they appear to expect an imminent return of Christ and for His Kingdom to come in its fullness during the lifetimes of the authors. The book concludes with different approaches we can take given the delay of the return of Christ...that's about it.
Since I last posted about books I've also finished reading "Jim and Casper go to Church," by Jim Henderson and Matt Casper. This was a good book that helps you realize what goes through the mind of a guest as they enter your church...very insightful. I would strongly recommend it if you are working in a church or ministry as we have a tendency of getting sheltered from reality whether we like it or not. I also read "God's Blogs," by Lanny Donoho and interesting look at what God would write if He had a blog.
I think that being a life-long learner is HUGE because the world is constantly changing and we have to be prepared for the challenges of life in this ever changing environment...if you don't believe me, think about how different life with cell phones is now from 10 years ago...or how within the last 5 years social networking sites have changed the way teenagers and young adults live their lives.

We're Back

We just got back from Planet Wisdom. We left a couple of hours early from the conference because of the weather. The conference was great, as usual. Mark Matlock had a lot of powerful things to say. Skit guys were great. All in all great.
Drive back was long, but we were brought safely home by Eric Seibold and fed deliciously by Carrie Guy & Carrin Seibold.
The end.
Goodnight.