Month: December 2004

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i hate shopping

i love CHRISTmas but i hate shopping.

for my birthday some friends gave me a giftcard to academy sports & outdoors. i’m very thankful for this because it said that my friends knew who i am – they wanted me to be able to buy some fishing gear. last night pam and i ate with these friends and they introduced us to the concept of deep frying chickens, much like you would deep fry a turkey. this was amazing. in fact, it was so good that pam agreed that i should probably buy a turkey frying kit so that we could do this same thing for CHRISTmas dinner with our families. i decided to use the acadmey giftcard for this & to buy some stuff for fly-fishing for bream.

there were lots of people on the road and lots of people in the store all in a mad rush to buy things. this is stupid. why the mad rush to spend money? i understand a mad rush to go spend time with people you love or to participate in a community building event but a mad rush to spend money is just plain stupid.

every time i turned a corner there was groups of people and products blocking the way. the lanes were filled huge piles of boxed up products that the store manager is hoping will be sold by the end of the month. where the isles weren’t blocked by items for sale they were full of people who were salivating over items that they “desperately needed.” it all made me won’t to scream.

i actually started the leave the store and just go back home more than once. yet, each time i realized that i needed to buy the turkey frying kit before next sunday when i plan on using it for a cheap way to feed allot of people – our 11th & 12th graders are going to have a potluck at pam and my house. so i went through the stress of picking up the items and then waiting in line. i hated it all.

by the end of it all i had a full set of equipment for frying turkey or chickens, boiling shrimp or crawfish and a bad attitude.

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now that’s ministry

article – mind, body, & spirit by ben edson

i love it when CHRISTians are truly creative in reaching out to the world – i only wish that i was more creative in doing it. the above article describes a church, sanctus1, in england that decided to be a part of the manchester mind, body, and soul conference, a new age spirituality conference. sanctus1 joined in the conference and offered a wall of prayer, plasma ball (which i’m not sure i understand), bread and wine, and foot messages. unlike all the other new age groups who were there sanctus1 did all of this for free. everyone else had consumeristic minds sets behind their spirituality. the free foot messages really amaze me because they strike me as modern day foot washing. true servant-hood in a environment that is hostile to CHRIST.

what an amazing idea. sanctus1 conveyed real CHRISTianity in an environment that many followers of CHRIST would completely avoid. what a great idea.

i pray that all of us followers of CHRIST could be inspired by our creative GOD to reach out in amazing acts of love and service.

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pam – the weird person

my wife is weird! plain and simply she is strange. that’s okay with me because i like strange people. yet, let me show you why pam is weird. this week she found out about a strange website called catster. this website is where people post profiles of their cats for other cat loving people to be able to read. people who love cats are a strange lot and thus a website made of cat lovers will be natural odd. of course, pam loved it and wanted to join in the fun. she made a page for both of her cats – keebler & oreo.

on the good side pam’s not quite to the crazy, old cat lady stage yet.

i am pasting links to these two pages below so that you can enjoy the oddness that is my wife.

here’s keebler’s page.

here’s oreo’s page.

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don’t eat on the tray

i’ve had several requests for the rules video from the JESUS project to be placed on the web page and since i always like to accommodate requests if it is possible i have decided to place the video here. you’ll need real player to view it. we used this video as a funny way to convey a few simple rules for the retreat. it was a fun way of doing something that we had to do.

on a side note – my dad has recently started telling me that i cheat at blogging because i will post small entries. i didn’t really know that there were rules about the length of blog entries but even if there are i don’t really think my entries are that small. yes, sometimes i post small entries, but usually my ramblings go on for a while. this may be the first time in my life that i have ever been accused of being to brief in my comments.

on a second side note – spiderman 2 is the best superhero movie that has been made thus far. i bought it yesterday and just finished watching it with my oldest son. it’s fast enough and action packeted enough for him to like it yet it still deals with the inner struggles of doing what is right. it’s an action flick that actually has depth.

on a third side note – i wish all of the blogs i read and look at would install an rss feed. i’ve recently gone from not knowing how to use the stupid things to being in love with them. i presently use bloglines to check almost all the blogs that i really care about. yet there are still a few blogs that i have to check out directly each day because of the fact that the owner doesn’t have an rss feed of the site. life would be so much easier if they did.

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100,000 miles


on november 24th i posted about fred crossing over past the 100,000 mile mark. when the moment happened i had a VERY cheap digital camera on me that i used to record the moment. the picture above is the best of what i took.

i think i am about to have to do some work on fred. it sounds to me like the water pump is going out – it’s making a high pitched whine. i’m going to take him in to barry’s automotive tomorrow and get him looked at.

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the perfect youth ministry day

yesterday was the perfect youth ministry day. by this i don’t mean that everything about it was good. in fact, allot of what happened during the day wasn’t good at all. it was the perect youth ministy day because the events that happened during it display why youth ministry is the greatest of all ministries. here’s what happened.

8:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.

i spoke at one of our school’s chapels – the elementary chapel. during this time i got the chance to try and help kids understand that even though JESUS may ask us to do things that sound odd to us, if we act in faith amazing things happen – i spoke about JESUS healing the man blind from birth by spitting on the groun and placing mud in his eyes. doing chapel for k through 5th grade is always allot of fun and this was no exception.

9:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

i officiated at the funeral of a former youth whose husband and his family are also very important to me. the husband and wife were in a major car accident saturday morning. the wife was killed, the husband badly injured, and their child and a friend left the car uninjured. in the past i had been able to baptize her, then i was able to officiate their wedding, and finally i was the minister who dedicated their son. this family means allot to me and thus the funeral was not something that was easy for me. yet, i was also honored that the husband would ask me to do the funeral. i don’t like seeing people i love in pain, but i am very thankful to get to be one of the people who GOD uses to bring them comfort. i was able to see their pain first hand at the hospital waiting for the husband’s surgery to be finished and then later when i went with him to pick up the personal effects that were still in the badly damaged vehicle. i was so thankful that i got to be one of the people who comforted this family that i love.

2:00 p.m. till 5:45 p.m.

during this time i was focused on setting up and preparing for the view, our youth worship service. this included everything from setting up chairs, to decorating the student center for CHRISTmas, to practicing with the band, those who shall remain nameless, for the worship in music during the service. all of this involved working with youth to accomplish a common goal – of worship during the night.

6:00 p.m. till 7:15 p.m.

this is when the view went on. two things happened during this 1) we had a great worship service that even though i wasn’t speaking during this night, alan my assistant was, i did get to lead kids in helping to lead the service, and 2) i got to clean up puke. that’s right we had a kid “spew chunks” in the outside hall. we played a game at the beginning of worship tonight (something we do very rarely but this time it fit in with the message we were trying to convey and therefore we did it). we had a teen drink 52 ounces of egg nog. he tried to make it to the toilet after he had won the game but he didn’t quite make it. i decided to clean it up instead of asking one of the volunteer adults to do it.

7:30 p.m. till 8:30 p.m.

i hung out with teens just talking about things

8:45 p.m.

i made it home – wednesdays are usually a late night but i make up for this by staying home in the afternoon.

here’s why it was the perfect youth ministry day. there is no other ministry in which you could go from the very serious nature of a painful funeral to cleaning up puke. in fact, there is only one ministry in which it would be normal to consider going from such serious matters to such disgusting janitorial work. the only ministry in which this would be normal is youth ministry. youth ministry is the only ministry that would consider such extremes normal. this is why youth ministry is the greatest ministry in the world.

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big things for GOD – by charles woodward – the ooze

article – big things for GOD – by charles woodward – the ooze article

a very powerful article in my opinon. it’s nice to hear someone asking why it is that we feel that we need to do “big things for GOD.” aren’t small, and unnoticed things the most important? do our egos just push us to think that big things are the things that actually matter.

the author suggestion is that instead of imagining bigs things for GOD we should focus on the change within. i would agree with much of this. of course, some of my change is a change of becoming a person who is concerned about GOD’s justice. this means that in order to focus on the change within myself i must be simultaneously focused on the world around me.

some would say:

“i have to find the vision for what GOD want’s me to do for changing the world”

i think that’s a great sentiment. we just have to remember that most likely what GOD wants us to do is to stay faithful in the small things. then maybe HE’ll use us in the big things.