Month: January 2005

sorry i don’t have any pictures of tonight’s service. the service was really good and i enjoyed it tonight.

earlier today i walked into my study and discovered that someone had placed a u2 elevation tour soccer jersey on my desk. i have a teen in the youth ministry whose dad drives tour busses for various rock groups. one of the groups he has driven for before (and will drive for again on their present tour) is u2. the jersey was one the band gave to him. he found out that i absolutely love u2 and thus the shirt ended up on my desk.

it was fantastic to have them think of me and desire to give me something like that. it made my day and night.

sometimes something simple can become something amazing. the tsunami blogathon is simply a guy named darren posting 100 blog entries during a twenty-four hour period (around 1 every fifteen minutes) in hopes of raising some money for the asian tsunami victims. this is really not a huge thing – even though the thought of posting twenty-four original posts is quite daunting in my opinion (at my present rate i post 100 entries every three to four months). yet a large number of people are starting to get behind this small little endeavor. you can be one of the ones who are behind it. go and donate to the cause, watch darren sweat, or even send in a post suggestion. who knows this could become something amazing if we all get behind it.

i constantly struggle with keeping our youth ministry website current. i’m too cheap (an overriding theme of my life) to actually hire someone else to do the website for me or to pay for one of the “ministry related” website services that you can get through truewell or other organizations that host and design your site for you. nope my cheapness makes me try to do things on my own. the result of this has been that i buy the cheapest web hosting i can find, make a site, and then typically don’t update it for quite sometime.

after a while i feel guilty about the state of the youth ministry website and start a major redesign of the site. i update the site and it looks okay for awhile but then i typically let it get out of date again. it’s a vicious cycle that repeats itself over and over.

but not this time. i think i’ve reached a solution that will last longer than normal. i’ve decided to use the blogger interface to run the youth ministry website. this will make the website look like a blog. i can update it regularly without having to change the code behind it all the time. blogger also let’s change the style of the website simply by changing the style sheet within it. hopefully this thing will work out.

we got back from the sabbath weekend and things went very well. for an experiment this thing turned out wonderful. all the reports i have received from the kids who went have ben fantastic. to the point of having the majority of the teens who went ask me if we could start doing “mini-sabbaths” every month or every other month. of course, the purpose of the weekend was not to start another program so i don’t know if i’ll start something regular from this. here are some basic thoughts on the weekend:

• the time periods of silence were very well received. the last about 45 minutes each time. i do think that if i do this again i will probably stretch this out some more. a couple of the teens made the very good point that they felt like it took them a good fifteen minutes to really get going with the silence. they said that they wished they had more silence each time. i think next time i will probably go for periods of 1 1/2 hours of silence.
• the parable of the lost sheep was a HUGE hit. it really brought up some deep seated issues for some of the participants within the weekend. i divided the parable into three periods of contemplation 1) in the pasture with the other sheep, 2) being lost, 3) being found. each time we focused on what it would be like to be within the parable as the lost sheep during that time. the danger of reading scripture is to think it is about other people. so we focused on the parable knowing that it was about us. this was not a bible study per se, rather it was a discussion of what would be running through our minds at the various points within the parable. i didn’t try to then connect this to the kids’ lives. they figured out how it connected on their own. it was amazing to hear some of their comments.
• cooking our own meals. i did not bring or hire someone else to cook the meals for us. instead the kids and adults did it. they were not allow to cook just hamburgers and such. instead the meals were decent meals – homemade chicken noodle soup, french dip sandwiches, etc.
• spiritual autobiographies. each person discussed where they had been, where they were presently, and where they were going with CHRIST. they were deeply personal and very moving.
• the free time. everyone loved the fact that we had a ton of free time.

it was a fantastic weekend and i’m so glad that it went well. if you’re interested in doing anything like this i’ll gladly send you all the stuff we did which you can then adapt any manner in which you want.