listen to me

look into my eyes. you are getting sleepy, very sleepy. now you are under my control. now you must do what i say.

so swap from internet explorer to firefox. i shouldn’t have to hypnotize you to do this but 45% of the people who visit this blog still use micro$oft internet explorer (51% use firefox plus 3% use safari – me – and one percent use netscape – both of which are mozilla derivatives and therefore firefox/mozilla is winning). it would be best for all of us if micro$oft learned a lesson and got it’s butt kick by firefox. help out by swapping now.

then you can move over to a mac or linux and we’ll really get things going right.

SIDE NOTE – sign up for the disciplenow if you haven’t done so already.

minor prophets

amos's table for the view

wednesday we’re starting at “the view” a message series on the minor prophets. it’s really supposed to be more than a message series though because we are going to have experiential stations set up around the room each week walking people through the 12 minor prophets. i stole the idea from jonny baker who did a worship session on the minor prophets that we have since adapted with some help from him. there are nine of us doing this (8 people doing the 8 minor prophets that i’m not talking about). i was so jealous of the fun that they are going to get to do by prayerfully developing a station that i decided i would do one on each of the four prophets that i am talking about (i just didn’t want to miss out). i’m using the “welcome table” that we build each week for basic ministry info as a way to convey the prophet that i will be speaking on. we’ll see how this whole thing goes.

above is the drawing i made in my moleskine of what i want to do with the “welcome table” while i’m speaking amos. i’ll post pictures wednesday of what really happened.

here’s the series of mesages and the stations for each one:

march 2 – amos

    station hosea – haley
    station joel – julie

march 9 – jonah

    station obadiah – whitney & sarah
    station micah – meagan

march 16 – habakkuk

    station nahum – sergio
    station zephaniah – brittany

march 23 – malachi

    station haggai – pam
    station zechariah – rebekah

not a happy clown

clown
the above picture is all that i have to remember the horrific episode that happened yesterday. i have set myself a flickr goal of posting one decent picture a day on flickr (i’m not sure that i could say any of my pictures are “good picutres” so i’ve set my goal for merely decent). this wouldn’t be to terribly hard if i could use all the pictures that i have taken over my life but that’s not part of the bargain i made with myself. the deal i made was that i could only use one “old” picture a week. all the other pictures had to be taken during the week in which i was posting. this means i have to take pictures constantly in order to get just a few that have the relatively high for me rank of “decent.”

yesterday i was blank on decent pictures. i didn’t have any “decent” non-posted pictures from the week waiting in the background ready to be placed on the photoblog. so i had to go on a picture hunt. i decided that i would go take so pictures down at the state capitol building. i figured that even on a gloomy day the statues around the capitol would look cool. i was wrong! the day was simply “bla” and i couldn’t find a good shot (this is where the difference between me and a good photographer becomes obvious – someone with skill would fid a great shot on such a terrible day). to make things even worse i had a horrific event happen on the way down to the capitol.

on the way down to the capitol i saw a clown in full costume driving on tiger bend street. i figured this would be a great shot. i mean really who wouldn’t love a picture of a clown driving through the streets of baton rouge. so i rolled down my window, started honking, and began shouting at the clown. i was holding my camera out with my free hand and screaming “i want to take your picture! please let me take your picture.” the female clown must not have heard me because her car sped up away from me. so i pressed the accelartor pedal and caught up. i started screaming again and but then the clown’s car slowed down. she must have been having some car trouble or something. so i slowed down till the clown’s car caught up with me again. once again, i started screaming and waving my camera. all i wanted was a picture of the clown in her car driving. for some reason this offended her because the next thing i knew she stared right at me and flipped me off.

that’s right the clown gave me “the bird.”

after flipping me off the she pulled into the turning lane and turned down jones creek road and out of my life. the above picture was all i was able to get as i sat in stunned silence. you’re barely even able to see the stupid clown in the picture. i hate clowns.

it’s a boy! or two!

indian supper
pam and i have two new children – sort of. for quite some time we’ve been dealing with the question of what biblical hospitality is. part of the answer for us has been a need to bring people into our family who are not entirely like us ethnically, socially, educationally, and all those other “lys”. because of this pam made contact with with l.s.u. to see if there were any international students that were wanting an “adopted” american family. that’s how we have our new kids. pam and i are now the proud adopted parents of a 27 and 24 year old bouncing baby indians. they are sam (27) and bajjee (24).

they came over for supper tonight and we spent the evening talking and learning about each other. i don’t know many indians so i didn’t have muh past cultural experience to work with. before tonight all i knew of indian culture was what i had read (which i didn’t think was much but was apparently enough). now after spending an evening with two indians i feel that i am an expert on indian culture.

so here are my hard and fast rules for those wanting to understand indian culture:

  • indians hate carrots – i’m not sure why (probably a civil war or something fought over them) but every indian i have ever known hates carrots.
  • indians love blackberry cobbler – the indians i have known have really liked cobbler VERY much.
  • indians can tolerate chicken divan – every indian i have ever known has considered chicken divan worth eating but if they had a choice they would choose buffalo wings.
  • indians naturally cause children to kick into “show off” gear – i’m not sure why but my kids respond to indians by trying to impress them by doing any magic tricks, random drumming on a djembe, or even doing the worm.

okay actually the evening was a lot of fun and it taught me that i basically know nothing about indian culture. of course, i’m still convinced that indians hate carrots. that just seems obvious to me.

it’s PUBLISHED

the leader’s material for our discipleNOW has finally been published. we finished it today. i also finished the student material and we started publishing it. it would like to see an adobe acrobat version of the material CLICK HERE. there is still plenty that needs to be done on the Dnow but life is much better now that i know the leaders will soon have their material.

finished – sort of

my moleskineI FINISHED IT! well kind of. i’ve been struggling with the dnow material for about a month now. mainly it was because i just couldn’t figure out where it was supposed to go. i’m in one of those times right now that when i pray begging GOD for guidance HE just responds with a chuckle and says “nope! I’m not gonna tell you right now.” it sure does make for a struggle writing stuff when GOD decides to do that. the good side is that for some reason those times always help my relationship with HIM. the other part of the writing struggle has been tons of distractions but truthfully i live for distractions and usually consider the distractions some of the best ministry opportunities so i can’t really complain.

anyway, i have finally gotten all four studies and general themes into a word document. now i have to proof them and get them in the desktop publisher with all those nice graphics and images. that’s the easy part though.

HURRAY!