i have nothing to say.
event blog
march 11-13 we will have our annual discipleNOW. for those who don’t know what a dnow is it’s basically a small group retreat in people’s homes with large group worship added each night. our have traditionally been wonderful because it’s a good way for allot of people to connect intimately with others (on of the former participants reads this blog and he can correct me if i’m wrong). this year i decided to see if the world of blogging could help us with the dnow (i decided this a little late but hopefully it will still work). we’ve set up a blog for all of our leaders to be involved with. this way we can get ideas and such out to them but they can also comment on and improve upon those ideas. everyone seems excited about it. now we just have to see if it’s worth the effort. if it works i’ll probably start doing one for each of the larger things we do during the year.
here’s the blog if you want to follow it’s progress towards being effective or being a waste of time.
psalm 23
this door is in nicaragua. i fell in love with it during my first visit to the country. the reason for my love for the door is the irony of the door. nicaragua is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere and driambe is one of the poorer cities within nicaragua. if you saw it you would know it instantly.
there is extreme want within the city. i don’t mean a want or desire for things but rather a desire for the necessities of life. the people of the city need food, water, shelter, clothing, etc. most important many people within the nation need hope. hope is the biggest thing necessary for life.
that’s why the picture blows me away. in the midst of a situation that many would proclaim hopeless the owner of this door has decided to proclaim “the LORD is my SHEPHERD i shall not be in want.”
that’s impressive faith. that faith that will make a difference and probably already has.
a rough night
last night was a rough night at the terrell household. i was up late working on some material for the discipleNOW. when i finally went to bed at about 2:30 a.m. i ended up not get very much sleep. the reason for this was because noah woke up at 3:30 a.m. with a bad case of croup. croup is a childhood viral problem that is usually finished by the time someone is five. unfortunately for us noah is the exception to the rule. he’s eight and still has bad cases of croup. it’s not a fun situation. in fact, it’s pretty dog gone scary.
last night’s was definitely scary. i got up with noah and started giving him some albuterol to help with his breathing. it didn’t help much so i gave him another breathing treatment. the second treatment help a little more but it still wasn’t good enough. it’s not much fun to watch your child not be able to breathe. he was panicing and that made the situation all the worse. there was no choice left so at 4:30 a.m. noah and pam went to the emergency room. of course, being a hospital and all means that they have all these great drugs that do the things that our simple little consumer and prescription drugs can’t. so they had him fixed up in a matter of minutes. they shot him up full of steroids and gave him epinephrine to breathe in. everything was fine and he began to breathe perfectly.
the problem here was that neither pam nor i had been able to get any sleep so we were worn out. noah on the other hand had just been shot up and breathing liquid speed. he was bouncing off the walls. pam and i just wanted to sleep. noah just wanted to talk loud and fast and run all over the place. the boy who earlier couldn’t breathe was now driving us crazy with his energy. that’s not a good parenting combination – tired parents and a hyper kid. i’m not so sure but that noah may have been in more danger from his tired parents than he had ever been from his croup.
all are resting now and life is good.
working on material
right now i feel just like the above picture. i’m working on material for our discipleNOW (material which should have been finished three weeks ago) and it’s simply not coming to me right now. i’m strugling through trying to make sense of what GOD wants to say through this stuff and it’s just not coming very easily.
SIDE NOTE – the above picture came from Si Smith’s comic illustrations of JESUS’s 40 days in the desert. He is posting a different image everyday of lent. you can find them here. by the end of lent all the images will be available for download. i would have never thought that comic illustrations of JESUS would be so moving.
constantine
i watched the movie “constantine” today and i’m still not sure how i feel about it. i definitely liked some of it but i’m not sure that i loved the movie. seemed a bit slow at times.
SIDE NOTE – i found a group on the net called “improv everywhere” today. you’ve got to see what they did with a mcdonald’s restaurant bathroom. i think it’s pretty funny. CLICK HERE to read the story.
landover baptist church
i can’t believe it has taken me so long to realize that landover baptist church had a youth ministry. i’ve followed landover with interest for years. i mean what could be better than a church with a tag line that says “the largest assembly of worthwhile people to ever exist. unsaved are NOT welcomed.” does it get any better than that? yet i’ve never imagined that they would have a youth ministry. i lucked into their youth ministry today while reading about how “JESUS didn’t have long hair.” what i read was amazing. it’s youth ministry at it’s finest. 🙂
every so often i try to go visit another church’s youth ministry and learn from what they are doing (or not doing). what better example could there be than the youth ministry at landover? i’ve got to learn from them. hopefully, with lots of work i could lead a youth ministry as good as theirs. 🙂
constantine
i just got back from watching the movie “constantine” and i’m still not sure how i feel about it. the movie is blatantly spiritual without preaching a specific agenda. it is nice to see faith claims being treated seriously. constantine discusses CHRISTian theology on forgiveness and the battle between good and evil and it does it in such a way that good discussions will come from the movie. i love the fact that hollywood has moved beyond making fun of spirituality. constantine is just the latest example of hollywood being open to spirituality. they approach the theme of constantine with an appropriate sense of respect and it shows within it’s content. there was some serious depth within some of the movie’s dialogue. the conversations between constantine and gabriel are great.
what i’m not sure of it how good the movie was. i liked it because i was excited about the extreme spiritual nature of the movie but i’m not sure i would have liked the movie if the spiritual content had not been there. sometimes the movie felt a little slow. i wish the whole thing had been a little shorter.
adutainment
product placement has been going on in the movies for years and hasn’t been completely absent within the television world but if you look around you’ll now see it all over the television programs you watch. that greatest of all shows, 24 made a deal with ford after its first season. the deal was that ford would pay them money and they would use ford vehicles for all the good guys (only evil people drive non-fords). thus far in an attempt to stay true to their creative vision the writers of “24” have pushed away suggestions from ford concerning how ford trucks and cars could be used within the script. there are plenty of other shows that have no problem molding scripts around products. just think about the apprentice. donald trump has no problem making an entire show focus on one product. survivor doesn’t have a problem bringing products into its story line either. in fact, the second season of survivor is consider a watershed moment for “adutainment.” in the second season survivor offered doritos and mountain dew to people who had barely eaten anything for three weeks. they responded in true excitement. it was great advertising and “adutainment” was born from it.
the reason for companies paying for product placement within a television shows is that we have gotten really good and avoiding advertisements – both mentally and electronically. mentally we simply ignore ads. think about it. you mentally dismiss most ads seconds after watching them. the second way that we have gotten really good at avoiding ads is via electronic recording equipment. people have fast forwarding past commercials with vcrs for years but now you have tivo. tivo automatically skips up to 92% of commercials. so what’s a company going to do when you don’t watch their ads? how is it going to get you to buy it’s product if you never actually see what they sell? it’s going to pay to become a part of the story that you are watching and that’s exactly what companies are doing.
pam and i have taught our kids that advertising is simply meant to get you to buy the product that it is selling. that is why every now and then when we see an ad that is really out there we will scream at the screen “that’s a lie.” it has been our way of constantly reminding our kids that they should not trust advertisements. maybe we will have to start teaching them to randomly scream “that’s a lie” at the television shows they watch.
i’m still not sure that it’s a lie that all the good guys drive ford trucks (i actually kind of think that is true) but i definitely know that it is a lie that mountain dew is what i want when i’m stranded on a desert isle. mountain dew stinks and they should pay you to drink it.
SPEAKING OF ADVERTISEMENTS – this rant has been brought to you by the student ministry 2005 discipleNOW. you might expect to $30,000 for a discipleNOW like we have but that’s not what our will cost you. in fact, sign up now and i’ll send you this free set of utility knives just for signing up. 🙂
belonging
this is jonathan and he is our new “official” “minister of belonging.” he has taken up the task of making sure that every person that joins us for anything feels like they “belong.” what a great word “belonging” is. we all have a need to “belong.” we need to know that we are not in this on our own and even that we are not just part of a group. nope we need to “belong.” “belonging” is so much more than just being a part of something.
jonathan has decided to make sure that people “belong” with us.