we’ve made it to global encounter in houston texas and spent our first night sleeping on the floor. not a bad experience on awhole. there is something about sleeping on an air mattress on the floor with a bunch of other people in the same room that is quite fun. you learn new things about people. you learn who talks in their sleep, who snores (that would be me), who can’t last the whole night without having to go to the restroom, and who uses too much cologne or axe body spray. it’s a fun and interesting experience.
it’s a great big stupid world
people around the london bombing (or 7/7 as some as calling it) are placing their pictures on the london bombing photo pool. most of them are captured stills from television news programs but there are some from people who were in the subways during and after the explosions.
other countries stood with, mourned with, and prayed for us when we were attacked. now we need to do the same thing for our friends across the pond.
the state of the blogsphere
yesterday i posted about the great and instant increase in the number of visitors to this blog and the confusion that it was causing me. thankfully, adam from ys forum blogring told me that the ys update listed my blog as their blog of the week. while i appreciate the “nod of the head” i do feel i have to ask “why would they list my blog?”
so here are my thoughts:
- ys has made a huge mistake meaning to actually type the url of http://disciplenow.blogspot.com/ instead of http://disciple-now.blogspot.com/ and accidentally sent innocent people to my blog.
- whoever picks the “blog of the week” for the ys update was smoking something strange last week when they were putting together the update.
- they have recommended so many blogs that they have reached the end of the blogsphere and are stuck recommending mine.
all i know for sure is that as someone who respects ys greatly i’m a little disappointed that you’ve dropped to such a low level. common ys i know you can do better.
don’t touch that it’s …
oh my word it was hot tonight at the view. what a perfect night for the air conditioning to break – a night when we were cooking out, it was 95 degrees, and the humidity was in the mid-80s. the good side is that i sweat out all the impurities that had formerly been in my body – it was like going to a sauna.
some like it hot
tropical storm cindy went by us today without a drop of rain falling. instead of getting any percipitation like our neighbors to the east we had an absolutely gorgeous day that grew quite hot, around 95 degrees fahrenheit / 35 degrees celsius with humidity around 85 percent. which made it the perfect day for our air conditioner to break down. so for our weekly wednesday night worship service we had about 80 people packed into a room watching (and feeling) the heat slowly rise. it was quite miserable except for the worship which was wonderful in spite of the heat. still some rain would have been very nice.
what’s happening here?
if you read this thing regularly you know that this is a small blog. using sitemeter and feedburner i know that i average around 50 friends a day that visit and read this stuff. that’s why why today is so strange. today my sitemeter account is telling me that 139 people have visited the blog thus far today. that’s strange enough because it is significantly larger than a normal day for this blog. the stranger thing to me is that allot of these visits apparently came from email accounts (sitemeter tells me where people are referred from but it doesn’t tell me what entry people are being referred to).
what’s up with that?
if anyone has any idea i sure would appreciate hearing it because i’m at a loss.
alls quite on the baton rouge front
everyone had thought that it would be raining around here by now. in fact, i canceled the soil that was going to be brought to my house because both i and the guy at the garden store thought it would be raining and i would be stuck with a huge mud pile in my front yard. of course, it’s still dry outside right now. who knows when it will finally start raining.
on the dirt front
it’s time for a landscaping update. because of the rain we had on july 2nd some of my roundup was washed off and it didn’t kill the grass as effectively as it should have. so i sprayed more roundup yesterday and it definitely did the job this time. we now have a large brown patch of grass in the shape of our future flower bed in our front yard.
the second, update is that i have finally found a better price on the top soil. nature’s own garden center will sell me 7 cubic yards of top soil (their flower bed mix) for $226. this is the best price i’ve found thus far. if anyone knows of a better price i’m open to saving money.
i understand this
this is where i am. i have married far above myself and i know it. i married an incredible woman and i don’t deserve an incredible woman. thus i most constantly grovel and hope that pam never realizes that she could have done so much better than me.
checkpoints
i ate lunch with j.t. today (in our never ending conversation to start something new around baton rouge) and he mentioned student life bible study’s six year plan. the plan is what they want a student to know by by six years within their studies. here’s what it looks like:
- CHRIST
- the life of CHIRST
- the basis of faith
- law and grace
- the foundations of ethical living
- old testament people
- the development of character
- the theology of paul
- discipline of a biblical worldview
- the new testament church
- essence of fellowship
- wisdom & prophetic literature
- the frameworks for a passionate life
covenant
character
consecration
community
commission
of course, you can also use andy stanley’s seven checkpoints of youth ministry as an example. again this is what their student ministry wants it’s teens to have experienced by the time they leave the student ministry. stanley’s seven checkpoints are:
- authentic faith
- spiritual disciplines
- moral boundaries
- healthy friendships
- wise choices
- ultimate authority
- others first
j.t.’s statement got me thinking about a study i had done four years ago. i went through the gospels looking at every time the word “disciple” occurred. what i discovered was that discipleship isn’t so much a step by step plan as it is walking along side someone else who has been walking with CHRIST longer and deeper than you have yet experienced. during that study i mapped out the basics of what i think a disciple of CHRIST would ideally look like (i.e. nobody actually looks like this because none of us are “ideal” disciples). here’s what i wrote out:
if i were to do this today i would word things a little and focus more on the “walk.” yet i guess it is still close to what i use as a guide directing my goals for what i hope our students learn concerning being a disciple of CHRIST.