Month: July 2007

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wierd ministry day

today was a good & bad day that had allot of different ministry aspects within it.

  • i visited with the 15 year old grandson of a church member who has a malignant tumor in his brain. the visit was actually a time of celebration because they now know what’s wrong after two weeks of struggling with what could be wrong. for two weeks jonathan was passed from doctor to doctor and diagnosis to diagnosis until someone finally said “we have to get you to the hospital now.” the great news is that the tumor is very treatable and after four to six weeks of radiation the tumor should be gone and because of the type of cancer he should be perfectly fine. he will be going to st. jude’s within the next week to begin his treatment. his name is jonathan. please remember him in your prayers.
  • i’m the emergency minister for parkview for the week. tonight a lady who said her name was shirley (not her real name) called saying she was going to kill herself. after allot of discussion it came out that she is manic depressive and her medicine had stopped working (or she was off it). she is not in the baton rouge area and just randomly found the church’s number on the internet and called. she promised me that she would go to the emergency room but i have no way of checking up on her. please keep her in your prayers and ask that she will call back tomorrow like she promised she would.
  • i was able to leech off some great equipment for tapestry. i spoke with red (our minister of music) today to find out if parkview might have any sound equipment sitting around not being used that i could snag for tapestry. he talked to the right people and tapestry now has a barely used sound board, mic stands, and a good bit of other miscellaneous equipment. thank you parkview.
  • after two years of not taking my guitar to get it’s preamp fixed i finally brought it to a technician today. i had feared it would cost $200 or so to fix the preamp. it actually turns out that it was just a ground that was bad and it only cost me $15 to get it fixed.

my run for the day
distance – 1.56 miles
time – 17:30
pace – 11:13/miles

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the trials of being a basset

saturday we took montana and roux to the brec dog park (located at forest park). it’s a great place for our dogs to run around and socialize with other dogs. montana and roux loved the place. the played with other dogs, sniffed everything imganible and and “marked.” the biggest problem was that roux and montana are short, large dogs. all the other large dogs were at least a foot taller than them. that’s how the problem happened.

roux decided to go act “tough” around a boxer that was there. roux had his hackles up and he had “puffed” his chest up to twice it’s normal size. he was as large as i have ever seen him and quite impressive looking. in fact, i thought he was a terror to behold. the boxer didn’t even notice him. instead the boxer just lifted his leg, “marked” roux and walked off like nothing had happened.

i guess that’s what happens when you’re a short dog.

since i didn’t have my camera with me at the time i decided to draw a recreation of the event.

marked

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i like your yard

for about 4 years pam and i have been driving by a yard that we both love. we liked the house when we first started driving by it six years ago but we fell in love with it four years ago when the owners decided to change their landscaping. it’s wonderful. it’s pretty on it own but the best part is that is fits the house perfectly. the colors go well together, the shapes fit the structure perfectly, and the textures are spot on. every time i drive by the house (which is basically every day) i think to myself “dang, they did that right.”

today we had to get out of our house for yet another showing. this is a good thing. the only bad part of the whole situation was that the whole process went long. we disappeared from the house for an hour, as we were asked to, but when we go back the realtor and her client were still there (hopefully this is a good thing). so we drive around for a little while. after 15 minutes and our second trip by the house we decided to take a longer route. this longer route took us by the previously mentioned house. since we had to waste some time pam and i talked about stopping by and telling these random people how much we liked their landscaping. so we did. i walked up to these stranger’s home that live about a mile away from us and said “you don’t know me but i have been meaning to stop and tell you how much i like your landscaping for about four years. i just wanted to tell you that you did a great job on it.”

the homeowner was as surprised as you would think she was. she began to tell me how hard her husband had worked on the landscaping and how thankful she was that i stopped by to say that. it was all pretty fun.

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contemplative youth ministry

last night i finished mark yaconelli’s “contemplative youth ministry“. i picked this book up a month ago thinking that even though starting a church plant will change how i approach youth ministry i assumed there would be some really good stuff in the book that would relate to all ministry. my guess was on target. the book is great. i especially loved two things from the book: 1) the liturgy of discernment as a meeting agenda, and 2) and the concept of noticing, naming, and nurturing being a model for ministry. it’s good stuff and a worthy read.

btw, len has a good interview with mark yaconelli here. it’s worth reading the whole article if for no other reason than the story of yac and mark at the world series.

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two weeks without a word

i haven’t blogged in two weeks and my wife has been reminding me that my parents need me to post. it’s an odd feeling having an audience of two but the good news is that they are very loyal readers. so in order to keep them loyal i am posting now.

the reason that i haven’t posted in two weeks is really good. it’s a two fold reason, 1) i was on a mission trip for eight of the days. the youth ministry was repairing houses in vicksburg, mississippi. it was a great week but i couldn’t post anything because i didn’t have any internet access. 2) i’ve had a summer cold since getting back from mississippi. i hate summer colds. there are simply not fun. i’ve felt pretty miserable all week. i think i’m finally pretty close to over it.

the only two things that have really happened within the past two weeks are 1) lots of showings of the house, and 2) some good financial news. the showings are in an attempt to sell our house so we can buy one up in stevens point. we’ve averaged about one and a half showings per day. supposedly this isn’t bad – in fact it’s pretty good. we’ve been on the market 16 days and we’ve had 22 showings. now we have to get an offer and ell our house.

the financial good news is from parkview. when we leave baton rouge we knew that it would involve us going without an income for eight weeks. because of this we saved up all of our vacation time so that we would each have 4 weeks of vacation and thus cut the eight weeks down to four weeks. we figured we would just live the remaining four weeks off of our savings, credit, and capital in our house. this all changed this week when the parkview personnel committee met. they decided that they wanted to pay me for eight weeks vacation instead of four. this means that we’ll be losing a little with pam’s income (right now my salary is the main source of income where as in stevens point pam’s salary will be the main source). it was a very nice surprise that took away the stress of trying to move a family of four and live for a month without any income. thank you parkview.