Author: Robert

Posted on

young love

i’m in baton rouge at the moment and right now i am officiating the wedding ceremony for haley fletcher & john gieselmann. i couldn’t be more happy to be a part of something. they are a great young couple an while i can’t predict the future (i failed my courses on prophecy in seminary) and anything is possible i feel very good about their future. they are starting things off in the best way possible.

actually there are four of “my” kids that have been married recently or are getting married recently and i am very proud of all of them. kate & justin smith were married last week and sarah fuselier is getting married in july (though for some reason i was convinced it was next week). they are all great kids and i am proud to have been a part of their lives.

Posted on

treadmill painting


this is just odd. it’s a public access t.v. show about a guy painting while on a treadmill and also taking calls and eating a meringue pie while on the treadmill. it’s truly od.

Posted on

26.2 stories

it’s now the second day since running the green bay marathon with jim and jill. therefore i thought i would put down some thoughts concerning the experience and then move on to talk about other things. so here goes:

  • 26.2 miles is a LONG WAY TO RUN. i didn’t train anywhere near as much as i should have. you can see this in my half-split for the marathon. i ran the first 13.1 miles in 2:17:01. this rate was on pace for a 4:35 finish. i ran the next 13.1 miles in a little less than 3 hours. this is a whole lot slower and shows that i had not trained for the distance. before the race the longest i had run in one continuous stretch was 21 miles and that had been 5 weeks before the marathon. i should have tapered down on my mileage in the three weeks before the race but instead of tapering slowly i cut it down way too quickly. live and learn.
  • the whole thing is mental. yes it is physically draining but finishing is all about your mind.
  • green bay marathonencouragement is everything. i was ready to quit at mile 22. no “if”s, “and”s or “but”s about it i was through. the only things that kept me going was the thought of pam and the boys screaming for me and the various people along the course who could tell i was tired and would say “you can push through this, keep going.” pam and the boys had made signs for jill, jim, and i and showed up at various stages of the race to scream for us. it was a huge thing. i’m sure they don’t think it was that big of a deal but i know that i would have collapsed without it. there were several groups that did the same thing, but not for family reasons. springlake church had hundreds of people in various places on the course dressed in “go the distance” shirts and they also manned the “wall party” at mile 20. i can not believe how long or loud they shouted. the “wall party” was rocking so much that i probably speed up too much from the energy of the area. if they is a “heartbreak hill” in the green bay marathon it’s a bridge going over the river at about mile 22. it’s not real high but it seems impossible when you hit it that late in the race. springlake people had lined the side of the bridge and where screaming encouragement the entire way. it’s one thing for them to do it for the elites, who finish the race in 2:30 hours. it’s a more impressive thing for them to continue through the slow pokes like me. i’ll write more about this later because there is some cool church stuff in this. i was so impressed by the church that i called the pastor to tell him how much the encouragement had meant. anyhow, like i said encouragement was key.
  • green bay marathonsome of the stories you hear along the way are the best parts of the run. i’ll list two here but there were many others. i ran probably a fourth of the race with grant. i started talking with him because he had written across the back of one of his calves “i lost 155 pounds.” that was enough for me to become curious. as a 20 year old he weighed 381. the thought of hitting 400 pounds scared him so much that he started a regime of exercise and diet control. in seven months he lost 155 pounds and he was running his first half marathon as a celebration and a promise to lose 50 more. his family is all overweight and he was trying to convince them to start dropping the pounds too. recently his dad and decided to join him in losing the weight and living in a healthy manner. i thought of grant a lot during the next half of the marathon. green bay marathonanother person that was fun to meet was sarah. she decided that while she didn’t feel like she could run the marathon she could do some serious encouragement for those who were running in the middle of the pack. her plan of attack for this was to be at ten different spots along the marathon course so that she could encourage the same people over and over. i think i saw her at about eight of these spots.
  • one is not enough. these things are simply too much fun. jill, jim, and i are already planning on participating within the indianapolis marathon in october. it’s on a saturday which is one of my prerequisites for the next year or so. i can’t miss sundays while we are starting the church services. in a couple of years i’ll probably feel better about missing a sunday every now and then, but for now i’m going to be very picky about missing them.

there is so much more that i could write concerning my experiences within the marathon but i’ve probably bored all of you already.

Posted on

the marathon

DSC_0147_edited-1
i’ll write more about it tomorrow. it was amazing. i finished in 5:14:26 (chip time). now the goal is to improve that time in another marathon. i meet some great people and learned and experienced a ton.

my run for the day
distance – 26.2 miles
time – 5:14:26
pace – 12:01/mile

Posted on

fishing with the in-laws

jim and jill, pam’s brother and sister-n-law, are up here for the a few days while we run the green bay marathon (in two days, woohoo). we went fishing today with andy (a great a generous guy) and had a pretty decent day of catching fish and enjoying nature. i think each of us caught 15 or so.

below are pictures from jim and jill’s first fish in wisconsin.
smallmouth jimwalleye jill

my run for the day
distance – 5.0 miles
time – 54:45
pace – 10:57/mile

Posted on

what does a church planter do? part 2

as i posted once before, i have no idea what a church planter is supposed to do.

what i’m trying to do (and i’m hoping it’s what i’m supposed to be doing) is hanging out with as many people as possible. today that took the form of fishing with a guy. he’s the intervasity campus minister for uwsp, he has a good handle on where people are, and he’s a great guy to hang out with. the side benefit of all this is that i caught my first muskie today. woohoo! i also caught my largest smallmouth bass today. woohoo! of course, niether one of them were huge, but being raised in the deep south these are two fish that i haven’t had much experience with.

anyhow, here are the photos.
my first muskiesmallie

Posted on

project mayhem

first, i have a great mom and though i have wished her happy mother’s day personally i thought i would also do so on my blog. happy mother’s day mom.

secondly, i thought i would introduce y’all to “project mayhem.” due to finals and the beginning of summer the tapestry launch team will not meet for the next month. since, we’re going to be separate for the next month i thought it would be fun to have a project for all of us to work on. thus “project mayhem” was born.

it came out of the book i am presently reading, a whack on the side of the head. it’s a book on creativity and it is wonderful. one of the things it pushes is overcoming the practical. it tells a few stories of creative products that came out of completely impractical original ideas. here are a couple of them:

  • in a brain storming session on how to improve the additives within dog food one person suggested placing indigestible items within the dog food that would produce certain desired effects. two suggested examples were grass seed and florescent dye. the grass seed would sprout from the poop and the florescent dye would glow in the dark enable people to avoid the spot when walking in the dark. not practical ideas for dog food but great ideas for livestock and wildlife. the ideas were put into action in some cattle food to encourage reseeding of the grazing land and into wildlife salt licks for help in tracking the animals. not bad for an unpractical idea.
  • a town was dealing with a major trash problem. they brainstormed ideas for getting people to put their trash in a garbage can. they suggested increasing fines, hiring more police, and other ideas that punished people for not placing their waste in a trash can. finally, one person suggested creating garbage cans that would pay people to put trash into them. a completely impractical idea. the city would of course go broke if they gave people money for putting trash in a garbage can. yet they took the idea of a reward and created joke telling trash cans. every time you put trash in the garbage can it told a different joke and since the jokes were changed every two weeks people were encouraged to continue doing. not a bad idea for something that was originally completely impractical.

so “project mayhem” is about completely impractical ideas. for the next month the launch team is going to pray and think about the most amazing and impractical ideas that tapestry can do or be a part of. via the wonder of google docs we will also discuss the ideas. the only rule is that for the next month nobody is allowed to point out why an idea will not work. instead, we will discuss what positive about an idea and how it might “cross pollinate” into other more-practical ideas. hopefully it will be a means for pushing on the walls of the box a little bit.

Posted on

faq's

over the past couple of weeks i’ve been updating the tapestry website. i like it’s present theme but there are still major changes that have to take place. primarily i’m trying to arrange for medium size photos to smoothly rotate on the homepage. i’m trying to use JonDesign’s smooth gallery code to accomplish this but at this point i’m apparently not doing something right. if anyone has any experience with smooth gallery i would be thankful for the help.

anyhow, the reason i’m posting is because i need to have a “faq’s” section on the site (or something else that does the same thing). what things would you want to know about a church? i’m open to anything. the best one i’ve seen those far was “what if GOD was one of us?” (dad, it’s a song from the 90’s).

SIDE NOTE – dan kimball has a real interesting post on his experience at “the holyland experience.” it reminds me of “CHRIST of the ozarks,” which i went to when we lived in carthage, missouri.

my run for the day
distance – 7.0 miles
time – 1:16:45
pace – 10:57/mile
weather – 48/rain

Posted on

may stands for busy

may is a busy month for me both personally and ministerially. last night was the first thing that tapestry led within the community. we did our own interpretation of proost’s labyrinth experience. considering the fact that very few people within the point area have ever heard of tapestry i was quite please with the attendance. there were 18 people other than the launch team that came to the labyrinth (there are 5 of us thus making it 23 that participated). we might could have handled a little over double that amount and still been comfortable. the best part was that we didn’t draw very many people who attended other churches. the vast majority of the people that came to the labyrinth were not connected with another church. that’s the way it’s supposed to happen. i get more pumped about it the more i think about it. there was even discussion concerning doing this annually or doing a different experiential project each year.

it’s all not bad for a church that is starting out of hanging out in coffee shops.

even more important was that the labyrinth gave the launch team an example of what we can do that is not your typical church service. there are some amazing people on the launch team. most of them had not been through anything as experiential as the labyrinth. now that they have, their creativity can be released and great things can start happening. in the future we will be able to work more and more as a team, using everyone’s talents and input, because of what happened last night.

the rest of the busyness bounces around traveling and running. pam’s brother and sister-in-law are coming up to run the green bay marathon next week (i’m running too but they are beasts). we love hanging out with them so that make for a fun few days while they are here. after they leave i have a day or two before i fly down to baton rouge for john/haley’s wedding. it’s always fun to see former youth get hitched and it’s even more fun when it means i get to see people that i haven’t seen in a while. once i get back from that the family and i leave for minneapolis to see spamalot. we’re all very excited about this. the kids are going to love the play. pam and i have already seen it and seeing it again with our kids will make the experience all the better.

it’s a fun few weeks.