I mispell things!
for some interesting reading on father’s day go to this wikipedia entry.
after you read the history of father’s day go and treat your dad nice. it’s the right thing to do.
SIDE NOTE – i just set up a yahoo group for the student ministry. i want to see if it works as a good tool for spreading word about what we do. if it works we’ll keep it and if it doesn’t we want. if you want to join and help figure this thing out just click the link in the side bar of the blog.
this week the church has been holding it’s v.b.s. and as a part of that some of us within the youth ministry office were asked to dress up like biblical characters and be a part of some skits. here are a few pictures. now i ask you – have you ever seen scarier looking biblical characters? surely none of the great heros of my faith looked like this.
it’s strange how GOD answers prayer. for at least the past year and a half i have been praying, and wanting, and desiring to split our student ministry into a middle school and a high school group. we average 70 to 100 kids on wednesday night and it’s not the usual mix. instead of being about 55 to 60% middle school and 45 to 40% high school we are always more like 60% high school. each year we loose middle school students and gain high school students as the year goes on. it has been obvious to me that we are doing something right for high school students, but something that doesn’t connect as well for the middle schoolers.
but here’s the issues. our church has this butt kickingly large private school that uses ever other part of the church on wednesdays till 6:00 p.m. and we start our worship services at 6:00 p.m. so for the past year and a half i’ve been talking about the need to split our group but unable to figure out a place to have a second group. that was what was going on until yesterday. this week is our v.b.s. and the student center is being used by one of the groups. in the past i have taken down all the v.b.s. decorations and then put them up after we were through. i wanted to do something different this year so we moved to the stage that is in the new gym area. we closed the curtain on the stage and it became another room. in fact, it became a very cool room. it had a real “beatnic” feel to it. on the stage we had the following:
on top of now having a room that would be great for an additional service that room is located right next to a full gymnasium which gives us a great place to do some games and expend the energy that is coursing through the veins of our middle schoolers. it’s perfect for doing a separate middle school service. in fact, i got so excited about the whole thing that i have already asked our adult leadership to begin praying about the possibility of the whole thing and i’ve called 5 out of the 7 people that i will probably need to talk to in order to make it happen. after a few weeks of prayer if things still look good we’ll move to doing a test run sometime in august or september. we’ll try the whole thing out for 4 to 6 weeks and then get everyone together to see how it went. then we’ll either test the whole thing again, scrap it, or put it into action.
so here’s the plan as of now:
of course, i have some strong fears about this thing too:
i guess that’s all for now. i’ll write more on the move to a middle school service if GOD leads and the whole thing develops.
how cool is this? i just posted this picture automatically from flickr. i’m able to do this on my blogger site (a ministry blog that discusses the details of what we do within the youth ministry) but until now i haven’t been able to do it on this blog. yet, another cool advantage of the new bblog code. again, how cool is that.
btw, the picture is the photo on my flickr site that has been “favorited” the most (in other words, it’s the top picture from all my photos that has been marked the most as one they want to remember).
well i still haven’t figured out how to import my previous 397 posts into the new database for the new blog but i have at least figured out how to access the old database and manually transfer each separate post from the previous blog. this means that if i transfer 4 old posts a day then in 100 days i would have transfered all my previous posts. of course, that leaves out all the old comments and insightful statements that some of you made. there has to be an easier way to do this.
yes i know everything looks different. there is a reason for it looking different. the reason for it looking different is that i have upgraded to a newer version of bblog and as of right now i can’t figure out how to import my old entries. for those of you are mysql literate here’s the issue (for everyone else just skip to the next paragraph) – from what i was able to figure out i had to start a new mysql database in order to use the new bblog code. the old code used an 11 table database and the new code uses a 10 code dbase. so i still have the old database with the old entries in it but i don’t know how to import them into the new table. if any of you know enough code to figure out a way for me to import my old entries i would greatly appreciate it.
to everyone else, i decided to change to newer blog code because my old software doesn’t allow me to control my comments (it won’t send me an email when i receive a comment or hold a comment until i say its okay). based on a few experiences i figured it was best to move to some new code that has some improvements. the sum of this is that the blog will look different from awhile and hopefully become better (the style of it not the content – there’s no hope for the content).
anyway here are some of the advantages of the new bblog code:
there are other benefits to the new code but these were the main incentives for me.
i know that i have talked about this before but it seems that a bunch of you don’t understand how amazing del.icio.us is. so if you still haven’t figured out what is so cool about del.icio.us and are wondering \”what’s the big deal\” about it you might want to look at the following links. they describe what the big deal is about \”tagging\”:
if you ever do any research at all (i.e. school, business, etc.) you need to be using del.icio.us.
SIDE NOTE – i just accidentlally kicked the computer and bent the toenail on my pink toe backwards. it is amazing how much pain such a little thing can produce.
![](\"http://www.one.org/media/banners/ONE_banners001_468_88.gif\")
saturday some cool stuff happened relating to making poverty history. here’s how the latest email from the ONE campaign puts it.
together as ONE, we have helped do something incredible!
this past saturday, the u.s. joined together with other wealthy nations to free millions of people in some of the poorest countries from crushing debts. the finance ministers from the ‘group of eight’ or ‘g8′ nations agreed to write off billions of dollars of debt, and in return for cancellation, the qualifying countries will invest these savings in their own people — to help with more schools, health clinics and wells.
debt cancellation will quite literally save millions of lives — but this deal was struck by only eight men huddling around a table. eight men and the millions of us watching them, asking them to do the right thing. you called for this, with ONE voice, and they got it done.
the finance ministers’ meeting was just a warm-up act, a down payment on an overall historic breakthrough. let’s keep up the positive pressure for the main event, when president bush, prime minister blair and the other g8 leaders meet on july 6.
so here’s what you can do to help – go here and write president bush an email with your ONE voice and let him know how important getting rid of extreme world poverty is to you.
i know that i have talked about this before but it seems that a bunch of you don’t understand how amazing del.icio.us is. so if you still haven’t figured out what is so cool about del.icio.us and are wondering “what’s the big deal” about it you might want to look at the following links. they describe what the big deal is about “tagging“:
if you ever do any research at all (i.e. school, business, etc.) you need to be using del.icio.us.
SIDE NOTE – i just accidentlally kicked the computer and bent the toenail on my pink toe backwards. it is amazing how much pain such a little thing can produce.
bbc news | technology | micro$oft censors chinese blogs
i have mixed feelings on the story behind this article. basically the article says that in order to do business with china micro$oft has given in and agreed to block blogs that have “banned expression” within them. micro$oft says this is not a statement of the company’s politics, rather they follow the laws of whatever company they operate in and this censorship it is just the price of doing business in china. so micro$oft has banned blog entries that use words like “freedom,” “democracy,” and “human rights.” yahoo has done the same thing.
my mixed feelings come from the fact that i do want companies to operate within the law. yet, my heart cries out that microsoft (and yahoo) should say that if this is the cost of doing business in china then they won’t do business in china. the money simply can’t be worth the cost.
one of the reader comments on the article says:
As all companies, Microsoft is at making money and in the modern world, ethics is not good for business, which is sad but you can see it almost anywhere if you have a look at the world.
i simply can’t agree. companies are not amoral entities. they are composed of people, people who have ethical standards, and thus those companies have to operate within the ethical standards of those who compose their numbers. even in their pursuit of “the almighty dollar” our businesses still have to operate within the ethics of their people. otherwise we are all doomed.
