Author: Robert

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 🙂

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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.

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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. 🙂

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belonging

jonathan our minister of 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.

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family relations?

i’m watching cops right now. it’s in nashville and it involves a strange set of couples. right now a woman has called the cops to have them remove her ex-husband and ex-boyfriend from her front yard. sounded simple enough except for the fact that the ex-husband was living at the house till that morning when she apparently decided to kick him out while he was at work. of course, the ex-wife never actually told her ex-husband that she was kicking him out of the house. thus the ex-husband was standing in the front yard waiting for the ex-wife to arrive back to what he thought was their home because he had assumed that the only reason he couldn’t get into the house was because something was wrong with his key. nothing was wrong with his key, the ex-wife had changed the locks in order to keep him out of the house that he still thought he was living in.

during the conversation with the cops they found out that the ex-husband was actually husband number 3, 5, and 7 (he had been married to her three times and divorced three times and had been living with her until the change of door locks). in trying to figure out what in the world was going on the cops discovered that the male in the car with the woman was her brand new fiance, who just so happened to be another ex-husband (he had been husband number 4). the ex-boyfriend who had been watching the whole thing never really said where he fit in but i got the impression that he was the boyfriend sometime after husbands number 3, 5, or 7 (all of whom ironically were the same guy who had just so happened to be living with her until earlier that morning). the whole thing was very confusing to me.

where is doctor phil when you need him?

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distractions

why is it that the most legitimate needs arise on the day in which i need to be most focused? i really needed about 5 hours of solitude for writing some bible study material. instead of quietness and peace i received tons of urgent messages today on real needs. these were real needs (from my youngest child having a headache to a church member being stranded on the interstate and not having anyone else to call). being a good dad and a minister meant helping with these needs. yet i still need to write two studies and format two others. i didn’t get anything done on those and i really needed to since i need to have them finished a week ago. it always seems to happen this way.

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were you raised in a barn?

i’m sitting at cc’s coffee house drinking some blackberry tea and working on the material for our 2005 discipleNOW and i need to rant for a second. i need to rant about people leaving there trash every where. i walked into cc’s, purchased my tea, and then went to one of the “computer” tables to get to work. these tables hold three people side by side facing the window (the table allows you to sit right beside someone, within inches of each other, and pretend like there is not another person beside you). when i got to the only table that was open i noticed that two other people had been sitting there recently. i knew this because they decided to just leave their trash on the table when they left. ARGH! that infuriates me. there was a trash can at the end of the table – literally three feet away from the farthest person.

i’m sure these two people were probably very important people, much to important to actually throw their own trash away. they probably had to rush out to save someone’s life or stop a war. maybe they are allergic to garbage can bags and could die if they accidently rub against the plastic trash can liner. perhaps they had some really bad trash can experiences as children, like being forcibly placed in a trash can by a bully and rolled down a hill, and now they have an irrational fear of trash cans. surely they weren’t just lazy scum who decided they were better than everyone else and therefore didn’t have to pick up their own garbage.

anyways i didn’t want to sit by their garbage for an hour or two so i picked it up and threw it into the trash can at the end of the table. after all it’s up to the little people like me to pick up the garbage of the really important people like the ones who left this trash.