Category: ministry

we’re back from houston. the church we worked with in houston was (and is) incredible. of course, it is now good to be home.

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.

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 of you may have heard that friday there was a 6.7 magnitude earthquake near diriamba, nicaragua (you can read more here) and that our friend kate is already there on a month long mission trip. i am glad to report that i have it on first hand authority (stephen – her boyfriend) that kate is fine and dandy though a little but shaken by the experience.

actually, from reading the news stories on the earthquake it’s quite amazing. 6.7 magnitude is a pretty decent earthquake. it was in the ocean but still close enough to the land that there could have been extensive damage and injury. yet, there wasn’t any. no one was hurt and there doesn’t seem to be any reported property damage. it did cause a tsunami warning for the california coast but that didn’t happen either.

last week i posted about praying for kate as she left to spend a month in nicaragua working with our friends down there. now i want to remind you to pray for haley as she leaves to go do the same thing. she will leave for nicaragua on july 5th. she will be working with kate as they both experience life down there and live with the baltodanos. please keep them both in your prayers.

both haley and kate will come home to baton rouge with our the youth ministry team that is going to nicaragua july 28 through august 4.

i posted kate’s email earlier so now i’ll direct you to haley’s email. click here to send her a message. i know that both she and kate would appreciate any messages of encouragement you care to share with them.

i was talking with blaine today and told him i would put up on the blog steve jobs’ commencement address to the 2005 graduating class at standford. here’s a quote form it:

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

you can read the rest of it here.

every year we take a ton of basketballs down to nicaragua with us. we do this to be able to give them to the kids. try as we might we never have enough for everyone to get one. sometime the kids get so desperate to get a basketball that fights break out over them. we need to find more basketballs to take with us to nicaragua.

that’s where you can help. consider bringing some basketballs to church with you. you might have three or four old basketballs sitting around your house collect dust – you can bring those too. every basketball you bring will be sent down to nicaragua and given to a kid who will be extremely thankful for it.

besides bringing joy to a small child your basketball will also help to continue cementing the relationships between parkview and the people of diriamba, nicaragua.

thanks to the modern technology of our world you may now send kate encouragement via emailwhile she is in nicaragua. how convenient is that? click here to email kate and encourage her.

you’ll be able to do the same thing for haley when she leaves for nicaragua. i’ll place haley’s email up on the blog when she leaves for nicaragua.

hey there guys & girls i just want to remind all those who are involved within the student ministry to continually lift up in prayer kate, our friend and sister in CHRIST. over the next month she will be ministering with our friends in nicaragua. we will see her again when some of our number go down to nicaragua in late july.

in the student ministry we have often talked about missions as a bow and arrow. the arrow goes to the target but it is the bow that supplies the power and direction. kate is the arrow being sent to the target. we, her church, are the ones who are supposed to send her and continually support and empower her. she is going to nicaragua to be faithful to what GOD has called her to. we have to be faithful to make sure she knows that she is not alone.

haley, another of our family, will go down and join kate next week.

some of us went go karting this afternoon and i learned a valuable lesson. today i learned that alan is invisible to authority figures. you see alan has the rare ability to use his kart to slam people into the side rail without ever being seen by the people who are supposed to throw troublemakers like him out. it was an amazing thing to watch. alan bounced everyone who came by him. he would pound his victim into the rail and just continue driving while hitting the person. he didn’t even try to hide it. yet no one who could do anything about it ever saw his behavior. it was like he was invisible and since he was invisible he just continued to slam everyone he saw. bad alan, bad!