I mispell things!
another long day but i thought i would report to those that care that we won our curling match tonight. that makes the team’s record 3-1. woohoo!
i’ll also report that the low today in the stevens point area was 12 degrees with a windchill down to 1-2 degrees. oh yeah it’s cold.
it’s been a long day and i just finished filling in the monthly report i have to send in for my support, so i’m too tired to really type anything worth squat.
i started reading “launch:starting a church from scratch” today and i thought a statement steve sjogren made in the preface of the book was amazing. he stated that the average sales for a book published within the united states was 2,500 and that the average sales for a book published by a CHRISTian publishing house was around 1,000 books. he stated that he thought the reason for this was because so few of these books ever changed anyone’s life. i think the same has to be true for many of our churches – the reason o many are not growing is because so many of them haven’t been a part of changing anyone’s life. i want to be a part of a church that sees people’s lives changed through the power of CHRIST.
SIDE NOTE – i have always liked xbox live but it’s even better when it allows me to chat with people who are 17 hours away. up until recently i did not have a mic for using the vocal communication (i’m too cheap to buy one). when i bought the xbox 360 it came with a mic and i have fallen in love with being able to chat with some of my former youth from baton rouge. if you’re on live look me up (my id is ratterrell).
until this year i had never been to black friday. if at all possible i usually try to avoid shopping when there are crowds. this year however during CHRISTmas i am fixing up an old computer with my dad so that i can place in the man cave and best buy had a few deals going on that would make everything a little cheaper. therefore, i decided that i would wake up at 4:45 a.m. and go shopping at best buy. i didn’t really think it would be that big of a deal. after all this is the stevens point area. the whole micropolis is only composed of 60,000 people. boy was i wrong.
when i got to best buy the line going into the building was wrapped 180 degrees around the building and that was while it was already moving in. i jumped in the line just to see what it would be like. all i know is that you people who do this regularly are completely nuts. why would so many people be in such a mad rush to spend money? i was so distracted by the oddness of the situation that i ended up grabbing the wrong item (i wanted a 22″ lcd monitor for $149 + rebate and what i grabbed was the “better” 22″ monitor for $199 without rebate). by the time i realized it all the other deal monitors had been snatched up. it then wasn’t worth it to me to stand in line and buy the only other item i needed (a new hard drive for the machine) when i knew i could buy it online for the same price. so i put both items back up and walked around to amuse myself.
i ended up randomly pointing people to other parts of the store. the big item for sale was a whole emachine computer for $199. every one and their mom was looking for that. of course, the item sold out minutes into people entering the store and of course most people didn’t realize that. every time i heard someone say “i wonder where the computer for $199 is” i would tell them that i had heard it was over in another department. woosh! they would fly off in that direction. i feel kind of bad about it now but i have to be honest and say i thought it was quite funny at the moment.
thankfully, i do not think i will ever go to black friday again. usually i prefer celebrating “buy nothing day” more than black friday. i guess today i kind of did by proxy.
good night i’m going back to bed now.
i hope everyone had a great thanksgiving. the terrell family in wisconsin did. our normal tradition involves us hanging out with our families in alabama (we hang out with friends on CHRISTmas). we like thanksgiving lunch (and CHRISTmas lunch also) to be full of food, crowded with people, and loud. while it was fun this year just being with the immediate family, pam and i both agree that we are looking forward to when it will be load and crazy around here. our ultimate goal for next year is to gather some friends around who aren’t able to be family for whatever reasons. this is what we usually tried to do in baton rouge.
part of our family tradition also involves going to see a movie on thanksgiving day. today we went to see “fred claus.” it was pretty good on a whole. we all enjoyed the moment when santa claus responded with “this means nobody in wisconsin gets any gifts.” thankfully we will be in alabama on CHRISTmas day. whew! that was close.
SIDE NOTE – i finished “jim & casper go to church” last night and it was great. since i checked this book out from the library i am probably going to have to buy this book so i will have it on hand to pass around within our core group. i actually may just buy it for everyone our core group.
for those of you who are trying to follow my curling progress i thought i would let you know that last night my team won it’s second bonspiel. our record now is 2-1. last night’s bonspiel was a tight one. we were tied going into the last end (the curling term for a round). i’m not sure what the other teams’ records are so i can’t tell you if we have a dynasty going on here or not. i tend to think we probably do.
SIDE NOTE – while walking my dogs i am presently listening to richard baxter’s book “the reformed pastor.” even though it was written in the 1600s it is still amazing. obviously i have to listen to the book through a 21st century filter (looking at things have changed dramatically since the 17th century) but it is still so on target. it’s was free on christian audio last month.
before i left parkview i had hoped to send out a letter to all the parents making suggestions on how to help the new youth minister get going quickly. as can happen life got busy with other things and so this was dropped by the way. i thought since a few of my friends from baton rouge read this blog i might do it now. i don’t know now when y’all will know who the new guy/girl is or when he/she will be at parkview to start ministering with you but here are a few things i would find useful if i were in his/her situation.
that’s all i can think of right now. since i know and love so many wonderful people at parkview i am sure that you all will make the most of this time of great opportunity.
last week i posted the first of the series of emails i am sending to some young friends of mine for whom i am officiating their wedding ceremony. they are getting premarital counseling from a great guy who is geographically closer than i am but i still felt like i would be remiss if i didn’t make sure a few things were covered. i’m actually 99% sure that the counselor will cover this stuff but i would rather send a useless email than not have some things covered.
anyhow, here’s the second email.
Last week I wrote you concerning what I believe to be the ultimate purpose of marriage (and life for that matter). Now I will begin to write to you concerning some of the things that I believe are important for living out your marriage. Basically I’ll just write on the subjects that I would normally cover if we were meeting together for premarital counseling. The subjects we would cover together are
• Relational defaults
• Fighting
• Money
• SexSo let’s talk a little about “relational defaults.”
What I mean by this has a lot to do with your experience of your parents’ marriages. I know a good bit about your family life (name removed to protect the innocent) and a little about your family life (name removed because of the witness protection act & his testimony against the mob) and from what I know I would assume that you both feel as though there are parts that you would like to emulate and there are parts that you would like to completely avoid. That’s why I would like to talk about “defaults.” You will not automatically become your parents (for good or bad) but the experiences you have had in watching their marriages will help to form you for good and bad. In my opinion those experiences can form “defaults” that you naturally go towards.
What this means is that how your parents fought, treated each other, communicated, parented, etc. are all a part of who you are and you will have a natural tendency to coast toward those behaviors. If your mother had a tendency to horde money, or your father had a tendency to love his yard more than his children, or your parents had a tendency to fight with the goal of slashing each other’s throats, or one spouse had a tendency to humiliate the other spouse in public, etc. then you need to watch out for those behaviors within yourself. You are not doomed to become your parents (or for that matter blessed to naturally become your parents) but if you do not watch out for some of the behaviors that you don’t like in their relationships then you will find them slowly creeping into your lives. After all your parent’s relationship with their spouse is the closest you will ever be to studying someone else’s relationship. You have learned a great deal for good and bad from watching those relationships so carefully. If you don’t watch out for it you will probably find yourself doing the very things that you had always hated when your parents did them to each other.
I don’t mean for this to be a cut on your parents because we all have our faults and the goal is for our kids to get better at things than we are. I know that one day Adam and Noah will look over at me and think “Dad should be treating Mom this way” and hopefully their marriage will be even more successful that ours because of it. Should you have children the same will be true with them.
Overcoming our negative defaults takes work. We have to constantly be on the look out for them and also be willing to do what is necessary to overcome them. Obviously we head towards these defaults because they are easy for us. That means overcoming them will probably not be easy. I am a firm believer that successful marriages are such because of work (and I don’t merely define successful as staying together). The couple that purposely works at loving each other is usually the one that stays loving each other. Working at overcoming our relational defaults is one item that a couple needs to work on so that they will continue loving each other as well as they possibly can.
If we were meeting together I would assign you both some “homework” for us to talk about together the next week. We’re not meeting together so we can’t really talk about this together but I think I’ll still assign the homework. The first week’s normal homework would be to go out to eat somewhere and write out answers to the following questions and discuss it:
1. What is it about your parents’ relationships with their spouse that you dislike the most and wish to avoid in your marriage?
2. What is it about your in-laws’ relationships with their spouses that you most dislike and wish to avoid in your marriage?
3. How can you help each other avoid these behaviors?I try to encourage each couple I talk with to give each other permission to lovingly (and that is most important) call each other on behavior when they begin to act out on the behaviors they have discussed. How to do that comes under “fighting fair” and typically we would talk about that the next week. In our present case I will simply email you next week.
Until next week.
first & most important pam is back from the operation smile project she was on in honduras.
secondly, i ran across this today and it made me laugh. it’s an article about ashlee simpson postpoing her new album for fear of going up against american idol singer blake lewis. the part that makes me laugh is a quote from one of ms. simpson’s friends.
ashlee hates american idol, and she thinks the show makes stars out of nobodies, taking credibility away from real musicians
she thinks the show makes starts out of nobodies? apparently she doesn’t remember getting her start because of big sis’ and a reality t.v. show or maybe she’s forgotten about an internet petition to ban her from singing that made the circuit (or maybe she’s forgotten her dad pimping her and her sister out).
it’s sad when you see someone say or do something that is the exact opposite of reality. it’s even sadder when it is a body that is supposed to represent CHRIST. i know we all make mistakes. that’s just a part of the game. the problem to me is not so much when we followers of CHRIST make mistakes but rather when we are not humble enough to admit them or even the possibility of them. i’m not even really talking about sin issues here. rather it’s the egotism that i sometimes see within churches. i believe that JESUS is the way, the truth, and the life but i don’t believe that i understand or know HIM completely. while standing firm in my convictions i want to do so with a sense of humility and not arrogance because the day may come when i find out exactly how far away from GOD’s truth i am. i don’t think humility concerning our beliefs is in opposition to standing firm on our convictions. i believe JESUS (WHO i believe really did know TRUTH perfectly) stood on HIS convictions in humility. HE was able to converse and relate to people who completely disagreed with HIM while treating them with extreme respect. HE used the TRUTH as a means to bring people to the FATHER instead of as a means to pound people into the ground. the only people HE kind of even “pounded” on were the religious ones – who thought they already had the truth all sown up.
i hope we followers of CHRIST will “get it” more often than not.
if i was still in baton rouge and in youth ministry this would have been the first day of the annual fall retreat, the JESUS project, that we did at parkview. the JESUS project was always one of my favorite weekends of the year. for seven straight years it was an incredible weekend of pushing boundaries and having a great deal of fun doing it. as a matter of fact, if i was still there and doing the fall retreat we would be in the midst of two things: 1) a voluntary prayer labyrinth, and 2) a huge voluntary game of capture the flag at this very moment and about half of the adult leaders would probably be in the woods with water balloon slingshots launching water balloons at every kid that ran within their targeting range. ah the memories.
then of course, monday morning i would be sick. that pretty much happened every year too.
today i went to the monthly bay lakes associational pastor’s gathering. the meeting is in appleton, wisconsin which is about an hour and a half away from the stevens point area. usually i carpool with another pastor or two who live on the way there. because of these guys plans for the day carpooling wasn’t an option and so i was on the road solo. the good side of this was that i was able to listen to a couple of mp3 lecture recordings that were great.
here they are:
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the first was a lecture of n.t. wright & anne rice – it’s here and it’s amazing. the second lecture was one by ron sider talking about the historic chance that stood before the church to be a real difference within poverty in america. it’s here and it’s incredible.
the only problem with listening to sider is that what he says has a tendency to refocus your priorities – which isn’t really a problem unless you’ve set you heart on something that obviously a large luxury. listening to ron i suddenly realize where the money really should go. thanks ron.