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vacation

as i told you yesterday i have taken some vacation time in order to finish some work around the house – specifically finishing our kitchen. thus far i have

  • painted three ceiling (more touch up than full coverage)
  • taken the kitchen cabinets apart
  • sanded the kitchen cabinets
  • primed the kitchen cabinets
  • put the first coat of paint on the kitchen cabinets (but not the doors yet)
  • cut out spots in two doors for punched tin to go into

by the time all of this ends i am going to need a vacation from my vacation.

i have discovered one thing already while doing all of this work. what i have discovered is that the part of the cabinet that will be most difficult to paint will also be the part that is most easily seen if you miss it. i have never actually noticed the baseboard of my cabinets. they have never semedn that important to me before. when i was priming the cabinets today i decided that since it is so difficult to get to the baseboards of the cabinet (they drop back 2 1/2 inches behind the actual cabinets) i would just give them just a basic no frills priming job. after i finished priming the cabinets i stopped to eat some lunch. of course, it was right in the middle of my meal while i was walking into the kitchen to get something to drink that i noticed these blaring missed spots shouting out at me “hey look at us! you did a lousy job on us!” it was the baseboard glaring at me, making me feel guilty for a poor job. so, i had to go back and prime the baseboards again. nobody will ever notice these thigns but if i had left them alone everyone would have commented on the crudy job i did on the baseboards.

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sanding

i hate sanding. the main reason i hate it right now is because today i sanded one half of the cabinets in our kitchen to prepare them for being painted tomorrow. i have taken off tuesday through thursday of this week to do work around the house. i’ve been painting the ceilings and working on the kitchen to finish it. of course, in order to do the fun stuff like painting you have to first do the miserable stuff like sanding the things you are about to paint. the whole process would be so much more fun if i could just paint the whole thing and never do any prep work.

now i could pretend to have a spiritual reason or moral for this little rant against prep work. i could tell you that you usually need to put time into doing the hard stuff before the good things you want to happen will occur. or i could mentioned that sometimes we need a good scraping from GOD to get us really clean. or i could come up with some other statement to make the above rant seem like it had a real purpose but that would be untrue. the real reason i wrote the paragraph above is because I HATE SANDING!

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violent acts & our church

for some unknown reason my church has been linked to a fair number of violent acts over the past three years. we have several church members who have suffered from or been the victims of murder recently. over the past three years one of my teen’s father (who was separated from the family) killed her two half-sisters and is now on death row in another state, then one of our church members and the mom of one of my youth was killed by a local serial killer, and then tonight the body of a teen church member was found murdered after being missing for three months. the teen and his family are church members though he was never involved within the youth ministry. my pastor and i went out to the church members’ house tonight just to let them know that we care and will be there for them.

being at the home of parents who just found out that child was murdered is an experience that nobody really tells you about at seminary. i never had a professor at southwestern seminary tell me how to handle circumstances like this. not knowing what else to do my pastor and i just went to the house and stayed for a little while. we really didn’t have any great words to say but there aren’t really any words that would make this situation better. when we got there we found out that members form the church had already been making contact with the family and letting them know of our care and concern – it’s nice to see the church work the way it is supposed to.

i hate that our members have to suffer through this things. yet, i love that our church is responding as the church is supposed to.

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THIS IS NOT MY STORY – but i have to tell it anyway

alan, the assistant youth minister at parkview, had a wreck today. or maybe i should say that his truck had a wreck today. you see alan wasn’t in his truck at the time of the accident.

alan parked his car in front of the student center and then got out to take some stuff inside. after taking things into the building he had to take some other items into the church office. this was going to keep him busy for awhile.

apparently alan forgot to pull out his emergency brake.

after about 20 minutes of being parked in the same place alan’s truck seems to have decided to go for a little drive. of course, trucks don’t usually realize that they can’t drive themselves and thus when alan’s truck decided to go for a ride it didn’t do very well with steering. instead of a small drive with turns and excitement all his truck was actually able to do was go straight backwards with no control towards the road and ditch that were behind it.

i’m sure this scared alan’s truck to death. of course, it couldn’t have scared the truck near as bad as it did the poor young lady whose car was behind alan’s rampaging truck. you see there were cars waiting at the stop sign that was directly behind alan’s moving truck. one young lady was in line for this stop sign with a car ahead of her and a car behind her and she was right in the route that alan’s truck had decided to take. she honked, and honked, but it is a little known fact that trucks generally have really bad hearing. apparently alan’s truck was unable to hear her honking and thus did not stop until it backed right into her driver’s side door. thankfully her car stopped alan’s truck from running into the ditch.

nobody was hurt from this little adventure and very little damage was done to the vehicles. it’s just too bad that alan’s truck had to learn to stay in one place in this awful manner.

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you rang?

for the past year i have kept the exact same message on my cell phone voice messaging system. here’s what it says:

    hi, you’ve reached the voice mail of robert terrell, associate pastor of student ministries at parkview baptist church and the emergency minister on call for the week beginning sunday, december 28, 2003. if you have an emergency please leave your name and number and i will call back immediately. i am most likely just distracted at this moment and couldn’t pick up the phone. otherwise leave your name and number and i’ll return your call and i’ll return your call just as soon as possible. if it is an emergency please state that it is an emergency.

as you can see by the date that i say in the message it is way out of date. i was the emergency minister on call for the week that i recorded that message and after it was done i just decided to see how many people would say “hey, you need to update your message.” my goal has worked because i get that allot people telling me that i need to update my message. it’s sad but it makes me laugh every time. it’s a cheap laugh but still al laugh none the less. the absolute best part has been when i get the same person to tell me over and over again that my message needs to be changed. that’s the greatest.

the problem is that my message seems to have lost some of its punch. i guess people begin to realize you are not going to change your message after they listen to it for a year. the only people who ever say anything about changing my message now are those who call me for the first time. i guess it’s time for a change. so i’ll change the message when the 28th rolls around. that way it will have been on my phone for a year. for now, hopefully i get a few other people to say “you need to change your message.”

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rumination

in february, alan l, came on board with the youth ministry as the assistant youth minister. when he started one of the things i wanted to happen was for us to swap off speaking at the view every other month. before alan arrived i had been speaking consistently with a few other people every now and then. now i’m speaking one month and then listening to alan the next month.

at first, i didn’t really like this.

after years of preferring small groups (small groups have feedback and interaction while large groups don’t) i’ve finally gotten to the place in ministry where i enjoy speaking in front of larger groups. so, at first the thought of speaking for a month and then listening for a month wasn’t that thrilling. i felt like it threw my groove off.

that was before i went to the national youth workers’ convention and heard rob bell do his critical concerns course (8 hours of conference) on having “a revolutionary voice”. during the conference he talked about letting messages and ideas “ruminate” in your head for awhile. i’ve tried to do this before by having my messages planed out for a while. yet, i have never done this anywhere near as well as rob bell. he said he never speaks about anything unless it has been bouncing around in his head for 3 to 6 months. the advantage of this is that GOD starts to provide teachable moments and ideas during this period of “rumination”. these things then relate to your messages and add freshness and depth to them.

this “rumination” is what has changed my mind concerning speaking every other month. during my off month i have the time to simply listen to GOD concerning what HE wants me to speak about during the next month. i’ve planned out by prayer what i will be speaking on through november of 2005. everything i read, watch, listen to, and experience has the possibility of becoming something that GOD can deliver the message through. having the extra month gives me the time to figure out how to communicate what needs to be said. i throughly believe that my messages are getting much better simply because of the fact that i have the time to let them simmer a little while.

i am very thankful for this system now.

i kind of think that this might be a good system for churches. have two main speakers and have them swap off months or message series. in order to do this you would have to have two people who were very secure in their positions and humble. it would have to be two people who would not end up in a sense competing against each other. i know a few ministers and unfortunately i think it would be hard to find allot of people who would fit in this system..

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counselor preveldge?

it’s been a very weird day of ministry that i can’t type about right now. maybe one day i will be able to discuss it. who knows. what i do know is that i have finally learned that it is best to simply shut up when you don’t know what else to say. i couldn’t comprehend what in the world to say today and i merely kept my mouth shut. turns out that the person who was talking to me took my quietness for good counseling technique and continued to spill their guts to me. after it was all through i still didn’t know what to say and the person who had been talking to me told me that they really appreciated that i had given them my complete attention and had really listened.

of course, i didn’t really listen. i was too busy trying to figure out what in the world to say.

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here’s looking at you


it’s time for a dog update. above is a picture of the basset hound that we are considering adopting. her name is montana and she is 10 months old. she was rescued from a “puppy mill” and has been staying with a “foster” home for the past three months. our kids don’t know about her yet. i can’t wait to tell them but that won’t be for a while.

the above photo was taken by a very cheap, junky intel digital camera. i’ve been wanting to get a better camera for taking pictures within the youth ministry but my overwhelming cheapness (which i inherited from my dad) has kept me from spending the money necessary to get a decent digital camera. today i found and purchased from ebay a canon powershot sd100. it’s a 3.2 megapixel camera with good reviews. it should beat the baloney out of the intel camera (which is 1/3 of a megapixel). i love ebay!

the only thing i don’t like about ebay are the snipers. a sniper is someone who sits and watches your auction until the last second and then places their bid. i lost two cameras to snipers before finding this one. of course, the sd100 is a better camera than the other two that i had bid on so the snipers kind of did me a favor. even with the favor i still don’t like them. down with snipers!

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just an odd time

two things:

first, i cut my grass for the last time of the summer today – this should have been done three weeks ago but it’s rained every time that i started to do it. so i have cut my grass for the last time of the lawn growing season and this happened in DECEMBER! living in southern louisiana is a blast.

second, while waiting to cool down enough to shower off the lawn filth that is on my body from cutting the grass i read an article on how koreans’ faces have grown smaller because of eating hamburgers. here’s the article. it actually makes sense. koreans are eating softer foods that are primarily eaten with your front teeth rather than ground down by your molars. this has resulted in a weakening of the muscles of the jaw and over generations produces a smaller jaw bone.

it’s a great, big, stupid world.

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i hate shopping

i love CHRISTmas but i hate shopping.

for my birthday some friends gave me a giftcard to academy sports & outdoors. i’m very thankful for this because it said that my friends knew who i am – they wanted me to be able to buy some fishing gear. last night pam and i ate with these friends and they introduced us to the concept of deep frying chickens, much like you would deep fry a turkey. this was amazing. in fact, it was so good that pam agreed that i should probably buy a turkey frying kit so that we could do this same thing for CHRISTmas dinner with our families. i decided to use the acadmey giftcard for this & to buy some stuff for fly-fishing for bream.

there were lots of people on the road and lots of people in the store all in a mad rush to buy things. this is stupid. why the mad rush to spend money? i understand a mad rush to go spend time with people you love or to participate in a community building event but a mad rush to spend money is just plain stupid.

every time i turned a corner there was groups of people and products blocking the way. the lanes were filled huge piles of boxed up products that the store manager is hoping will be sold by the end of the month. where the isles weren’t blocked by items for sale they were full of people who were salivating over items that they “desperately needed.” it all made me won’t to scream.

i actually started the leave the store and just go back home more than once. yet, each time i realized that i needed to buy the turkey frying kit before next sunday when i plan on using it for a cheap way to feed allot of people – our 11th & 12th graders are going to have a potluck at pam and my house. so i went through the stress of picking up the items and then waiting in line. i hated it all.

by the end of it all i had a full set of equipment for frying turkey or chickens, boiling shrimp or crawfish and a bad attitude.