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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.

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now that’s ministry

article – mind, body, & spirit by ben edson

i love it when CHRISTians are truly creative in reaching out to the world – i only wish that i was more creative in doing it. the above article describes a church, sanctus1, in england that decided to be a part of the manchester mind, body, and soul conference, a new age spirituality conference. sanctus1 joined in the conference and offered a wall of prayer, plasma ball (which i’m not sure i understand), bread and wine, and foot messages. unlike all the other new age groups who were there sanctus1 did all of this for free. everyone else had consumeristic minds sets behind their spirituality. the free foot messages really amaze me because they strike me as modern day foot washing. true servant-hood in a environment that is hostile to CHRIST.

what an amazing idea. sanctus1 conveyed real CHRISTianity in an environment that many followers of CHRIST would completely avoid. what a great idea.

i pray that all of us followers of CHRIST could be inspired by our creative GOD to reach out in amazing acts of love and service.

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pam – the weird person

my wife is weird! plain and simply she is strange. that’s okay with me because i like strange people. yet, let me show you why pam is weird. this week she found out about a strange website called catster. this website is where people post profiles of their cats for other cat loving people to be able to read. people who love cats are a strange lot and thus a website made of cat lovers will be natural odd. of course, pam loved it and wanted to join in the fun. she made a page for both of her cats – keebler & oreo.

on the good side pam’s not quite to the crazy, old cat lady stage yet.

i am pasting links to these two pages below so that you can enjoy the oddness that is my wife.

here’s keebler’s page.

here’s oreo’s page.

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don’t eat on the tray

i’ve had several requests for the rules video from the JESUS project to be placed on the web page and since i always like to accommodate requests if it is possible i have decided to place the video here. you’ll need real player to view it. we used this video as a funny way to convey a few simple rules for the retreat. it was a fun way of doing something that we had to do.

on a side note – my dad has recently started telling me that i cheat at blogging because i will post small entries. i didn’t really know that there were rules about the length of blog entries but even if there are i don’t really think my entries are that small. yes, sometimes i post small entries, but usually my ramblings go on for a while. this may be the first time in my life that i have ever been accused of being to brief in my comments.

on a second side note – spiderman 2 is the best superhero movie that has been made thus far. i bought it yesterday and just finished watching it with my oldest son. it’s fast enough and action packeted enough for him to like it yet it still deals with the inner struggles of doing what is right. it’s an action flick that actually has depth.

on a third side note – i wish all of the blogs i read and look at would install an rss feed. i’ve recently gone from not knowing how to use the stupid things to being in love with them. i presently use bloglines to check almost all the blogs that i really care about. yet there are still a few blogs that i have to check out directly each day because of the fact that the owner doesn’t have an rss feed of the site. life would be so much easier if they did.

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100,000 miles


on november 24th i posted about fred crossing over past the 100,000 mile mark. when the moment happened i had a VERY cheap digital camera on me that i used to record the moment. the picture above is the best of what i took.

i think i am about to have to do some work on fred. it sounds to me like the water pump is going out – it’s making a high pitched whine. i’m going to take him in to barry’s automotive tomorrow and get him looked at.

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the perfect youth ministry day

yesterday was the perfect youth ministry day. by this i don’t mean that everything about it was good. in fact, allot of what happened during the day wasn’t good at all. it was the perect youth ministy day because the events that happened during it display why youth ministry is the greatest of all ministries. here’s what happened.

8:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.

i spoke at one of our school’s chapels – the elementary chapel. during this time i got the chance to try and help kids understand that even though JESUS may ask us to do things that sound odd to us, if we act in faith amazing things happen – i spoke about JESUS healing the man blind from birth by spitting on the groun and placing mud in his eyes. doing chapel for k through 5th grade is always allot of fun and this was no exception.

9:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

i officiated at the funeral of a former youth whose husband and his family are also very important to me. the husband and wife were in a major car accident saturday morning. the wife was killed, the husband badly injured, and their child and a friend left the car uninjured. in the past i had been able to baptize her, then i was able to officiate their wedding, and finally i was the minister who dedicated their son. this family means allot to me and thus the funeral was not something that was easy for me. yet, i was also honored that the husband would ask me to do the funeral. i don’t like seeing people i love in pain, but i am very thankful to get to be one of the people who GOD uses to bring them comfort. i was able to see their pain first hand at the hospital waiting for the husband’s surgery to be finished and then later when i went with him to pick up the personal effects that were still in the badly damaged vehicle. i was so thankful that i got to be one of the people who comforted this family that i love.

2:00 p.m. till 5:45 p.m.

during this time i was focused on setting up and preparing for the view, our youth worship service. this included everything from setting up chairs, to decorating the student center for CHRISTmas, to practicing with the band, those who shall remain nameless, for the worship in music during the service. all of this involved working with youth to accomplish a common goal – of worship during the night.

6:00 p.m. till 7:15 p.m.

this is when the view went on. two things happened during this 1) we had a great worship service that even though i wasn’t speaking during this night, alan my assistant was, i did get to lead kids in helping to lead the service, and 2) i got to clean up puke. that’s right we had a kid “spew chunks” in the outside hall. we played a game at the beginning of worship tonight (something we do very rarely but this time it fit in with the message we were trying to convey and therefore we did it). we had a teen drink 52 ounces of egg nog. he tried to make it to the toilet after he had won the game but he didn’t quite make it. i decided to clean it up instead of asking one of the volunteer adults to do it.

7:30 p.m. till 8:30 p.m.

i hung out with teens just talking about things

8:45 p.m.

i made it home – wednesdays are usually a late night but i make up for this by staying home in the afternoon.

here’s why it was the perfect youth ministry day. there is no other ministry in which you could go from the very serious nature of a painful funeral to cleaning up puke. in fact, there is only one ministry in which it would be normal to consider going from such serious matters to such disgusting janitorial work. the only ministry in which this would be normal is youth ministry. youth ministry is the only ministry that would consider such extremes normal. this is why youth ministry is the greatest ministry in the world.