Archive Page 2
Five Years
Five years ago this past Saturday, my wife and I got married. Half a decade. Utter craziness.
In that time, Janna and I have been on an amazing adventure. Ten moves. Long seasons away from home being trained for ministry. Everybody thinking we are crazy for leaving jobs and raising support to minister to college kids. Learning to live life dirt poor. Witnessing the miraculous provision of God. Seeing lives forever changed by the Gospel. And, of course, our two gorgeous daughters in the past two years.
Here is a pic from our 1st anniversary. (Our cake actually made it a year in the freezer):
And here is one from our date on Saturday night:
As you can see… Not much has changed except for the size of my head.
Life hasn’t exactly been a walk in the park the past five years, but through it all I’ve had an awesome wife to go experience it all with. I count myself a blessed man in large part because of the woman God brought me. These past five years have been the best of my life and I’m looking forward to the next 60.
Thanks Love.
Filed under: home | 6 Comments
Tags: anniversary, janna fisher
Welp… its not whelp
Got a great email from a family friend who was pretty much like another dad growing up. In it he enlightened me to the fact I’ve been erroneously spelling one of my favorite words. A word that I fell in love with many years ago while watching Jim Carrey in the instant classic and ever so high class drama Dumb and Dumber. Here is the breakdown from his email:
| 1. | the young of the dog, or of the wolf, bear, lion, tiger, seal, etc. |
| 2. | a youth, esp. an impudent or despised one. |
Filed under: cool stuff, home | 2 Comments
Tags: Dumb and Dumber, jim carrey, welp, whelp
The Weightdown Throwdown
Thats right people. The biggest competition of ‘09 is already going on. My friends, Clayton Bell and Chris Tavalare started it all with trash talk on Twitter and it ballooned into a full fledged organized competition with a $20 buy in.
The competition is simple. You have eight weeks. Whoever can lose the highest percentage of body weight gets paid. The top three finishers receive cash.
22 people have joined in the fun and after the 1st week yours truly is in 4th place. I’ll give weekly updates as they are available.
Filed under: announcements, cool stuff | 1 Comment
Serving
I was at a sound team meeting at church today. We have a great team of people who volunteer their time and talent to help create engaging worship environments where life change can take place. In my opinion, these are the most unnoticed heroes in our church. They get there early and leave late and no one knows their names or faces until something goes wrong (which thankfully rarely happens) and people in the audience crane their head around to look who’s back there.
What impresses me most about these men and women is their heart of service. It seems at times as if churches who are made up of men and women who serve are hard to come by. We’ve fought those battles in our own church.
I think the level of service in a church primarily points to the leadership within a church. If you lead and are unhappy with the level of serving within your organization, I have a few questions for you:
- Do you preach Christ in everything, including his penchant for serving?
- Do you give others opportunity and empower them to serve?
- Do you cast vision that people want to be a part of?
- Do you clearly communicate the vital role that each person plays?
- Do you serve in your church above and beyond what you are payed to?
It is my experience that people easily get on board with a clearly communicated God-breathed vision, especially when it comes from someone who practices what they preach.
Enough Saturday night rambling.
Filed under: church, leadership | 1 Comment
Tags: church, serving
Back in Black
I’ve made more blogging comebacks than Michael Jordan. But I suppose mine were never retirement related. I just had to take care of business in the offseason and recover (my hard drive) from in game injuries (computer). In other words, my computer was destroyed and now I am back in action.
If your wondering, I’m rocking the same black macbook body style with a few upgrades. Namely a 2.4 ghz processor, 4 gigs of RAM (previous had 1), and 250 gig hard drive (previous had 120). Oh yeah, and i upgraded from Tiger to Leopard. Its good to be back.
p.s. if you are all screaming “noooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!,” at your screen like I did at the TV when Jordan made his last “comeback,” let me know and I will officially retire from blogging.
Filed under: announcements | 3 Comments
Sanctification… Awesome.
Sanctification is a fun (read: extremely difficult and hardly bearable) process. When we come under the Lordship of Christ, Jesus begins to put his finger on issues in our lives. Us dealing with those issues- repenting of that sin and walking in victory over it, is part of that process of sanctification.
I lived most of my life with an anger problem. I’m not talking about a holy and righteous anger. I’m talking about that ugly thing that rears its head with people I love. Since you aren’t Dr. Phil I won’t tell you where it came from (though I do know) but I will tell you it always revolves around one category- people doing really, really boneheaded things that affect me personally. You could ask my wife. I would be a flat out jerk. It would even tear at relationships with the people I love most.
This week I had a crappy but awesome experience. A young lady, whom my wife and I love, spilled her full glass of sweet tea on my macbook. My less than 2 year old macbook. The one I scrimped and saved for like a year to buy. The one that I use for all of my work and home projects. The cool black one my wife makes fun of since the power cord is white. The one that cost just under $2000. Get the picture?
That is the crappy part.
Here is the awesome part:
I didn’t get mad.I really didn’t. A little stressed. A little apprehensive. Fought doubt and worry about how it could be fixed or if I could afford another one. But not once did I get angry at the person who did it. And I think Jesus deserves a little more glory because of it. It is crazy that He would love me enough to extend his grace to me and I cannot but exend the same to others. So here I am glorifying God that He would help me with such an issue in my life.
note: still not sure how the whole situation is going to work out. Could use your prayers on the tech front. I’m charismatic enough to believe God can raise my computer from the dead or provide another one without wrecking my bank account.
Filed under: home, life, theology | 4 Comments
Tags: anger, Dr. Phil, macbook, sanctification, sweet tea
The Return
Whelp, I’m back. No flashy fanfare. Blogging hiatus over. That is all. Stay tuned…
Filed under: announcements | 4 Comments
