Communion

I really need to know what is the meaning of the word "Communion." Is it not the same as the word koinonia in Greek? Because if it is, then many of us in church have been lead astray by traditional viewpoints and we have a bit of a problem.

The Church

My friend and fellow youth minister, Chris Rampey, has this to say to us today.

2 Corinthians 3:14
"But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away."

What if the Church in America, no matter which version you belong to, has a veil over it's eyes. Are we The Church that Christ leads? Do we glory in Christ and the way He served and honored God. Or do we glory in Man made traditions and the thoughts of the Men who began our version of Christianity.

The question is does the Church you belong to have a veil over its eyes? What is it? What can be done about it?"

Six Flags Fun!

Just got back from a great weekend in Dallas, TX!! 35 of us got to spend some great time together at Six Flags all day on Sat, then we crashed hard in the motel that night.

We got to worship with the Legacy Church of Christ where my buddy, Allan Stanglin, preaches. Great times there!!

We finished it off with a good time of eating, shopping and ice skating at the Galleria!

And best of all I got to see my sister, Misti, and her family!!

Word of the Day

I used to have at least one day per week where I would post a significant quote and throw in an occasional word for my readers to try to figure out. I am going to start doing that again right now. This time, every week will have a word of the day and a quote of the day.

Whoever can answer the fastest (whether by comment, email, text or call) is the winner of many brownie points that can be collected on a later date. Here is the word that you will need to figure out:

Adiaphoristic

Abundant Life!

I am stealing Terry Rush's blog from this morning to share it with you. I say a hearty Amen! to it. He has such joy, energy and passion for life in God's world and his words today just get me revved up for life in its abundance!! How can we feel any other way after reading this?!?

"Who wouldn't like to be you? Every blind person would give an arm for your ability to read this blog. Others would love to have just one good friend and you have how many.....? While you may have a job you hate, thousands would love to have a job. Some worry over hair turning gray while so many lost theirs to chemo.

Irritations are overrated. Let them go. They aren't worth our earth-time; let alone our kingdom time. So the plumbing is clogged. Get it fixed. Think of how many went to their graves early who would have loved to live a bit longer to gladly fix a clogged shower.

Wake up to your own wonder! Wake up. You who constantly spoil your day by griping about it? Stop it! It's an insult to the Creator who gave us these days. So you are ten pounds overweight. Do something about it....and in the meantime be thankful you aren't 210 pounds overweight. Basically, quit harping at your body that has been very good to you.

Every morning we get up and face obstacle courses; not as spectators, but as participants. Hurdles are many and several are high. And by day's end we will have skinned our knees, run out of breath, and at times finished last. Glory. We were in the race!

Wake up to the spectacular day of now. It is not average....and you are not average. You are blessed"

Yesterday Was...

• Amazing because we had Terry Rush here as our 5th Sunday guest speaker. What a great man of God he is!!

• Powerful because God worked in the lives of Evelyn Hunt and Shirley Wallace through his almighty word.

• Moving because worship with 450+ in the same room has that sort of impact. Especially when singing the newer praise songs (wondering what kind of response you'll get) and hearing everyone sing out!!

• Sweet because the fellowship with brothers and sisters in Christ always is.
  

I Will Miss Mama

There was a memorial service held for Sandy "Mama" Milligan this morning in the Village. I was able to attend. Sandy was a member at the VCOC where I began my career in full-time ministry. She was a small woman who packed a lot of strength and conviction in that little frame. I was blessed to know her and will miss her immensely. Please keep her husband, Johnny, and family in your thoughts and prayers.

True Success

Ralph Waldo Emerson defines success this way:

"To laugh often and much, to win respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

Does that sum it up for you or do you have something you would like to add?

For First Time Students and Their Parents

"Its back to school time in central Arkansas. Wednesday morning thousands of students will be heading back to class. And for a new crop of kids it's their very first day and it can be a bit scary.

When you started school, maybe there were a words of wisdom you wish you heard from others whose footsteps you'd follow in. FOX16 caught up with some grade school students who gave us the top 10 things a kindergartner should know for the first day of school.

Number ten:
"Keep your grades up and study a lot," says Abby.

Number nine:
"Smile it's gonna be a good day," says Caitlyn.

Number eight:
"Recess is fun because I love the monkey bars," says Emi.

Number seven"
"Be brave and make new friends," says Peyton.

Number six:
"Be yourself and sit next to a smart kid," says Kelsi.

Number five:
"What should a kindergartner not do on their first day of school? Shove crayons up their nose," says Katelyn.

Number four:
"Find out what your teacher likes to eat and bring them a lot of that," says Micha.

Number three:
"Wipe down the wipeboards and be helpful," says Katelyn.

Number two:
"Listen to your teacher so you don't get in trouble," says Tommy.

And the number one thing a kindergartner should know for their first day of school:
"Don't sniff the glue, and don't eat it either," says Mackenzie and Ashton.

Don't be nervous, it's everyone's first day, so do your best to make some friends, and when the time comes, study."

-Jeremy Baker from Fox 16 News

School Daze

Since school has started back this wonderful day of August 19, 2009, I decided that I would resume my blog! Gone are the wild and woolly days of summer. And that is refreshing. Most refreshing! I have time on the days that I will not be substitute teaching at Bryant, Benton, CAC or any other school that will take me. I have time to breathe and finish up preparations for fall events. I will be back later today with a thought or two.

Camp Barton Pics

Linda's gonna kill me for this. Linda P aka 'The Popette!' Anyone here at Northside will get what I mean!

Shirley, Barbara and Cindy having a laugh!

Savannah and Nikki doing the "Chickee Chickee Dance"!

Bella and Sam hanging out.

My sweet little Boodle and me!!

For Youth Ministers and Workers

This summer has been one wild and crazy ride! Last summer was a lot of work but this one has been totally insane!!! I have found myself coming up for air any chance I get. I came across this article by Mike Kupferer earlier today and totally shouted Amen! Ministers and Ministry

"Summer is a busy time for youth workers. But even during this season of the year, you don't have to become overwhelmed and exhausted. You can survive summer and feel rested as the school year starts again

Don't neglect your prayer time and Bible study during the summer. Plan for it and put it on your calendar.

I want to suggest five things you can do this summer to help find that rest you deserve and need.

1. Continue to take your off day.
You are taking an off day, right? I don't mean just having a day you call your "off day" but continue to come into the office, make phone calls, and check email. I mean a real off day, one where you spend time away from youth ministry responsibilities. If you don't have one of those days, stop right now and figure out how to start. (Do not worry, we'll still be here—floating around the Internet when you get back.)

The summer isn't the time to start working 7 days a week. (Unless you're at camp or a trip, which just means you need to take an extra day off afterward.) Taking a day off every week in the summer helps keep you from wearing yourself out physically and emotionally. When you take an off day, you will notice an improvement in your ability to minister on the days you're working.

2. Take vacation before/after the busiest time of the summer.
With so few weeks to get everything done during the summer, it's tempting to neglect taking vacation. Why would any youth worker take an entire week away from the students when this is prime time to minister? Because that youth worker knows the impact of the rest of the summer depends on it. Obviously I'm not suggesting you randomly (foolishly) pick any week during the summer to take vacation. There are certain weeks that will be better than others. You can't take vacation during the week you're helping with VBS or camp. And it might not be wise to take vacation the week before a mission trip or week-long conference.

Try taking vacation a few weeks before a big trip, that way you still have time to take care of any final details. Or if the first part of the summer is event heavy, wait to take your vacation after its all done. This will give you a chance to relax without any need to think about an upcoming event. Whether you take your vacation before or after a busy season doesn't matter, what does matter is that you take vacation.

3. Take a day trip with the family.
Take your family out of town and just enjoy some time together. You don't have to drive far or spend a lot of money in order for it to be effective. The goal of getting away from your town is to not see people you know. You want to have the entire day away from ministry responsibilities, which might mean you leave your cell phone on vibrate or just don't answer it every time it rings. Use this time to make memories with your family, they matter more than the youth ministry summer calendar.

4. Do something without students.
I know the impact involving students in your life can have. I believe strongly in allowing students to work alongside you on projects around your house or at church. But there are times when you just need to have some time away from students. Give yourself time to work on a project without inviting one of the freshmen over to help you. Working with students is what you do for a living and when you invite students to help with projects around the house, you are working. Instead, spend this time talking to God and listening to Him speak into your life.

5. Eat/Sleep/Pray.
Every day in the summer will come and go quickly. You might neglect many little items on your to-do list, but these three items cannot be neglected. Eat three meals every day and you will have more energy to minister. Sleep is important, but easily neglected when you have late nights and early mornings. Sleep later into the morning when you are up late with a student. And on that rare occasion you don't have anything going on in the evening, go to bed early and allow your body to rest.

Finally, and most importantly, spend time alone with God. Don't neglect your prayer time and Bible study during the summer. Plan for it and put it on your calendar. Nothing else you will do this summer will refresh you as much as spending time with your Heavenly Father. He wants to continue to mold and shape you, just as much as you want to minister to the students.

If your summer calendar is too full to include time to rest, you need to find a way to adjust it. The people around you do not need a youth worker who is tired. They need you to be well-rested and modeling healthy behavior.

How are you finding rest this summer?"

Quote of the Day

"The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is... more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do... The remarkable thing is that we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10 percent what happens to me and 90 percent how I react to it." - Charles Swindoll

Uplift Pics

Devon on stage with Taylor Mason!

Maddie, Heather and Allison.

Conner, Josh, Sara, Haley and Devon mugging it up for the camera.

Audra and me.

Finally Back

It has been a long time since I have blogged. I have done a poor job of keeping up with it and I am going to be better from now on.

Many things have happened while I have been away and I am going to share them with you over the course of the next few days.

First off, we had a great senior graduation banquet and completed the Youth Loft on the same day in May. Quite an undertaking, but it is now finished.

Our 1st Principles Day Camp started on June 8. We had 30 students , 4-8 grade, ready to learn more about the foundational elements of our faith. We got down to the basics about sin, repentance, baptism and Christian living. Great things came of it and we will get to that part later.

We finished with the Day Camp on the 10th and then, on the 13th, a group from the 7-12 graders left for Uplift at Harding University. What a great time of learning from the Sermon on the Mount that it's not what we do but who we are.

Got back on the 18th and left for Camp Barton on the 21st. We had 8 baptisms, 6 of which were products of the 1st Principles Day Camp! We also have 2 on the horizon from what was done at Camp!!

We returned from Camp on the 27th of June and then I headed back out at 3:00 A.M! on the 2nd of July for some mission work in the Dominican Republic. We returned on Thursday the 9th a completely exhausted and changed group of believers.

I am in the process of resting and recuperating from everything. Glad to be back with my family!! I will post pictures later.

Music Is Vitally Important

This is the address to the incoming freshmen at Boston Conservatory. It was given by Karl Paulnack, the director of the Conservatory's music division.

One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school she said, “you’re WASTING your SAT scores.” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works. One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940.

Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp. He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture why would anyone bother with music? And yet from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning. ”

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless.

Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day. At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang We Shall Overcome. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does. I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts.

Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects. I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier even in his 70¹s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute chords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle.”

How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me? Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft. You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevys. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor or physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should it together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.

Prayers and Marriage

Please pray for the family of Casey Rine, Youth Minister at Levy Church of Christ. His 26 year old sister was killed last week and they have charged her husband with the murder. I can't imagine what the family is going through at this time. They need as many prayer warriors as possible.

-------

"Baseball Hall of Famer Joe Sewell used only 1 bat in his 14-year career and struck out only 114 times in 7,132 attempts. He never was convinced that a newer, more sophisticated bat would improve his play. When he was in a slump, rather than blaming his equipment, he took extra batting practice and focused on his swinging mechanics.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if our nation had that same philosophy towards marriage? When things go sour, rather than looking to get a new partner, we instead would focus on what we can control... how we can improve our relational mechanics. How can we be more patient? More thoughtful? More loving? All too quickly, we try to get new spouses when what we need are new attitudes." - All Pro Dad

Devotional Thought

A Central Arkansas Youth Minister friend wrote this in his daily bible study and it puts into words just what I have been chewing on this week.

"March Madness is a great time of year. It's so much fun to watch all the tournaments, and watch these teams succeed. However it's very sad to see a team just fall apart because of selfishness.

The same thing can happen within the Lord's church. We can become very selfish and disregard the team aspect of ministry. The early Christians worked hard together to spread God's love. Sometimes we get away from this and selfishness takes over our ministries. We can not allow this to happen! We must all realize we are all very valuable to God's kingdom. We must all recognize our place in His work."

- Casey Rine

Murphy Strikes Again!

The Northside Youth Group went to Winterfest in Gatlinburg, Tennessee this past weekend and I have so much to tell you that it will have to be a 2 parter!

I will begin with the Murphy bits. He likes me a whole bunch. Here is how he played a role in this most recent trip:

1. We're making great time to our destination of Gatlinburg when all of a sudden I smell burning rubber and see chunks of tire on the road in front of me (I was the last driver in a caravan of 3 vehicles). My cell rings and it is John Sloan (the driver of the big bus) asking if I will pull up and see if he has had a blowout. He had!! We are able to get it into a tire shop and replace 4 (you read right) 4!!! tires. One had shredded and three were almost there.

2. We are having an amazing time at the largest gathering of teens and the second day is getting even better for everyone except...Clint Smith, one of our chaperones. He starts feeling bad and losing everything he tries to get down-even water and Gatorade. When he starts getting the worst headache ever coupled with dizziness and blurred vision, we decide to take him to the emergency room. He stays there for 3 hours getting pumped full of liquids.

3. Now I have just found out that one of the riders on my van had the beginnings of the full blown flu when she was with us on the way home and that it ain't pretty.

Murphy has struck again, my friends.

Prayer for the Day

"Lord, someday may my life look like this orchard for You.
May the fruit of my life be so heavy
that You'll need angels to hold up the branches
And whatever You need to do in my life to produce this
kind of harvest, Lord, please do it!"
- Bruce Wilkinson

Conversations With God

Just got a cautionary email from a friend about a book entitled "Conversations With God." According to the email, this book is offered to children in schools through a scholastic program. It fields questions from tweens and teens about homosexuality, sex outside of marriage and other basics of morality. The author answers with the voice of God. And the answers are basically boiled down to allow the questioners the freedom to do whatever they want or whatever feels right to them.

I don't know if this email or even the book it writes of is real, but I do believe that there is a pervasive mentality in society, and, sadly, among other Christians, of relativism. "Basically do what you want to do and enjoy your life because each of us decides our own morality-It all comes out to the same thing in the end." This is what I hear around me every day and it is very disconcerting.

I have my thoughts on this but I would like to pose some questions for you, dear reader: When you come in contact with this philosophical mindset, what do you do? How do we, as followers of Christ, counteract this movement?

Friends

I am on a high because recently I have been able to spend some good quality time with my former partner in crime, Jim Gardner. He was in town for the funeral of his uncle, Gerald. We were pretty much able to spend a day and a quarter together before he flew back to Fresno, CA.

Just riding in the car with him here in central AR brought back a flood of memories from my early days in ministry. Great times!! Times with an old friend that I will never forget.

How many of you have old friends you haven't seen that you would like to spend some time with? I say just do it!!!

Praise 102

You will notice on the right side of this blog that there is a spot for Praise 102. My quarter devoted to praise and worship not too long ago was so well received that I have continued it on Wednesday evenings at 6:00. We are learning even more songs. I will keep them listed there as we go along.

By the way, are there any great songs that I have missed out on?

Remember To Memorize

Our memorization of bible verses, although not always publicized here, have been a continued thing. If you would like to work this out with us, go right ahead.

The verse this week is an easy one. If you can't get this one, you may have problems:

"For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen or heard." - Acts 4:20

It's hard to hold it all in, isn't it?!?

Gross and Disgusting

Talking with my pal, Gary Black, the other day, I started thinking (because of our topic of discussion) about what could be the most disgusting smell ever to enter our defenseless nostrils. I thought I would put my top 6 here and let you tell me if I am right or not.

6. Diapers (Boodle is sweet but can leave some potent stuff behind, if you know what I mean)

5. Raw Sewage (cmon it's raw sewage)

4.Rotten Food (like when you forget about something in the back of the fridge)

3. Chicken Towns (driving through towns with these babies can knock the strongest person over)

2. Burnt Hair (Not good at all)

1. Paper Mills (The winner by a nose)

What do you think?!?

Quote For Parents

"The word "stigma" comes from the Greek and it means "tattoo." In Greek and Roman times, when a runaway slave was caught, he was tattooed (branded) with a hot iron as a sign of disgrace. His master never let the slave forget his past actions.

Stigmatizing didn't end a couple thousand years ago. Many parents brand their children's souls forever with by their actions. Phrases like "you always" and "you'll never" need to disappear from your vocabulary starting now. Instead, brand your children with "I love you because ___" and "The three things you do better than anyone are: ___, ___ and ___." Make your lasting tattoo one of unconditional love." - APD

Birth In Christ

I just want to say a huge congratulations to Adrienne LaSage and her family for the decision she made this past Sunday morning to be clothed in Christ through baptism!! I hope that we will all be there as she walks this new path.

A Change Is Gonna Come

First of all, Happy New Year!!!

Second of all, I am back from a really long and much needed hiatus. I will be here in the blog kingdom for a while.

Third of all, my little girl, Jenniva, celebrated her 2 birthday this past Monday!! I can't believe she is 2 already. Time flies.

Last of all, I want to tell you about the amazing horizon I see before us at Northside. With the new year came some evaluation and newly implemented ideas and programs.

• This past Sunday morning, Adrienne LaSage became our newest member of God's family. No better way to start out the year!!
  

• This past Sunday evening, I had my first devotional with the 3-6 grades. 24 showed up to learn more about God and have fun in the process. And they are bringing there friends next time.
  

• Meat Eaters has moved to Tuesday nights. We had 18 teens show up tonight to give encouragement to Mike K who is at home resting in bed after full knee replacement on the 29th of December. We also traveled to the funeral home to comfort Doug, Marilyn, Adrienne, Janice and Billie Wilson on the passing of Doyle Wilson.
  

• Wednesday evenings at 6 we will be meeting in the outreach building to learn new songs. This can continue indefinitely.
  

• The Youth Loft is so close to finished I can taste it. I will give you some new pics soon. The Christmas CD Project has yielded more than we dreamed. Donations have exceeded the $2,500 mark!!!

• We have split our Sunday mornings to 7-9/10-12 for the Winter quarter and will be splitting them Male/Female in the Spring to address different needs.

• The Youth Committee is transitioning out the former members and ushering in some new blood.

• All the while, we are living LIFE IN THE VINE FOR 2009! That is our theme this year and we are going to cultivate the Fruit of the Spirit.

I am so excited about 2009!!