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I love reading the Tweets and Blogs of a few ‘famous’ people. One of those ‘famous’ people is Adam Young – the young man behind the group “Owl City” and that song-you-can’t-get-out-of-your-head “Fireflies“.

I had known for awhile that Adam is proud-and-loud about his faith in Jesus Christ – but only via third-parties. Some of his music and lyrics had shown up in some youth ministry resources with a blurb about his testimony for Christ.

Just this week, however, Adam made it extremely clear personally where his “hope is found” via a blog post over at his site – owlcityblog.com

From his blog post:
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As I’m so often reminded what a priceless gift my life is, I ache with everything in me to make it count, so that when I finally cross the finish line, I’ll hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

To me, there is no greater reward.

Of course, all of this weighs heavily on the spiritual scale, so allow me to be completely honest and say none of it is intended to be “crammed down the throat,” if you will. That is not my intention. This is what I wholeheartedly believe, and to that belief, I remain steadfast until He returns or calls me home.

One thing is certain:

When He comes for His own, He will have no trouble recognizing me… because my banner will be clear.

___

Powerful words from the twenty-four year old singer/songwriter.

Young also embeded a recently-recorded cover-track of “In Christ Alone”, written by Keith Getty and Stuart Townend. That is getting radio-play now here, locally.

You can download the track here: “In Christ Alone” by Owl City.

While I was in Indianapolis for FUEL 2010, one of my ministry-peers and friend – Heath Mullikin asked me for an interview about my first couple of months of ministry. He, too, had recently (within the last couple of months) transitioned from full-time youth ministry to leading his first church. The conversation was terrific and we captured it on ‘digital’ film.

Heath is also featuring this interview on his website: chaseyourlion.com

PART 1

PART 2:

Interesting…according to the screenshots of both of these video clips, I must use my hands when I communicate. Can anyone verify or deny my over-use of hand-signals while communicating?

I wrapped up the series “REAL CHURCH” this weekend with a sermon revolving around our church’s “Divine Focus” to Love God and Love People. I spent time focused on James 2:14-26 and the idea that it is NOT enough that we continue to worship the Lord inside the walls of our church, grow in faith, continue to disciple believers WITHOUT putting ACTION to our quest to LOVE PEOPLE.

I then tried to explain our version of the traditional “servant evangelism” that has continued to be a popular faith-action amongst evangelicals.

At the close of the service I passed out handfuls of “connect cards” to our families for them to have the opportunity to hand them out as they share the love of Christ in practical ways in our community. We are also working on some team-based opportunities in the near future for us to collectively LOVE PEOPLE in practical ways. I am more-than-excited about this emphasis!

Our connect cards:

FRONT:

BACK:

I finally finished uploading all of the session videos to YouTube. Here they are in order:






Also, a couple of our “humorous additions” to FUEL 2010:



FUEL is the yearly Wesleyan Youth Pastors training and gathering opportunity developed by the Spiritual Formation Department. It was my pleasure to have been a part of this event this year!

Nearly everyday something that my new HTC EVO (Sprint) phone can do makes me feel empowered and excited to have such a piece of technology in my pocket.

Last week I had a trip to Indianapolis that was going to interfere with a package being delivered to my church office. We don’t have anyone else in the church building during the day usually, so I was a bit concerned with making sure that Mr. FedEx would still deliver the package and that I could have someone come and pick it up instead of it being left outside to be trashed by the weather.

Enter, “Parcels“. After a quick search for Android apps that deal with package-tracking, I stumbled upon Parcels and with a simple touch-click was downloading and installing.

Parcels instantly allowed me to enter in my tracking information (that the shipper had previously provided me via e-mail) and “add” this package to my list of packages I wanted to track. The app provides support for tracking our major U.S. delivery services including FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL, and even allows us to skip the “who” and enter in information for anything coming from Amazon.com!

Once the information was entered, Parcels immediately began tracking my package and offered to keep me posted via alerts sent directly to my phone and even allowed me to choose how often it would attempt to update the status of my package!

Because of Parcels, I was able to make my trip to Indianapolis, keep instant-track of my package and note within 10-minutes of its delivery and call and ask someone to pick it up at the door for me!

Interested in downloading Parcels for your Android OS Phone? Click here!