This reminds me of growing up in South Carolina and tying thread around the legs of Japanese Beatles in the Summer and walking them around like pets –
This has “Wesleyan Youth Convention” advertising written ALL over it!
Last weekend was extremely busy. My Uncle David and Aunt Bea came to town on Friday night and on Saturday, Uncle David and a team from McLean Bible Church helped lead a few songs at the Tomajko Memorial Service. Uncle David and the team also stuck around Sunday morning to lead worship in both of our worship services, too! Sunday evening we had our monthly SNAC and I enjoyed playing basketball with some of our students until late. Monday was my day off and I knew I was beginning to get a cold, so I literally laid around all day. On Tuesday I had a full day in the office and then an evening meeting training some volunteers in the world of hospital visitation. By the end of that meeting, I was ready to collapse. I came home and set up my “sick bed” in the living room.
I stayed home all day Wednesday with a 102+ fever and saw the doctor on Thursday morning. My doctor gave me a ZPack antibiotic and swabbed my nose to see if I have the Flu. I’ll find out hopefully tomorrow. She also said I have an upper respiratory infection and bronchitis. Two of my favorites.
Today I have been fever-free, but I feel as though I’m breathing from the bottom of a swimming pool. I also sound as though I have a smoking habit I’ve been trying to hide. I don’t.
Jess has been incredible during this whole thing. Bless her heart, she has put up with my lack of ability to do much of anything and still keeps both kids fed and clean! I am so thankful that Jess doesn’t get sick like this – I doubt if I could keep up with things like she does!!
Our church has a Clover Site website. (cloversites.com) It’s beautiful, it’s functional, but it doesn’t do EVERYTHING I want it to… I’ve e-mailed them suggestions but it seems like they’re pretty set on keeping things the way they are when it comes to changing some of “the way things work”. I’m okay with that, just makes me search harder for solutions to issues I come up against.
Speaking of issues. I recently switched from being a strict MS Outlook-guy to a strictly Google-guy. I ONLY use Google for my e-mail and ONLY use Google for my calendars. Kind of nice to have made that switch just weeks before owning a phone that works very nicely with Google’s e-mail/contacts/calendars, by the way.
Anyhow, Cloversites doesn’t play nice (or at all) with Google’s Calendars App. They have their OWN calendar built-in that apparently they offer to those who may not even know what Google is, I guess. I asked Clover about integrating the two and they said, “Sure! Just point a link to your Google Calendar.” Not the response I was hoping for, but a solution we are using nonetheless.
The problem, however, was that I pointed our “link” to a public-version of our church calendar that showed strictly church-events, but I also have another calendar for our youth-events, and imagine having other calendars in the future that show other ministry-events that don’t necessarily need to be listed on just the main church-calendar. So, our link ONLY showed our church-events, NONE of our youth events. This bummed me out, but I didn’t have a solution.
Until today.
Today I stumbled upon someone else with the same problem and they had a solution!! Hurray. Here’s the site that I digested and solved our church calendar issue – http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/displaying-events-from-multiple-google-calendars-in-a-single-embedded-calendar-view/. Now our calendar page on armbrustwesleyan.com is a link to a calendar that lists BOTH our whole-church calendar AND our youth-events calendar! (now if I could just make them show up as different colors…)
I’m a “churched kid”. Raised in the church. Been going to church for as long as I’ve been alive. That said, I have grown tired of watching much of what is labeled as “Christian media” stay in the Stone Age as the modern world embraces media and technology and uses it to its fullest. Just had a conversation again today about “flannel graph” and how many in the Church are still convinced of it as a valid medium.
Tonight I took my small group of guys (7 of us total) to a presentation of Heaven’s Gates & Hell’s Flames at the local Assembly of God church. I had seen this presentation in my teen-years and even had the opportunity to be a part of the production while ministering in Indiana. It has been at least 4-years since I’d seen the production.
I went in tonight very curious – I wondered what advances would’ve been made in the technological-side of things. I wondered if the scenes portrayed the few times I’ve seen it would continue to be acted out in tonight’s performance.
#1. Nothing has changed technologically. They still show the same video clip segments that they showed the last time I saw the presentation.
#2. If I’m not mistaken, EVERYTHING tonight was exactly the same as we presented it four years ago.
I tend to watch these sorts of presentations with a critical-eye – watching and listening EVERYTHING to form my opinion about its usefulness and relevance in today’s culture.
Tonight I enjoyed the performance and reminisced a bit about being a part of the thing back in Indiana. What blew me away, however, was watching the response of people in the audience when the opportunity to make a first or re-commitment to Jesus Christ. In our service tonight, at least 50-people responded and came forward to make a public commitment to serve the Lord. Each of them was then ushered out of the room for a personal time of prayer and for the staff to get their information.
I was reminded of a few things tonight:
#1 – Not everyone else has been “spoiled” by stage-performances like Cirque Du Soleil, Blue Man Group, etc. My experiences in being blown away by technology, acting, etc., on stage is NOT what everyone else has experienced. Someone else there tonight was probably impressed that there was a smoke machine, while I reminisced about the days of having one in my youth room!
#2 – The Holy Spirit still works amongst D-list actors. No offense to the church family that presented HGHF tonight, but I’m pleased to know that God chooses to use people like ME to get His message across.
#3 – Some things DO still work. HGHF hasn’t been “updated” in 4-years (at least!) and yet it’s still being performed in churches across the world every week. The clips are old, the audio isn’t professional, the stage-design isn’t amazing… and yet, it still works. HGHF doesn’t use the latest technology to run the show, they don’t even have two projectors with the same lumen bulbs (at least it looked that way tonight), and yet people were still impacted by the ministry and responded to the Gospel.
I’m glad I went tonight. I’m really glad I took students with me. 4 of the 6 of my guys made recommitments tonight at the close of the service.
Praise the Lord!
