Monthly Archives: December 2008

2008 was a great year for me.  There was just something throughout it that felt different.  Lots of cool stuff happened this year and so I decided to look back and share my “Best of 08″ list.

(listed in no particular order)

• LASIK surgery.  After using contacts and glasses for 12 years…my dream of getting LASIK came true this past May.  You can see pictures after the surgery HERE.
• New Car. One day before owning my Chevy Blazer exactly 6 years…I bought a brand new 08 Honda Civic.  Check out that story HERE.
• New Office.  After working nearly four years in a modular (AKA nice trailer) I finally got a real office in the main building at church! Amazing how much a change of environment can change things. You can check out my new diggs HERE.
• Eric.  After 9 months of filling the role as Interim Minister of Students…Sunset hired Eric Venable as the new Minister to Youth & Families (AKA my boss).  This has been answered prayer and allowed me to return to focus on my passion for middle school ministry. Excited to see where he takes us in 09!
• Becoming a mentor.  It was 08 that I began to “officially mentor” two guys.  While they are very different and it challenges the heck out of me…it also has added a wonderful new dynamic to my life. I encourage you to invest your life into anothers…you dont have to be a pastor!
• Mom quit smoking. So this one might seem out of place since it’s my blog and not her’s…but it was HUGE for her and something I’ve encouraged and prayed for her to do for years. Recently I had given up…thinking she would never kick the habit.  She had smoked for over 30 years. This December marks 8 months that she is smoke free. Go mom!
• The Shack.  Other than the Sacred Romance, no other book has impacted my life like this book has.  I recommend it for everyone…but specifically for people who have grown up in a church or have gone through a crisis in their lives. You can read about some of my posts on reading The Shack HERE and HERE.
• Trips to Monastery.  This year I found a sanctuary in the middle of my busy life…a place to connect with God in new ways.  I went twice to the Mt Angel Monastery and each time found it to be a very valuable experience. I will definitely be returning in 09. Check out my post on my first trip HERE.
• YOU. What were your BEST of 08′ moments that I was part of?

It has been fun to journey back through the past year…reading many posts in my blog from 2008. If you have a blog I encourage you to do it…if you don’t you can click around some of my old entries HERE.

Now its time for me to finalize my goals for 2009…I will be posting them soon.

Happy New Year! And may 2009 be one of the very best years of your life.

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when
With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly,
To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars.

We ask You to push back
The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future
In strength, courage, hope, and love.

attributed – Sir Francis Drake -1577

So there's so much I love about being home…lots of stuff.  Lately Ive been noticing the little things I love and wanted to share some with you.

• Mom doing my laundry again!
• Sleeping in my old bed.  So cozy and dark in my room!
• Eating at restaurants that I love that I dont have in Oregon…
• Dove soap…nuff said
• My grandmas cooking
• Sledding!
• Seeing "D" hats everywhere and other Michigan wear
• Being a silly uncle
• Catching up with old friends and students
• Pumping your own gas (yeah right…when its 0 degrees you want someone else to pump!)

One of the weirdest things about being home is sometimes I get the feeling that I never left…that Oregon is just some dream or something.  It is quite bizarre living somewhere for 4 years and when you come home it can feel like you never left.

In my post on Friday I asked this question that I stumbled on as I was studying for my last talk on relationships;

Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?

Thanks for everyone who responded. If you didn't and still want to respond please do at the original post. 

So what do I think? I definitely agreed with how most responded…I would say it is better to have love and lost.  Love is risky…and you definitely always have the potential to loose.  I would say this fear kept me stuck with cemet shoes for many years and still slows me down today.  I want to love someone but I find myself holding back unwilling to do the work to get to know someone. Love is scary. It's tough being single and 28. Even more tougher I think to work as a pastor in a church and be single and 28.  I am everyone's project…everyone has an opinion of what I should do and why I'm not married. This "pressure" bothers me more than actually being alone. I have become quite content and alright with being alone (probably too much). So either way it's a fight…I fight the tendency within to remain comfortably single and I fight the pressure outside that constantly offers a "quick solution" to my single "problem." 

The good news is I am willing to fight and have been breaking out of my cemet shoes for sometime now.  Last night I actually went to a Christmas Party knowing that there was a plan to set me up with some women I had never met before.  Did I talk to either of them? Nope. But I did make a couple of circles by them…just couldn't find a perfect moment to meet them and I didn't want to be introduced.   Progress.  Walking through the door last night was progress and something that just a year ago I probably wouldnt have done.  I wont give up.

So as I was preparing for my last talk on relationships I came across an intriguing question that I thought I would ask my journal audiance;

Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?

I think I know how I would answer…I will let you all respond first

Decided to go with a new format this week. I've been thinking for sometime now that I need to get away from this feeling less like an evaluation of the program and more of a reporting of what took place. This was always my intent…but obviously saying "Average or Above Average" sounds like I am grading the elements and can come across in the wrong tone. I would love your new thoughts on the new format…how can I make it even better? As someone who is not at the programs what would you like to know?

Attendance

You can always tell how attendance is gonna be within the first 15 minutes the doors are opened. We were down about 30 last night…which isn’t uncommon for this time of year. I think the holidays make it tougher for families to make to church Wednesday nights. Energy was still good.

Talk: Topic Relationships911 Time

The big idea this week was that genuine relationships take time to develop. I talked a lot about Twilight…basically highlighting one of the lies in it that relationships happen really fast and are just about some feelings we have in our stomachs. I opened with a good illustration about a pastor who did a 20 year reunion with his students. He asked them what was the most impactful from their time in youth group…they answered genuine relationships. Overall seemed like it landed well and made for good discussion in small groups. 

Volunteer Involvement

I think we were close to having all leaders present…which coupled with the lower numbers of students made for smaller groups. I talked with a couple of leaders that said they enjoyed the better connection due to smaller numbers.

Music

Nick is a rock star. He was down multiple band members and led from his acoustic guitar. His sister Krista led with him as well. The song selection was great and I liked how he did a mash up of a Christmas song and worship song for the response.

Final Thought

Two weeks ago I had a seven grade boy tell me that he was not getting anything out of Wildfire. While I definitely don’t like hearing that I have done this long enough to know that there’s a lot that can go into a statement like that. This week the very same boy told me that he wanted my job…in other words…he decided he wants to become a youth pastor. Whew I can’t paint a greater picture for you of middle school ministry…they are ever-changing beings. Sometimes it’s frustrating and other times it’s beautiful.

How you answer that question reveals alot.  I think the Abortion debate is one of the most important in our day…because it has to do LIFE.  There has been alot of rhetoric out there during this election year. but polls show its still an issue that voters care about.  The election of Barak Obama has pretty much guarenteed Roe vs. Wade wont be over turned in the next four years. (disagree? Get educated HERE and HERE) While the debate has many facets it all comes down to one definition…a very important definition…and that is the definition of personhood.  Abort73.com wrote this on their website regarding the personhood of unborn babies;

There are essentially two issues which must be resolved concerning unborn embryos and fetuses. The first is, "Are they human beings?" The second is, "Should they be recognized as persons under the law?" We've already established that there is no debate on the first question. It is a matter of plain, objective science. Embryos and fetuses are fully and individually human from the moment of fertilization on. If this were not true, if unborn children were not demonstrably human, there would be no need to even talk about rights of personhood. "Removing a fetus" would be the moral equivalent of pulling a tooth. This, however, is not the case, and so the debate must now enter the political arena.

There is a very real sense in which the need to answer this second question is, in itself, an absurdity. If you look up the word "person" in your average dictionary (we'll use Webster's), you'll find something like this:

Person n. A human being.

A person, simply put, is a human being. This fact should be enough. The intrinsic humanity of unborn children, by definition, makes them persons and should, therefore, guarantee their protection under the law. For more than thirty years, however, this has not been the case. The situation we are left with is this. In America today, there is a huge and singular group of living human beings who have no protection under the law and are being killed en masse every day. Is that not astounding?! It is astounding, but not wholly unprecedented.

There have been at least two other instances in American history in which specific groups of human beings were stripped of their rights of personhood as a means of justifying their horrible mistreatment. African-Americans and Native-Americans both felt the brunt of a system which denied their humanity, stripped their personhood and subjected them to horrors beyond measure. While the legal framework that made such injustice possible has now been removed, it remains firmly in place for unborn Americans.

There remains one, and only one, group of human beings in the U.S. today for which being human is not enough. The inconvenience of their existence has resulted in a legal loophole of shameful proportions. What is a person? A person is a human being (unless, of course, you haven't been born yet, in which case we'll define personhood in any way possible so as to exclude you, kill you and forget you).

Welcome to America.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter…Exodus 20:9-10NKJV

God knows us so well. He can see the store owner reading this verse and thinking; "Somebody needs to work that day. If I can’t, my son will." So God says, Nor your son. "Then my daughter will." Nor your daughter…. "I guess I ll have to send my cow to run the store, or maybe I will find some stranger to help me." No God says. One day of the week you will say no to work and yes to worship. You will slow and sit down and lie down and rest.

Still we object…"What about my grades?" "I’ve got my sales quota." We offer up one reason after another, but God silences them all with a poignant reminder; " In six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, all that is in them, and rested the seventh day." God’s message is plain; "If creation didn’t crash when I rested, it won’t crash when you do."

Repeat these words after me; It is not my job to run the world.

From – Grace for the Moment by Max Lucado