Month: March 2005

With another fresh coat of snow yesterday, the golf nazi’s are in full effect. My personal goal of starting my golf year in March is now officially dead. While I could go to one of the many golf domes in the area… It is hardly the same.

In other news:
Last night’s Napoleon Dynamite nite was a lot of fun, but a failure. It turns out one of the classes at the school put their movie night at the same time. That’s a real bummer for me since it wasn’t on the school calendar at all. I generally never ever do that… But I just didn’t know.

In still other news:
I’ve had a good week with the two problems that I had to address earlier in the week. In both instances it wasn’t pleasant, but it was dealt with swiftly, appropriately, and in love. Nothing in working with students is harder than issues of personal sin or sexuality. Eeks.

My goal of playing golf in March 2005 is now in serious jeopardy. We awoke this morning to a fresh blanket of 2 inches of snow with a lot more forecasted.

What is going on?
So much for global warming, eh? This winter has been long and sustained cold. Sure, we’ve never dipped down into the -30 degree below 0 mark or anything like that. But since late November it has been chilly. I don’t think we’ve had a single day above 60 since November 1st. I actually can’t remember a winter as cold for a sustained period as this one. Generally there are at least a couple of breaks were it gets into the 50’s – 60’s.

In other news
I will be busy today making all the preparations for the Napoleon Dynamite nite this evening. We’ve sent out hundreds of flyers… So there is a chance we could see some visitors. In Sonlife-speak…. This is a seed planting event. While we are not presenting the gospel, we are communicating to visitors that Christians can have fun, are OK people, etc. It’s all part of the process.

More good news
I sat down for a couple of hours with a parent of 3 of my students. We’re going to start meeting regularly for prayer, accountability, and learning hermeneutics. Pretty cool.

This may seem like a broken record for consistent All Blogs readers, but tonight’s Light Force kicked butt.

Bob and Rachel (the new SP and his wife) came and visited us. They wanted to check it out and I really appreciate the effort to come down. That was a big deal to me as it was the first pastor I have ever had come to a ministry night and hear me do the talk… Ever, in 5 years of ministry! The game (Moose, Moose is an LF favorite… It’s our game.) went very well. The worship went very well…. Students really participated and the girls did a nice job. And I think the talk went pretty well also. It was called Stubborn People and was off of Revelation 9:20-21.

Isn’t God funny sometimes? I mean, I felt extremely overwhelmed by everything leading up to tonight. I barely was able to work on my talk but it came out great.

One day I need to figure out why it is that the less I prepare sometimes, the better my talks are. What’s up with that?

One of the most annoying problems of being a youth pastor is constantly dealing with issues of adolescent sexuality.

Here are the normal things I deal with…

1. Puberty issues. I’m fat, I’m tall, I’m small, I have pimples, my boobs are too small, I have no pubes. Yada yada yada.
2. My parents don’t understand dating. What a load! No, they get it and generally speaking, the stricter they are on you the more promiscuous they were as teenagers. They get it, you’ve got hormones and you are intent on using them.
3. I like someone in the youth group. Yes, I hate inter-youth group dating. It comes and goes in cycles of youth ministry… Thankfully I haven’t had this come up in about 3 months. This means I am due any day now.
4. I like her, she doesn’t like me. This usually has to do with the “long shot” and I have Hollywood to thank for it.
5. No, you did not invent sex or being horny in high school. Adam & Eve got to claim “we discovered sex” and I’m sure it wasn’t too long after that that someone discovered oral and all manners of fun things besides. Yes, if you are fondling one another it is sex… and I don’t think you can call yourself a virgin… at least not a totally pure one, OK?

But… This week has started off with a bang! So far, in the last 12 hours, I’ve gotten to deal with two similarly annoying problems.

• Girl/Boy “accidently” sleeping next to each other at a youth event. I want to kick myself in the butt for this one. I sent a girl to the girls room to sleep. I went to sleep. She went and slept next to some boy and got yelled at. Great, now I have to kill her.
• Girl dating older man, “is it OK if we cuddle in bed?” No… You think you are stronger than sex… But hormones and desires will result in nakedness, bumping around, and guilt everytime. It’s always a bad idea to snuggle under the covers with someone you love unless you are married!

I love to tell our new Senior Pastor this stuff. It makes him realize that he needs someone like me. Ugh.

Note to anyone unmarried: Keep your pants on until you get married. It will solve a lot of problems. Sure, sex is fun for the 3 minutes it lasts… But it’s hell after that and worth the wait.

After a little bit of work and a lot of wiggling around, I got the new PC’s in the sanctuary up and running. All of the hardware is working fine.

It looks awesome and works even better. Going the desktop route for both of these PC’s was an obvious choice. While there are still some minor problems to address, by Sunday AM our church should be caught up technology-wise. (Now if only I could get that worship music out of the 90s worship phase and into the 00s!)

Here is a short list of what is yet to do before Thursday’s “Big Test” with Pastor Bob.

• Reseat the DVD drive. I had a student install it and some of the sound is garbled sometimes.
• Run the cables for the video feed, install the camera.
• Talk the trustees into spending $400 on Media Shout.
• Get the PC’s installed on our network. (Half happening tonight, half later in the week.)

Mambo? Was ist das?

I am slowly turning into a Mamboevangelist. All I really know is that I love mambo sites and am addicted to making my mambo site better and more content driven.

In the past week I have turned about 3 small websites onto the power of mambo. First off, there was a church looking for a content solution. Then there was our church site. Then there was a real estate company looking for something. All of them, when I showed them the power and flexibility of mambo… Made the switch.

Why mambo?

Ease of use, depth of free components, 100% web server maintained. I’ve found the entire open source movement to be utterly fascinating and suppressions “approachable.” Even as a newbie I can post on a forum a help message and within hours someone from the core team has replied to me. Try getting that level of service with a paid site!

Who is it for?

I’m going to say… Anyone who has a content driven site. For all of my buddies in youth ministry, this is your solution. My total cost is less than $10 per month!

Then why does my blog still suck?

I have no idea. If someone wants to redesign All Blogs go to Heaven more power to them. I would put up some cash to make this place look better. I’m just too busy to get really, really involved.

I’ve asked my Northern Ireland team to watch this movie. I thought I would post some of my thoughts about it.

Truth?
The controversy of this film is that it is extremely slanted towards the Sein Finn side. At least, that’s what the press said about it. In the way that it is produces, a very strong case is made about the U.K. Army firing upon a rowdy, but peace minded crowd that day. It shows that the Army was very interested in making a point and showing off their might. On the flip side, their must have been something else that was missing on that fateful day. Some precursor or predicating event that led to that level of hostility in 1972. They made a brief mention of “we’ve lost 42 soldiers in Belfast” and I can see how that would elevate tensions “in the box.” But since the film was so slanted towards the Irish side, it was tough as an ignorant American to figure out.

The Movie
I thought the movie’s style was choppy and poor. It looked and felt like The Blair Witch Project for a lot of the time. Jumpy camera angles and strange angles. At the same time, they did manage to capture some of the battlefield confusion like Saving Private Ryan. All-in-all, I thought the quality was terrible. But that isn’t why I bought the DVD, I bought it for it’s content. As an Ignorant American going to Northern Ireland, I felt like it was good to see the slanted angles of that day.

Northern Ireland’s September 11th, 2001
The reverence to which the characters were treated in the film made it clear that these people had become the stuff of folklore. In an American context, the 27 people shot were a lot like the 2000 who died in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania.

Much like 9/11 was in the United States, the same was true for Bloody Sunday 1972. It acted as a call to arms for young men to take up the fight. While Americans are uncomfortable with that militia mentality after something terrible… It is a reality and it did bring to the world’s attention the many problems of oppression in Northern Ireland.

Overall, I am glad I saw it and would recommend it.

As will be clear by my shear lack of good posts this week… I’ve been more than a little bit busy. Hectic and crazy are better words.

All in all, it is very clear that I’m assuming more roles in the ministry here at Romeo. I’ve gotten very tied into some technology issues and it is clear that Bob intends on me heading that up for the church.

Here are some projects I’ve headed up in the last 3 weeks.

Project #1 Getting the church on DSL. I think we were the last place in the world running dial-up!

Project #2 Replacing the cruddy PC in the sanctuary with something more apt to handle current needs. Two big “Dell” boxes showed up today as evidence of that.

Project #3 Rebuidling the church website. This has gone famously well. Check it out at http://fbcromeo.org/beta to see where we are at. I’ve got about 10 little things to do with that and I’ll make it a live site.

Besides that, all I’ve done is get through one of my busiest ministry weeks of the year!

This is what I just wrote on my ministry blog called Being Intentional.

This has been one of the fastest weeks on record. Of course, that’s not a literal statement since a 23 hour period is always the same… But that just means I’ve been busy.
If last week was all about relationships… This week is all about church business. I have a feeling that for the next month or so it will be like this. I’m not mad, in fact it is a nice change of pace. The flip side of that has been long days at the office and few hours with my family. I don’t like that very much.
Only a few more months until we can go to the cottage and do nothing for a full week!

Of course, the thing I didn’t sum up there is that the tiredness has set it bigtime. Plus, I still have the heavy portion of my week left with the 30 Hour Famine starting tomorrow. I can’t believe it… It’s already here. It’s going to be a fantastic event, but I don’t feel like I have the right amount of time to truly prepare the way I want to. I’m certain it will all work out.

So far this week I have just been hammered with stuff. I worked 16 hours yesterday and today looks only slightly better.

I feel like I am swimming in a strong river. I am swimming hard to keep up but still sliding downstream fast.

Dear God, slow it down.