Month: January 2006

  • re-run time

    Lf_bug_1Starting to sound like a broken record here, but tonights Light Force was great. The talk was simple, yet solid (I thought anyway) and the "big secret" is that I didn’t get to practice because time crunched me today.

  • Intel gets hammered

    Intel Not a good day for my portfolio as Intel is getting their butt kicked. I tried to sell at the opening but it quickly went lower than I was willing to sell at. It’s down something like $3/share so far today. As I told a friend earlier, I guess if this keeps up I’ll be retiring one year later. Seriously, in the grand scope of life this isn’t a big deal.

  • What should I do with my life?

    It’s crunch time for our high school seniors. As the financial packages are coming together and the final choices are soon to be made… I am left with this from Jim Elliot. A bright future laid ahead of this young man, he could have done almost anything but he felt God’s call on his life. [A new movie about him and his co-workers]

    Jimelliotquote It took me a long time to really understand this quote. I heard it all the time at Moody. People had it written on their doors, on their notebooks, on and on. I remember hearing it and seeing it and thinking… That’s a little dumb.

    Here is what he said, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."

    When you sit back and let that sink in for a time, you start to see the truth in it. Following Christ anywhere is never a "waste." What is paramount above all things is following him. Whether that be into chemical engineering, parenthood, politics, ministry, sports medicine, or whatever. What is paramount is the attitude that it’s Christ’s life and not mine to waste.

    I know there have been many times in the last few years when I’ve wanted to press the "cash out" button and walk away. "What’s stops you?" From an earthly perspective there is still a dream to be chased. From a vertical perspective is the reality that it’s He who "wasted my life" and not me. It’s not my life, I gave it away!

  • New church name

    Church_1

    My mom sent this to me. This is a real place of worship in Las Vegas. 

    What do think, good name for Romeo?

    Update: So, it’s my day off and I simply had to find the back story for this "funny named church." I mean, who really names a church Thomas Paines Church of Christ and Common Sense?

    Well, I found the backstory on a Las Vegas news site.

    "The last temptation of Larry"
    Sept. 8

    The story: This was just another story about a strip club owner who became obsessed with Thomas Paine and decided to open a church in his honor.

    In 1972, Larry LaPenta opened a piano bar called Larry’s Villa at the corner of Rancho Drive and Bonanza Road. At the urging of a bored customer, LaPenta turned the bar into a topless joint. Since then, he said, Larry’s Villa has expanded three times. And while not as big as Sapphire or as crowded as Club Paradise, it does pretty well.

    When asked exactly how much money the Villa makes, LaPenta balked. But noting that he owns land and other businesses in the valley, he said he is worth about $15 million.

    So what does the 83-year-old strip club owner do with all that money? How does he give something back to the community? What’s his last wish?

    To open a church, of course.

    In the summer, LaPenta leased a space on West Charleston Boulevard for Thomas Paine’s Church of God and Common Sense. He planned to use the space daily. Activities were to include self-improvement meetings, a Toastmaster’s (or public speaking) night and current-event debates.

    "It’s going to be a church for patriotic Americans," said LaPenta. "It’ll be nondenominational, nonsectarian. Basically, we want us all to be better Americans, to unite and to do what we can to improve our lives and our country. The way things are going now, it looks like America is really going to need good, supportive citizens."

    The update: Since opening, the Church of God and Common Sense has hosted only a few meetings. It has not been open on a regular basis and its future seems uncertain. This is due, in part, to LaPenta’s poor health.

    Shortly after the church opened, LaPenta caught pneumonia. Recently, he caught it again and checked into a local hospital. He is expected to be released shortly, said Larry’s Villa manager Ron Lenox, and hopes to continue to promote the church.

    "He’s a very well-to-do gentleman," said Lenox. "And I imagine that church is going to get everything if something happens to him. He’s going to keep that church going perpetually, whether he’s with us or not."

    MATT O’BRIEN

  • the mountaintop

    MlkThe man could preach you know? [Check it out] I have often been amazed at how few people have ever heard Martin Luther King, Jr. preach a sermon. Yes, he was one of the great oritors of the 20th Century… but he was also one of the most profound preachers I have ever read.

    Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks, before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman empire.

    I’m grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle.

    Was not Jesus an extremist for love — (Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 1963)

  • connect, connecting, and connected

    Link_aloneunConnected The reality is that for every person who feels connected to a church or to "people like them" there are 10 who aren’t connected. This isn’t the end of the world, but it isn’t all that great either.

    If you’re a student and you’r unConnected than you are a floater. You’ve got plenty of acquantances but are looking for some friends who will really love you for who you are. You’d be cautious about calling yourself lonely because that makes it seem like you are a loser or something. You aren’t a loser, you just are unConnected. The answer is keep trying to make the connection!

    Connect! There is an "aha" moment when someone finally connects with someone they click with. It happens and you aren’t sure how or why… you just know that you feel a sense of relief and you instantly feel like you’ve belonged for a long time.

    For youth workers, this happens on YMX every day. It is exciting because someone realizes that they aren’t alone in their struggles. They find out that geographically they aren’t even that far from one another! Suddenly it dawns on them that while they feel anonymous and ambigious in the universe of youth ministry they can connect.

    Chains Connecting The next step is when you realize that the first connection may have been an accident, but you can do something about connecting some more.

    For a LF student, this isn’t all that easy! Middle school students feel very stuck in their groupings. They tend to fear that if they go outside of their group, even if they made a new link to someone and connected, if they go outside of their group too much they fear that they will be rejected by this. It’s not any worse for a guy as it is for a girl. Here’s the crazy reality though… you can connect your group by being the link!

    Connected Almost every day I’ll talk to someone and say "I know a guy in New York that does _________." Then I’ll see their head turn sideways and you can see them think, "How does a youth dude in tiny Romeo, Michigan know another youth pastor in another state?" It’s because I am connected to a group that doesn’t have geographical boundaries.

    Every group has boundaries. (Study Group Dynamics and your head will spin!) When you have good friends in high school there is a paralizing reality during your senior year when you realize that this group you’ve been connected to forever is falling apart due to geography. One of you is going to State. Another is headed to Alma. Another is going to stay at Macomb. But being and getting connected is not limited to geography.  For me, YMX and it’s predecessors where fantastic at helping me get connected with people who were wired like me. Is it weird that most of these "friends" have never met in the flesh? Sure it is. And an awkward thing is that not every time you meet up with a YMX friend does it turn out the way you want… (Meeting up with Todd and Kim has been the coolest thing in YMX so far!) but it’s better than being unConnected. [About YMXes  vision]

    At the end of the day you are reading this in one of these chairs. Are you unConnected, connected, connecting, or connected? Of course, most of us sit in all of those chairs at the same time… but as I reflect on different areas of my life, I think about those levels of connection.

  • Glory Road

    GloryroadLast night Kristen and I went to see Glory Road. I’ve wanted to see it since I first saw the trailer several months ago. Overall it was a good story. As Kristen and I joked during the movie… it’s not like we didn’t know they were going to win all along… so in that regard the story was a little well-worn.

    Contrary to what some fans of "big programs" have said… I am glad that they portrayed it as a tough road racially. Why? Because it was probably a lot worse than Disney portrayed. Even though fans aren’t OK with it, Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp was most likely just like the typcial white man living in the 1960’s. I even remember as a kid hearing a lot of the same comments that were made in the movie and I grew up 20+ years later. Remember Jimmy the Greek? That happened in 1998 and not 1968. I would like to think that today things are a little better.

  • At the Starbucks

    StarbucksI spent most of last night at the Starbucks on Hall Rd since there were a gaggle of high school females at my house. I ended up staying there for about 5 hours. During which time I watched a movie, Omagh, and mostly just chatted online with friends, worked on some stuff for YMX and people watched.

    Omagh On Omagh. This was a town fairly close to where I spent my summer in Fivemiletown, Northern Ireland. We went there on our day off, and I knew that it had a severe bombing. I had no idea that this is a lot like visiting the WTC area of New York. On October 15th, 1998 a bomb went off in the central shopping area of Omagh while children were going to and from school, people shopping, on and on. It was eery to see places and realize that I was there. I don’t know if the film was shot in the exact location, but it if was I stood right there, and went in that shop where the bomb went off.

    On people watching. This was a big eye opener for me. When we were in Fivemiletown we marveled at the way students congregated in key areas. As we tried to draw a parallel to this in the States the only thing we could come up with was football and basketball games. Now I know another place… Starbucks. For hours and hours tons of high school students filtered in, hung out, and filtered out. I have to look into that more. Wow. But more than that, there were all sorts of characters to watch. People like me on laptops. Ladies reading books about mystery. Young workers collecting checks. First dates. Business meetings. Old friends spotting each other over mochas. The occasional panhandler. And swarms of people either just going to or just finishing a movie. It is weird that I can concentrate so well among the noise of those places, but I can get more done in a few hours there than I can in an entire day in my office.

  • 3Story Life

    3storybannerI’m in the process of reworking 3Story for Students into a 6 session small group curriculum for adults. This isn’t a major re-write or anything, I would call it more appropriately "re-arranging" the curriculum to suit our needs.

    3Story has been slowly rolling out here at Romeo. I did the adult leader training last fall with what has become our core group of small group leaders. Also, a group of high school girls is working through it in their bible study. My goal is to see 100 Romeo people go through the training in 2006. Re-arranging the curriculum for adults is obviously a massive part of that.

  • Open Source Youth Ministry

    Ymx_transparantPaul Martin, in his blog called Like a Fire, described YMX as "source for people “in the trenches.” I like that a lot. That’s true. Take what you find at YMX and run with it. Make it better, tear it apart, put humpty dumptie back together again and share like mad. If all of us "in the trenches" do that then youth ministry will, as a whole group, be a lot more effective.

    Wikipedia defines Open Source as "Open source describes general practices in production and development which promote access to the end product’s sources. " Yeah, let’s do that in youth ministry today… how cool is that?