Category: Funny Stuff

  • The Road Trip from Hell Winner

    road tripMy students know that I love a road trip. There is nothing quite like climbing into a church van and driving to a destination. So a few weeks back YMX decided to have a contest to find out “Who has the worst road trip story?”

    It turned out that my NYWC buddy Chris Wyatt of South Carolina (and an adoptive parent newly back from Ethiopia) had the craziest story. This beats any road trip nightmare ever! Read the rest of the stories. If you like ironies, check out how Gospel.com avoided using the word “hell.”

    Here’s the winner:

    We’ll start with the fact that the last 20 miles of the trip took 2.5 hrs, driving over steep, curvy mountain roads in a whiteout. It snowed three feet in those two hrs. I was driving a loaded van, pulling a 10 ft. trailer, leading a caravan of several other vehicles. We couldn’t pull off of the road, and cars were going into ditches all around us. So, after 12 hrs of driving, we finally get to the lodge. We wake up the following morning to 18 degree temps and strong cross-winds. As we are walking to get the kids their skis, we start down a set of steps. One of our chaperones promptly falls on an icy step and breaks her ankle. Badly. I wrap my coat around her, and take off looking for ski patrol. We hook her up to a sled, and get her the infirmary. I then have to dig our van out of the snow (more than an hour), and go off the road twice driving to the infirmary. The nearest hospital with the facilities to help is almost two hours away over icy mountain roads. We FINALLY get to the hospital, and they tell us she needs surgery. They don’t have the facilites to do the surgery. So they put her in an air cast and send us back to the lodge. We get to the lodge and there are no wheelchairs, so we have to carry her to the room on a luggage rack. We get her settled in and drugged up, and my phone rings. It’s the ski patrol office. I have another girl with an injury, and one of my boys has been in a collision that required the other party in said collision to be airlifted out with a kidney injury (NOT my kid’s fault). So he’s been stuck in the patrol office all day, as he can only be released to his legal guardian (me for that trip…the other party tried to sue him for the wreck, and it went to court…our kid won). I take care of the injury, get the kid back on the slopes. The following day weather is so bad that no one can ski. Every kid at the place was holed up in the lodges. For a whole day. We start the trip back the following day. Our chaperone with the shattered ankle has never been in the mountains before this. She is doped up on painkillers. We are about 10 minutes into the trip when she suddently projectile vomits – right into the back of my wife’s head. There’s nowhere to stop for another 20 miles or so until we get to the bottom of the mountain. We finally stop, and I clean vomit up off of the van while my wife goes into the bathroom to try to clean the chunks out of her hair. Well, you know what happens when a van full of people has to smell vomit for hours. Everyone started chunking, and we had to stop every 30 minutes or so to empty out plastic bags full of barf. One of the vehicles broke down, another got lost from the caravan. It took us over 15 hrs to make what SHOULD have been an 8 hr. trip. On top of that, three kids ran out of money, and I had to foot their meals on the promise from their parents that I would be repaid on arrival. Did I ever see that cash? Nay.

  • Simply Youth Ministry is Getting It

    I consider the folks over at Simply to be my friends. I will admit that when I first started to get to know them they were a bit intimidating. But they are great folks that any youth worker should get to know.

    They are a couple of year’s into a competition with Youth Specialties for convention dollars. YS has run the very popular National Youth Workers Convention for years and then Simply partnered with another publisher to create the National Youth Ministry Conference. Let me make a quick observation about Simply’s marketing efforts.

    YS has found an edge (in the Seth Godin kind of way), their conference goes after the arts and goes after social justice and those types of things. From a marketing standpoint that’s their angle and they are doing quite well with it. The Simply/Group folks have found a different edge as they try to catch up to YS. They are going to appeal to their audience with silly stuff and videos like the one below. They must have discovered that this is what their audience likes.

    When it comes to marketing, there are two initial things that have to be done before you can succeed.
    1. Define your audience, including what they like.
    2. Define your competition

    HT to Andy

    This post was edited on 2/27 to clarify what I was saying a little better. It could have been misinterpreted, and for that I’m sorry.

  • Kristen’s Dream Bed

    igloo bedMy wife is a bookworm. While I struggle to finish books before they are due at the library, Kristen reads 4-5 books per week. In turn, Kristen has turned my children into bookworms as well and the highlight of their week is the trip to the library to pick up new books and take back the old.

    Her dream job would be to run a children’s bookstore or work at a library or somehow find herself surrounded by books 24 hours per day.

    So when I saw this I instantly thought of Kristen. When I showed it to her she said, “Oh I want that!”

    HT to Cory Doctorow

  • The Preference Wars of Church

    Perry Noble of NewSpring Church has a couple of funny, yet serious, points about heaven and the preference wars of church today.

    I was reading through Revelation a couple of weeks ago and I had this thought, “I really think that some people might not like heaven!” Especially when I got to Revelation 7:9-12…seriously, take a second to read that passage and then come back here as I share a thought or two about it. If people approach heaven the same way some approach church then here are my fears… 🙂

    #1 – For Some People Heaven Will Be “Too Big.” We have people that say, from time to time, “I really do like your church–except that it’s too big.” My reply is always the same, “Heaven isn’t going to be a small group/house church!”

    #2 – The Focus Will Be On Jesus…And That’s It! Apparently the music in heaven is going to be loud…and will not be sang out of the Baptist hymnal. (See verse 10–they cried in a LOUD voice…apparently they didn’t get the “reverence” memo!) No one will be asked in heaven, “Did you like the music? Was the sound too loud? Were you totally comfortable?” Nope–the focus will be on Jesus Christ…NOT consumeristic ego maniacs who church hop because they think everything exists for them. 🙂

    I think Perry is right. And I think he brings about the new battle in churches, personal preferences. If 1990-2005 were all about music wars 2005-present are all about preference wars.

    Should church be like Burger King and the parishioners be like Frank Sinatra?

  • New release: How to Boil a Frog

    How to Boil a FrogI saw this on Tony Morgan’s blog and thought it was interesting. So I gave it a whirl. (2 minutes on PhotoShop)

    This is my random album cover for my latest release. My band is “How to Boil a Frog.” We’ve been together for about 15 minutes now and are releasing our debut, “The Tediousness of Life.” The bats in the picture represent the tediousness of life in youth ministry. Those little details are like the gnats the bats eat… just swallowed up in a blur leaving nothing but inaudible communication in its path.

    Create your own!

    The Rules

    1. Band Name The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

    2. Album Title The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

    3. Album Cover Art The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

    Post a link to yours here. I’m kind of thinking this could end up being a contest over at YMX. Thoughts?

  • Make sure your company name doesn’t have a double meaning.

    titi nails

    I thought it couldn’t get any more odd than the S&M Market on 32 Mile and Rochester Road. Well, we spotted this gem of a store name next to the Costco on Hall Road. Something tells me the store owner doesn’t speak English as a primary language.

    Click on the image for full-sized version.

  • Who am I?

    adam mclaneI caught this on my vanity search this morning. It came from here. Since I don’t speak that language I have no clue what it means.

    But I am dead sexy, aren’t I?

  • Steve Jobs Keynote in 60 Seconds

    Imagine if we could do a sermon like this.

  • “I won’t have a party”

    This video is both funny and shocking. Maybe I’m getting old, but I think this kid needs some discipline.

    HT to Craig Gross

  • Hide and Seek by Megan McLane

    My daughter, 6 years old, made this video on her own. If you stick with it you’ll see the genius of it. (Daddy inserted some titles to help you; beginning and end and some sound effects.) She’s basically created a movie that you can interact and play along with. If you actually follow her instructions it is way more fun. I’m biased, but I think she has a nack for video and maybe even acting. This is pure Megan that she is often too shy to show. Let me say this again… Megan made this completely on her own. She was playing with Photo Booth for a long time all by herself, and this is one of her many creations.