• Megan’s memory

    Dsc06548Megan is getting pretty old you know? She is pushing 4.5 these days and there is something about this ripe old age that makes a girl reflective on life’s good times.

    Just now, she was telling me about the blue houses stairs. (We talk about the different places we’ve lived by the color of the house. In California we lived in "the green house" [More true than she knows!] and our first place in Romeo was "the blue house." Our current house is "the white on brown house.")
    But the funny thing is that she lives in both the real world and her pretend world and I like to catch her when she is pretending. She told me, "Daddy, one day when I was littler I used to fall down the stairs but one day, when I was two, I learned to walk up and down the stairs at the blue house." I said, "well… that is a good story but you learned how to walk really good when we lived in the green house. Did we have stairs in the green house?" Then she promised me that we had stairs in the green house. Yeah, we lived in a ranch.

    I think I have the same toddler memories because I swear I remember being able to jump up onto my garage roof as a kid!

  • good times rolling

    Romeo_logo_frontWell, it was another good day at church.  We’ve just been kind of getting better and better in the last few weeks. Basically the plan seems to be working… just keep being simple and solid and it’ll stabalize on it’s own. But there are a couple of 2006 initiatives I am seeing as very important.

    • We need to handle our abundant visitors better.
    • We need to offer more "points of connection" like the bonfire in the summer.

    More on both of those at a later date.

  • date nite

    KrusemuerLast night Kristen and I went to Kruse & Muer in downtown Rochester. it was the start to a pretty nice date night. Any night where we don’t have the kids is a date night these days!

    We had a few funny moments worth mentioning.

    1. – We thought it was pretty clear that there was a rear entrance. But we still don’t know if that was an entrance because we felt like we walked through the kitchen to get to the hostess desk.

    – Since we came in the back door we ended up right in the front of the line to put in our name. She looked at me and said, "As long as you’re only going to be here and hour we can get you in right now." I thought… no problem. Then the very next person asking for a table for 2 were told "30-50 minutes." Kristen and I looked at each other and said… that’s never happened to us before!

    – For "a rush table" the server sure wasn’t in a hurry at first. It was about 10 minutes before she came to our table… which was fine because their menu had too many options. I’m a big fan that if you have a specials menu it replaces the regular menu.

    – Kristen ordered the Atlantic Salmon and I ordered the Santa Fe Grouper, even though I am pretty sure there aren’t any grouper in New Mexico!

    – When our meal came Kristen got a quite large piece of salmon and I got a tiny little fillet of grouper and a big pile of rice… but I could see on our servers tray another order exactly like mine. She looked at me quite puzzled.

    – My plate was empty in about 5 minutes. It was good but it went REAL fast. Well, about 2-3 minutes after that the manager comes up to us blushing… "Um sir, somehow we screwed up… here is the rest of your order… sorry about that." And she slid another steaming plate of grouper!

    – Then our waitress came over, very apologetic and explained that she had written on our order "step on it" and the chef misread that as "split it."

    The best part of this is that this little posh restaurant was so embarrassed about doing this to me and I couldn’t have cared less! I wasn’t going to complain about the small portion because I am too ignorant about posh little restaurants to know how much I should have gotten! I kind of figured that since their other posh restaurant in Rochester, Rochester Chop House, had left us hungry… it must be something posh about small portions!

    Of course the best part of dinner was the company. That sounds cheesy but it is true. It was fun for Kristen and I to go out and be alone together.

  • typepad has been down… but it is coming back online

    6apartlogoTpyepad has some sort of major malfunction. So my blog is just now coming back online. It’s too bad because I had some great stuff to blog yesterday and I’ve forgotten all about it now.

  • but, but, it is so incredible!

    I can’t really go into a lot of detail but someone hooked me up with something that is "OH SO COOL" that isn’t available in stores yet. I don’t know where it came from but I am thoroughly enjoying it as a "turkish delight" like treat.

    If you come to the LF Christmas party next Wednesday, you’ll get a taste of it.

    p.s. If you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about… I am sorry.

    Dsc05279In other news I am really excited about a new marriage in our church. Beth and Shaun get married on Saturday. This is perhaps one of the coolest, smoothest couples I’ve ever been around. When God puts two people like this in such a special way… you just sit back in awe of who God is and what He has done. I know for Beth this has been an incredible 6 months. Graduating from Nursing school, passing the boards, 3 weeks of indescribable service to the King in Northern Ireland, a new job, and now a new life together with Shaun… this has been a special time in her life and I am glad to have been a small part of it.

  • light force love and bye bye nicole

    Light_force_023This was our first and last Light Force for December. Just the way it worked out with the schedule. I hope it’s a precursor to 2006… because tonight rocked. We just had a good feel from everyone. Now it wasn’t a night of uber-warm-fuzzies or anything like that, but all in all LF is just cruising along and going well.

    Tonight we said goodbye to one of my favorite students. Nicole is moving to the Chicago area next week, and tonight was her last LF. I mean… if you are going to move, Chicago is a good place to go… but it is sad nonetheless. I don’t like seeing studens go.

    In other news, we had a lot of visitors. This is a weird phenomonon as we aren’t and haven’t focused of "bring a friend" but that is just happening. The talk, I felt was pretty good. (Not to pat myself on the back.) I just felt like the story we read (Luke 7:36-50) is just stinking powerful on it’s own.  Here’s my dirty little secret from the talk tonight. I didn’t have an ending planned. I got to that point in preparation and I just said… "I need to feel this out." It was a weird bit of freedom and I think it was a good ending.

  • I couldn’t say this better

    You know… there comes a time when you sense that something you’ve created is starting to get bigger than you… bigger than you could have imagined because God has taken hold of it? Here’s an example of that.

    Less than two weeks before Christmas, a good friend of mine posted a dire prayer request on a youth ministry forum we both visit. Money’s tight this year and their van broke down. It looked like her two young daughters wouldn’t be finding any presents under their tree this Christmas. Sure, Christmas isn’t all about the presents, but try explaining no toys in shiny wrapping paper to a three and four year-old. Read the rest at Amy’s blog, Atypical Musings.

    When Derek and I swallowed hard and decided that in our "spare time" (whatever that means to full time ministry people!) we’d begin YMX just a few weeks ago… we had some idea what it could become. As I pray for this little fledgling thing… it’s stories like this that make this little hobby so cool. For a lot of hurting people out there, it’s my continued prayer that YMX will be an extension of Christ’s ministry to them.

  • Gotta love this shameless plug!

    Ymxsign1I found this on a friends blog. I am loving the free pub for the new site.

  • Christmas is Coming!

    Christmas_cryAm I the only person in the world who hasn’t done their Christmas shopping? I have to admit that I am patiently waiting for the Christmas bug to bite me so that I can even feel like shopping at all.

    I don’t even have much shopping to do. Since Kristen has pretty much taken care of it, I only have 5-6 people to buy for and I don’t know what my problem is. And I haven’t even started the annual Christmas letter. Ugh.

  • anxiety

    Maybe I hide this, or maybe it’s so evident that people don’t mention it to me… but I worry about things a lot. In fact, I worry about stupid things more than I worry about important things. I worry about things at work that are fine, I worry about how people "view me," I worry that I’ll get an e-mail and not respond fast enough, I worry that I’ve been rude to someone, I worry that I’ve missed some unknown step in "protocol" that was unspoken, and I worry that people I really care about won’t like me anymore, and I worry if people will notice if I am anxious about these things! But at the same time while I am anxious about these little things, big things don’t seem to effect me. I’m never nervous about going on a mission trip. I wasn’t nervous when we bought the house, or when interviewing for any ministry job, (haven’t done that in a while and I hope to never do it again!) or speaking in front of people, or meeting "famous" people, or things that are supposed to make you anxious!

    I know I am not alone in being anxious… and I think these things I suffer from are funny enough to talk about. And with that, I’ll remind myself of this… Phillipians 4:6, "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." Interesting observation about the author of that verse… he was hunted down like an animal, imprisoned, and executed… heck, he likely wrote that verse in jail… be anxious about nothing… OK Paul… if you say so!