Argentina

I know this post was not going to be posted until tomorrow night, but I can't wait to write about it. The phone call I got Friday night was from Ashland Theological Seminary, where I go to school, offering me an all expense paid trip to Argentina! It's not for a vacation, but to go work at South American Theological Seminary, our sister seminary, for ten days. The seminary has had this trip planned for awhile now and I'm part of a group that has been real interested in finding ways for our students to partner with their students so they invited me along to go for free. I feel so blessed! I'll post more about the trip as I find more out.
To do list for tomorrow:
1. Hang out at the bus stop for first day of school
2. Play golf with new friends (I haven't played in two years)
3. Apply for passport
4. Move all things in the upstairs to the downstairs so we can get carpet installed Tuesday.
5. Start studying for Greek
6. Go visit a few people
BUSY DAY

A Beautiful Night

This morning started off with a long thunderstorm, but by 930 AM the sun was out and pretty much stayed out. That is until about 530 PM when the rains and thunder came back out to play. Our baptism service along with our cookout was scheduled to start at 6 PM. So we all crunched into Aaron and Rachel's house while a few of us tried to cook out on the grill in the rain. That went fine until the grill ran out of grass. Jamie, the wonderful saint that he is, went and got more gas for us as we started eating what we had. God decided we had enough bad luck for the day and took away the rain for a few minutes while we went to the back yard and had a baptism service. We had a wonderful time baptizing Jaime. The Lord was really with us. I just love our church and the wonderful things God is doing in it. I am so honored to be apart of it.

Aaron and Rachel I thank you again for opening your house and your back yard pool to us. You guys are wonderful!

cool phone call

I just got a message on our answering maching last night offering a wonderful opportunity. I have to decide by Monday morning whether or not I'm gonna take it. I'll let you all know Monday night what's going on. Say a prayer for me that I'll have wisdom in this whole matter.

Crazy Ideas

So my friend Mark, who works for the Peace Core in El Salvador, recently wrote me and some other friends and invited us to go on a three month bike trip across the ole USA next summer. My friend Eric can only get permission for a week, I think I can only do a week as well, and we have a friend named James who thinks after reading "Wild At Heart" that he could do the whole three months, but he's just dreaming. I hear Ked might be in as well and there is an outside chance on Sean, but then again we were all gonna go White Water Rafting a summer ago and that didn't happen, so who knows if we can pull off a week long bike trip.

I really hope it happens, it just sounds like so much fun. I figure in a week we might be able to make it four hundred miles and then rent a van for the way back home. I wonder where that can take us? I know this is farther than four hundred miles, but i think it would be cool to make it to the Gulf of Mexico.

Baptism

Our first baptism service for our new church is this Saturday night at the Thackers. Today my job is to sit down and figure out how we are going to do it. I've got my Bible, the Nazarene church rituals handbook, some info on how the Christians who have gone before us have done it, and a few scattered other sources to go through. I plan on using all that stuff and then hopefully adding some stuff from who we are as a church in the West Side.

On a journey

I'm the pastor of a new church in our neighborhood and lately my wife and I have really been struggling with how we do our "church services." We always wonder why we do what we do and we feel we are on a journey to bring more meaning and authenticity to what we do on Sunday mornings. This past Sunday, Mandy, who leads our music, prayed spontaneoulsy where I normally have my pastoral prayer. It was a beautiful prayer that fit perfectly into our service, but it left me in an odd position. You see it would have been too ackward for me to pray again once she was done and I really wanted to lead the church in prayer for some people we really needed to be praying for. I ended up just going on with the service and not praying again at that moment.
It just sounds weird to me that I got frustrated at that, cause Mandy did the right thing in following the Spirit to pray at that time. Is what we do so much a show that things can't happen spontaneously? Why couldn't I allow ackwardness in our service and just continued on with Mandy's prayer? Sometimes I really think I'm missing the point in all of this. I guess that I'm noticing that I'm missing the point is probably a good thing.

I try again

This is my second attempt at blogging, I hope this attempt goes a little better. I figure I should start because I read at least three peoples blogs a day and I feel that I should be giving back in some way.