Youth Camp–Day 4

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Another really busy day of travel.? Mark Dinwiddie, from Forest Park, brought my new computer down yesterday along with a bunch of paperwork to get my employment stuff setup.? We headed to Forest Park Joplin to turn that stuff in after I met with the camp staff reporting and praying for the week.

I went by the Lowe’s in Carthage to buy some dowel rods to use as takeaways for tonight’s sermon.? They are going to be “wooden pegs” that are used in building–thanks to my student pastor friends.? (They also helped me flesh out the rock takeaway last night–I love sitting around in a room with creative people and seeing how the Lord will work out all of the details!

I really feel like I “brought it” tonight!? I don’t know if I could preach much better or harder than tonight.? I talked about Isaiah 6 and Haggai.? Basically that we all have some “building” and “rebuilding” to do for the Kingdom.? Again, the spirit of expectancy in the room before and during worship was really evident.? Lots of kids praying for one another at the altar.? They took home a wooden peg to remind themselves about the story in Haggai where the people of God obeyed Him and went up the hill, chopped down trees, and rebuilt the temple.? I love the promise from God–“I am with you!”

I am actually sitting right now in the ER waiting room at St. John’s hospital . . . don’t freak out grandparents . . . we are all OK!? We were all walking back down to the worship center after the service and Tucker had on his brother’s flip-flops and was running and fell and cracked his head open on the asphalt.? Right next to his almost healed spot where he ran into the coffee table.? He bled like crazy . . . and immediately went to see the camp nurse.? She bandaged him up and recommended that we come to St. John’s to “make sure” everything is alright.? I hoping that they will just Durmabond him up and we can head home.? I will let you all know how things turned out, but think everything is fine–Tucker is busy playing here in the pediatric ER waiting room.? They must be really busy with the holiday or something, but we have been waiting over an hour after they took our vitals.? I sure hope this is not as long as my horrible 6 hour ER visit this January!!!? Pray for us!? We have a long night ahead and a final message tomorrow morning. Yikes!

On a good note, there was a showing of our house tonight at around 7 p.m.!? With this new Rural Development loan, we can re-do the amortization schedule again after we apply the proceeds from the sale of our Ozark house, so we can move forward and close on our house in Carthage.? So we signed papers today and took the contingency off of our contract on our house in Carthage, so we are hopefully going to close on that house on July 24th.? It would be AWESOME to have a contract on our house before we close in Carthage!? Keep praying!

Youth Camp–Day 3

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Spent the entire day at camp today–except to make a run into town for some supplies.

The morning celebration time was the “Guatemala? Mission Team” sharing about their experiences and perspectives of their trip last week to Guatemala.? I was VERY impressed with these students as they shared about their week!? Plus, the “future worship leaders” did and AWESOME job in leading the worship time.

I met with the “Moms and Pops” and student pastors to discuss the service and pray for the students.? Man, there is some really heavy stuff going on with some of these kids–much more than any student should have to deal with, that is for sure!? There is a real sense of urgency for these leaders to be in prayer for the night tonight!!? That is really cool!

LATER:? We talked about the woman caught in adultery (John 8) tonight.? We had a “guest speaker” tonight as I did a dramatic monologue of the event.? I was “Jonathan,” a Jewish businessman in Jerusalem that was caught in the act with the woman.? I was told to “disappear,” as the Jews really wanted to question Jesus rather than car that much about the woman . . . she was just a convenient pawn in their game.? It really turned out well and the Lord really moved tonight–especially during the worship response time.? We used rocks to help the students physically respond to the spiritual invitation.? They went and grabbed a rock and prayed over it and left it at the altar–along with their sin that has been forgiven.? There was a real sense of brokenness in the room and a lot of students responded to the Lord.? It is really exciting to see that kind of movement of God.

Youth Camp–Day 2

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We spent most of the afternoon driving in the car!! We left camp after the morning celebration time and had to go all the way back to Ozark to pick up some papers for the banker. We are changing loan “programs” and are getting at “Rural Development” loan and this particular loan has manual underwriting instead of the web-based underwriting that we had already completed several weeks ago. We had to have a lot more documentation than the other loan had that we had already packed up and put in storage–nice. So, it was off to the storage unit and then to the house to get some more documents. While we were there, the Doyle’s came home, so the boys wanted to play, so we were later getting to Carthage than planned.

We did finally get to Carthage and back to camp just in time for dinner–not back in time to swim during free time. So after promising to stay and swim on Wednesday, we prepared for night two at camp.

I talked about one of my favorite stories in the Bible . . . John 11 and the story of Lazarus. We talked about why tragedy happens and that everything in life is for God’s glory–the good and the bad. The worship band has done an AWESOME job this week and did an excellent job tonight as well! They are called Broken Outside Beautiful. They are all from around Joplin and Cartersville (right next to Carthage.) So basically this is a week as they said, “to welcome me to the neighborhood.”

There was a lot of good discussion in church group times and I think the Lord really moved tonight!

Taylor and I went to the “Late, Late Night” and watched the “Don’t Forget the Lyrics.” Pretty cheesy indeed!!

Going to bed . . . Taylor and I are sharing a bed tonight and Jenny and Tucker sharing . . . we’ll see how that works for us tonight! Exhausted from all the driving and searching through the storage for files! More tomorrow. No showings today I don’t think–bummer.

Youth Camp–Monday Night

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We had an awesome night at youth camp last night!! The worship was really good and I felt good about the message! The theme is “fresh” for camp this year. I will be talking about four different passages where people had “fresh encounters” with the Lord and He changed their lives. Last night, we talked about Nicodemus. The Gospel in one verse–John 3:16!

We are in a TINY room with the boys! We “acquired” a mattress from one of the dorms for the boys to share and Jenny and I are on a double bed using their fleece throws that Grandma Betty made for them this Christmas. We didn’t bring double sheets, just twins as we thought we would all be in twin bunks or something like that.

Taylor and Tucker stayed in the worship service last night through the entire service–including my talk. Tucker loves the drums, so he needed mom to hold him up to see the drums during worship and Taylor stayed on the side all night to watch the band and dad from close up. I’m really proud of them, but they are wearing mom out right now in that TINY room while she is getting ready!! Pray for that deal!!

Pray for our house to sell!! Did I mention the house needs to sell?!?

Here are some pics from last night:

Off to Youth Camp!!

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We are heading off to Youth Camp at Baptist Hill Assembly outside of Mt. Vernon, MO.? I will be the camp pastor for the Greene County Baptist Association’s Youth Camp and Jenny and the boys are going to be hanging out with a bunch of teenagers.? Back to my roots!!? My friend, Kurt Simon, invited me to preach for them this week.? I am actually kind of nervous!? I haven’t been around a large group of teenagers in quite a while–and I am pretty scared of them to tell you the truth–just kidding.? I always have a nervous stomach before these kinds of events because I know the potential that is just waiting to be realized.

I can remember youth camp at Centrifuge in Glorieta, NM when I was going to be a Freshman in High School.? I can remember making a decision at that camp that I wanted to be around these kinds of environments for the rest of my life!? Maybe it was the shorts and t-shirts, but I think it was the Lord calling me to ministry!

Be praying that God really moves in the hearts of these students and leaders this week!

Beach Disaster Part Deux

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We must be a real glutton for punishment as we ventured out to give the beach the old college try once more, but this time right across the street from the condo. Tucker didn’t get a good night’s rest, so he was teetering on the edge of meltdown. He was a little confused at where he was at last night and didn’t really get to sleep at all. Basically it was not going to happen . . . so Tucker had to go back to the condo and take a long nap. Taylor and I went to the pool later on.

Here is Taylor’s Travelogue . . .

The next day day we went back to the beach in front of our condo. We were only there like 20 minutes. Then we went to the pool by our room. My dad and me raced. I won every time!

No pictures of this crazy day

Beach Disaster–June 25

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We decided to give the beach another try and headed out to the St. Andrews State Park (which is really awesome, by the way) to get some beach time. The boys didn’t think the “our” beach was clean enough, especially after going to the Shell Island beach the other day, so we were going to try to go to a cleaner beach. I find it funny that Taylor says “that is the cleanest/dirtiest beach I have ever seen.” Oh yeah, how many beaches have you seen buddy?

We had made our lunch, packed the chairs (thanks Gary and Fran) and a canopy shelter (thanks mom and dad). I realize that the picture on the front of the canopy is a beach scene, but they definitely didn’t have the beach scene we have had the entire time here–pretty brisk wind. So basically our canopy deal didn’t work because it was too flimsy for the large winds on the beach.

Secondly, what is always at the beach and tends to multiply?? Everybody? SAND! When God promised Abram that he would make his children as many as the grains of sand on the seashore, he wasn’t messing around!! I think the boys like the idea of the beach and the sand, but they get sand on their hands, then head to their faces to scratch an itch or whatever and the get sand in their eyes. Then add an anger management issues and throwing sand at each other and you have a disaster on your hands. That is what we had on our anniversary morning and early afternoon–a full on beach disappointment.

We left the beach just in time to head to Happy Hour at Sonic (wish is was something else, quite frankly–just kidding). It is “anti-customer service week at the beac”h for us, so even something as simple as some drinks turns into an almost 45 minute ordeal. The first hint was that the girl came over the speaker and said there was a 15 minute wait, would we still want to order. Well, we had just gotten done with an absolute beating with a two year old, so we needed some self-medication for sure. We ordered our drinks and watched all of the cars on our side come and go. . . 25 minutes go by and Jenny walks up to the door. She is not alone. There is a pretty upset senior adult who wants names and telephone numbers of district managers. The beauty of the deal was that the manager and assistant manager are both sitting down eating while the short staff is drowning. They didn’t even come out to face the angered public, they sent this poor teenage boy out to try to calm down the masses. Forty-five minutes and free drinks later, we were off to take a nap at the condo.

We had some really good hamburgers and hot dogs for dinner and ventured out to get those awesome vacation pictures next to the sea oats and the sunsets. Did I mention that Tucker doesn’t really like the sand and waves? I think I did.

Overall, we had a really good time and we think we got some good pictures to capture the memories of this week. We had to go to the pool before bed and really had a good time at the pool.

Here is Taylor’s entry for the day . . .

We went to the ocean. It was a lot of fun. Then we went to the pool.

Here are a few of the pics from that photo shoot . . .

Anniversary in Florida

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We probably put WAY too many eggs into the Anniversary basket and hoped that the boys would even give a rip about the fact that 13 years ago, we started this family and they are a huge part if it!!

I took the boys to the pool so that mom could have some alone time on her anniversary and then we came back and had a nap, yeah right!

We got to go out for a “romantic” dinner with the boys at a place called “Calypso.” We sat out on the back deck where they put all of the loud families with crazy kids. There was live music from a guy that did a bunch of 80s covers. He was really pretty good. We met some nice folks from Georgia that had a boy in between Taylor and Tucker. We had some awesome fried pickles as well as what Jenny called “the best onion rings I have ever had.” Overall, it was a really good experience for us.

Here are some pics from the Anniversary dinner . . .

Vacation Pics-Day 4 (including boat cruise)

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Here are some pictures from our vacation that didn’t get sent last night as I forgot my camera . . . Enjoy!

Those dorsal fins are dolphins, not sharks. And yes, those folks are feeding the dolphins. Sorry all of these photos don’t go with the posts too well. . . but hey, we’re on vacation right?

Are you praying for our house to sell?? You need to be!!!

Sorry, there are a “boat load” of pictures in this post gallery . . . pretty punny, huh?

Vacation Pics–Day 3

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Here are some pictures from our vacation that didn’t get sent last night as I forgot my camera . . . Enjoy!