being real

Friday:
5:00- Left for super retreat in Twin Cities.
8-11- TFK, Hawk Nelson, Dizmis, 7th Ave Jones Concert (crowded, but it rawked)
Saturday:
2:00am- Finnally got the Jhers asleep.
7:00am- get milk and juice
9-12- Collected Food for Food shelf.
12-5- Camp Snoopy (I love the Timberland Twister)
8:00pm- home
Sunday
2am- wife goes to emergency room
6am- wife back from emergency room
7:30- Up and get kids ready for church
9:30- Teach Sunday School
11:00- Church
12:30-3:30- Make lunch, clean house
5:30-8:00- Take kids to freinds for supper
8:00-8:30- Get kids to bed.

I am beat.

Here is some local weird news for today. In my town one of the schools was shut down because a deer got in a wrecked a bunch of stuff. We have a lot of snow days by living in Minnesota, but I have never heard of a “deer day”. Funny stuff.

Today we will be going on our annual fall retreat. This years schedule we will be heading up to Minneapolis to go to Thousand Foot Crutch/Hawk Nelson concert, then tomorrow we will be colleting food for the food shelf, then off to the Mall of America for Camp Snoopy. It should be a good time.

Here is the story about the deer:

This morning, police officers were called to Kennedy Elementary School about a deer that had jumped through a window into the school.

No one was injured during the incident.

Well I am back in the office with a ton of work to do.

I thought I would share a few pictures. I hardly took any.

Here is a picture of David Crowder and his band worshiping. I was pretty far back so the quality sort of stinks.

While we we at Youth Specialties we created this fun box ball game using a box from HQ and a ball that we got from one of the booths. Here are a couple of my friends playing the game. I have a feeling that something like this could only break out at a YS conference.

Here’s another…

Lot to do…I better get to work.

This will most likely be my final post from Sacramento. It was a good convention as always. It is always a little sad when it is all over and you go back home to your church. However, I am excited to see my wife and kids.

The final general session tonight was great with David Crowder leading worship. It seems to always be one of the best times of worship for my whole year.

It is late, so I’m not sure I can be very retrospective at 1:35am.

After I leave the NYWC I always feel so thankful for the privilege to serve the Lord by working with JH students. It is truly a blessing!

I also always come back with a lot practical stuff to bring back to my leadership team as well.

As I get back tomorrow night I have some major things to think about.

Super Group night at church this week (bring a friend night)
Play practice- it is going pretty well.
Preaching on the 16th- I think I am going to talk about Messy Spiritually.

Ok…heading to bed as I’m going lose two hours tomorrow.

I am too tired to blog tonight. It was a very full day. In short, the best of the day included:

Comedy Club
4th Ave. Jones
Louie Giglio (”We are in the movie!)
Hanging out with my old friend Barry.

Time to play some killer bunnies. I must reclaim my title!

This morning I went to a seminar about dealing with parents in youth ministry. There were a few good quotes I pulled out of it. One of the things that was talked about was about understanding the expectations that parents have on the youth ministry. The 4 that he talked about were these:

1. Teen sitting service
2. Entertain their kid
3. Save their kid
4. Disciple their child

It was emphasized that it is important to REALLY communicate with parents what the ministry is all about so these false expectations can be defused.

Here is a stat that was shared.

“Youth workers have on average 40 hours of time to influence students.”
“Parents have over 3000 hours to influence their kid.”

Those stats really show how we should be spending our time by enabling parents to minister to their own kids!

In dealing with parents our prayer should be…

“God , give me thicker skin, and a softer heart.”

More quotes…

‘Dealing with families in ministry make us (youth pastors) more Godly.”

During the seminar I took time to just thank God for giving me the strength to do ministry and deal with parents for all this time. Sometimes I forget that He is sustaining me through all this.

I also felt like I need to be more proactive n getting involved in ministering to the families in our church and make myself more available to them.

In the first general session was good. The “Skit Guys” tore it up! They get better and better every time I see them. What they do for a living is really my dream being a drama guy. I would love to take my weekends and do drama like that. My prayer would be that God would bring another talented actor to make that sort of ministry possible.

Looking forward to the 2nd session tonight. Rumor is Mark Yaconelli and Doug Fields are going to brawl.

I thought it would be cool to post a list of people blogging from the convention. Here are the people I have found so far. I will add them as I find them.

ysmarko
beingreal guy
Andrew Seely
ythdudette
revkasedoggy
lilly
chris not blogging yet but he is at the conference
jlyn76
ayouthpastor
midwesternyouthpastor

Hey everybody! I know that not very many people read this blog at this point. However, I am at the National Youth Workers convention in Sacramento this weekend and I thought it would be good for me to blog all that is happening. I am always pumped about this convention. This is the 8th time I have been to this convention.

So far all that has happened is we checked in to a nasty hotel room in the Quality Inn here in Sacramento. We checked in early and the lady at the desk said, “Go up there and if the room is not clean give us a call.” Ok…this was a bad idea to even go check. We go up to the room and it is really, really nasty. So we call and 10 minutes later they send the maids. They clean the room while we are standing outside. Then when they are almost done with the room the lady comes out and says the shower is busted. We are thinking “Yes” we don’t have to stay in the nasty room. I could describe how nasty I was but I is too gross to blog.

Then we head to lunch at PF Chang’s. YES! YES! Can you say yum? Their lettuce wraps are awesome! Then we went to the Convention Center to check in. One of the great things about YS is all the free stuff. It starts with getting the new YS tote bag. The bad this year is interesting. I really liked last year’s backpack. I wonder how much I will use this new one?

We then checked out the YS store and ten headed to back to the Hotel for a little round of Killer Bunnies. I won. Thank you Abu! Next we are heading back to the convention center to sign up for prizes. Oh..man I feel it…this is the year I will win an I pod.

It has been about a week since I have blogged. Here are some of the highlights.

Last week we started our softball season. I am on a team with a bunch of college age students. The reasons I am on the softball team is two fold: #1 to have a little fun and #2 to get to know the students so that I am able to minister to them in some way. Some of them are not believers, so I am least hope to befriend some of them and at least pray for them.

Today, I took pretty much the whole day for a spiritual retreat. I want to start doing this is just really connect with God and focus solely on him. I spent a lot of time in prayer, the word and focusing on the future. This included continuing to pray about changing ministry/location. It was a really good and refreshing time today.

Tonight, I watch my first movie from cleanfilms.com. It was pretty sweet. I watched Oceans 11. It is so nice to be able to watch a high quality movie and not worry about the objectionable content. Very refreshing! It was enjoyable, even though I’m not really to into heist movies. We have Oceans 12 on our “Q” too. We will probably get that one in the coming weeks.