My Worship Revolution

Literally.

As we pulled up to the house I could feel the nervousness in my stomach.  What is this guy like?  Is this gonna be awkward?  The door opened and next thing I know it was almost 3 hours later.

It was awesome hanging with him and his wife, Laura.   We had a blast chatting, getting to know each other, and letting Caleb go outside to play with the horses, goats, and chickens.  I might even be able to look past his total redneckness!  Country music, nascar, and cowboy hats!    Behold the pigs head that was hung the night before we arrived:

Meeting his family and being able to connect was super cool.  Strange to have somewhat shared experience and to be actually family with someone I’ve never known.  He is a Christ follower as well and is was cool to eat together and be able to pray together.  Looking forward to more visits with his fam as well as meeting the rest of the siblings in the near future.

So yeah, I know, Christmas was like 3 weeks ago.
But we just celebrated with our families last week.
Which means I can finally share a few of the gifts we gave that were birthed out of our focus on Advent Conspiracy this year.

The gift that I would say I was most looking forward to giving was one we created for both of our parents.  It was the most fun for me personally to put together and was one of those things we hope was meaningful for them to have.  We made extra copies and have been able to pass it on to some other family members who asked us for a copy as well.

We spent a bunch of time, with the help of Chris Gott (thanks dude!!) putting together our own Christmas album.  You can click to enlarge the inside of the cover below to see the details…track list, who played, etc.

And just for fun below that, you can hear the last couple tracks we laid down.  Including a little Merry Christmas from our whole family, 3 weeks late! 
Enjoy!

Little Drummer Boy

Silent Night

Well, back in the U.S. and back on the blog for 2009 anyway.  On vacation to see family for Christmas this week though.

Just got back from an awesome week in Mexico.  Like any trip, it had it's ups and downs, it's victories and it's hiccups, but after 5 days, between 2 groups equaling 115 people, one from Santa Cruz and one from L.A., 3 houses were built, 2 VBS experiences hosted, lots of other homes worked on, and lots of families were prayed for and loved on.  You can't beat that!

Here's a little video we showed at church on Sunday to share a piece of the experience.  Enjoy!

P.S. – The thumbnail in the video was Georgina leading us in morning exercises.  Hilarious!!  We need to produce her a workout video!

It’s been pretty quiet around here lately.
It’s gonna stay pretty quiet until after the New Year.
It’s actually provided kind of a nice break from blogging.
Kinda like it’s nice having an “off season” from Triathlon I guess.
Plenty of thoughts to ducument, just little time and motivation to bang em out.
But I’ll be back up and running (figuratively and literally) come January.

In the meantime, though, keep up with the next week in Mexico (internet service willing) over at the CLC Mexico blog.
Leaving with all these clowns in about 2 hours:

Keep us in your prayers!
It’s gonna be an awesome week!

Kinda like this, but a little bit different.
Saw this idea at both Whittaker blogs.
Comes from a Flickr group.
I like to steal good ideas.
It's a whole day in clips of a couple seconds each.

Yesterday I took the day off.
Here's the entire day in 90 seconds.
Welcome in to my life.
Enjoy.

Since I’m in a groove of pimping design, swing by our church site and check out the new design.
Tarena Heitmann, who is in our life group, designed it.  She is the bomb and did an amazing job!

Few small changes to tweak and then we’ll start adding some more functionality to it soon with the help of Aaron Mapes.
Good stuff!

A couple times a year I give designing a shot of my own.  We’re handing out a flyer at Caroling On The Wharf to advertise our Christmas Eve service as well as our New Years Series.  Used the same design as last year for our Christmas Eve candlelight service, but threw together a design for our January/February series using some background images Ed had grabbed for the branding.

I think it actually came out alright.  Better than some in the past in my opinion.  Take a look:

Any tips from you hot designers out there to make it better next time?

As a sidenote about that series, one of the things I’m really looking forward to is bring our friends Rex and Eve Johnson up here to do a marriage seminar at our church on Valentines weekend.  Unfortunately I might not be able to take part cause we should have a new baby that week, but if you are in Santa Cruz you wanna make it over for this.  They’re great!

I have a good excuse.

I was petty stoked about a creative element we added this past week.  We talked about advertising and the stock that it holds in todays consumeristic culture.  During the message, Rae Albrecht covered the cross with a collage of advertisements.  We pointed out that this is what our culture has done at Christmas, covered the cross of Jesus with consumerism and advertisements.  During the worship time after the message, we invited people to respond y removing the ads from the cross as a commitment to uncover the cross during this advent season.  It went really well and there were lots of people who responded that I don’t typically see get out of their seat to respond.

Thanks again to the brother-in-law Joel for designing a sweet mailer for our Caroling On The Wharf event.  Check it out: