My Worship Revolution

One of the things I absolutely love about my wife is her ability to constantly encourage me and feed into my insecure self.  She reminds me regularly of who God made me to be.

Sunday was a pretty busy and good day.  Leading worship in the morning.  Connections lunch with Ed and Brandon after church.  Leading a meeting for our Mexico missions team from 3-5.  Rachel took off right after that meeting to drive to SoCal without me to visit friends and family.

When I got home, I found this on the fireplace:

Just wanted to make you all jealous because my wife is the bomb.

Thanks for the constant encouragement babe.
You’re the best!

Well, if you're in Santa Cruz on November 30th, that is.

As I mentioned before, this Christmas we are running hard with Advent Conspiracy.  Let's spend less money this year, cut down the stress to focus on Jesus, give relational gifts of our time and effort this year, and give away the money we would have spent for the poor around the world.

As a creative way to get our church and our community thinking about and talking about this concept, we rented out the Rio Theater in Santa Cruz and will be screening the movie What Would Jesus Buy from producer Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me).  It is free, and instead of asking people to pay we will be accepting small donations to go to the Africa Oasis Project as part of our Advent Conspiracy initiative.  Check out the trailer:

In case you were wondering, no, this is not a "Christian" movie (whatever that means…I guess it isn't going to heaven when it dies).  In fact many people who go may not agree with all of the points made in the movie.  But it brings up some real issues, will get people thinking/talking (which I feel is a mark of great art, btw), and it is a message that fits in quite well in Santa Cruz.

The Rio has 680 seats.  I think it would be pretty incredible if we filled em all.  A long shot, but let's do it.
Invite all your friends:

What Would Jesus Buy
Nov. 30th – 5:00 PM
The Rio Theater
FREE

Here is the Facebook invite.

So, what do ya think?
And who's coming?

I kinda try to keep my politics fairly close to the vest around here.
I’m too opinionated.
I always end up ticking someone off.
And I learned years ago that it wasn’t worth it for me.
I still can’t help it sometimes.
But now I figure, it can’t hurt since the voting is over, right?  (Famous last words?)
Besides, I’m sure everyone else is blogging about it, too.
Might as well join the pack!

I doubt I keep it close enough to the vest for you not to know that my guy didn’t win.
Then again, both of them had some major weaknesses I wasn’t excited about.
But I’ve been saying for weeks that whoever wins will do fine.
I’ve been saying that I don’t believe one president can single handedly ruin us.
I’ve been saying God is in control.
Then Obama won.

Mixed feelings.
Huge day for us. First African-American president.  That truly is awesome and historic.
Although I was also disappointed earlier in the day reading about people who outright said they voted for Obama only cause they were excited to see an African-American president.  Is that really a sign that we have become color-blind?
But again, the fact that he is leader of the free world is very exciting only a generation away from the civil rights movement.
In that respect, I’m stoked.

But then the fear started to get in.
I let Facebook statuses and people’s opinions/fear tactics get in my head for an hour or two.
What will happen to our country?
What sort of massive mistake have we made?

Honestly, I know I’m in the minority, but I feel like W. has gotten a pretty unfair bad wrap.
And I’ve been irritated for several years now with the way people have attacked him.
That it has become OK to attack him personally completely outside of the issues.
Even cool to do so.

Now it’s my turn to practice what I preach and be on the other side.
I don’t believe any candidate can destroy what this country has built.
I will choose to be optimistic and hope for the best.
I will pray for our leader and do my best to get behind him.  That doesn’t mean I’ll agree always, but I’ll recognize him as the leader we have chosen.
And I’ll pray that he really can do some of the good things hes said he can.
Unity.
Momentum.
Progress.

And above all, whether it’s someone I voted for or not in office, I’ll keep in mind that I’m a citizen of the Kingdom of God before the kingdom of America.
I am optimistic, and excited for the future.

Of course you do have to admit, this is a pretty heavy blow for SNL.

Dude, this is awesome!

HT: JR Woodward

Enjoy your voting today y'all. 
Vote, then take the day off going around town getting all your free food!

Starbucks
Krispy Kreme
Ben & Jerry's
Dairy Queen
Woodstocks!!

So this year, Christmas is going to look a little different.
Our church will be talking about and participating in the Advent Conspiracy.
In addition to our church doing this, Rachel and I have been talking about it since last year and are pretty excited about what this means for us. 
Check out this embedded video:

So yeah, we want to take that pretty seriously this year.
That means a couple things for us.
Obviously, it means our gift giving is going to look a lot different this year.  So consider this fair warning to family and friends.
While we may not hit the bulls eye on every gift, we are trying to be more creative with our gift giving this year.  Giving gifts that will hopefully cost little and mean much.
And then redistributing our giving to people who need it world wide.
I can't wait to see how God is gonna bless it.

It also means this years Christmas wish list looks different.
I'll save that for part 2.
Look for that post later this week.

So, all of you, especially close friends and family…
Who else is in?

Let's take the story back.

I was quickly perusing a couple of blogs between tasks when I saw this video at Vicky Beeching's blog.

I hate hay.

Most of my SoCal friends and readers know Charlie Garrison.  Several Santa Cruz friends met him this year, too.  If you don’t know Charlie and his wife, Bridget…you need to.  They are one of the coolest couples, some of my best friends in the world, and God is all over their life with big things in store.

But there is one thing in particular that Charlie has sucked at in the past.  It’s called blogging.  This was his first attempt.  But he’s giving it another go.

So if you don’t know Charlie, get over to his new blog and get to know him.
If you do know him, and even followed his last attempt at a blog, go weigh in on this poll and encourage him to keep it up!

I can’t wait for Nov. 5th anymore!  Just with the props alone I am so tired of the ridiculous, non-stop commercials, YouTube videos, Facebook groups/status pleas, bumper stickers, signs, and clothing lines.  And I’m talking about from both sides of the big ones.  Half the time, the commercials and videos themselves make me want to vote for the other side because they’re just so irritating!

And welcome to my mailbox today…

Looking forward to November 5th!
What irritates you the most about politics today?

After my last triathlon, I ended up taking 3 or 4 (or maybe 5) weeks off from training.  After signing up to race again on Nov. 8th.  Big mistake!!  Last week I went for a couple of very painful runs and was realizing how much ground I have really lost.  It hit me that if there were the opportunity to jump in on a killer race immediately, I probably couldn’t hang.  Even worse considering I’m out again 2 weeks from today.  Today was a little better.  I shared with a friend that I recorded my new best mile today.  Apparently 8:22 is pretty lame to a former runner.  Good thing I was wrong.  My fastest mile is actually 8:15.

Now time for a triathlon spiritual analogy.  As I was running, it got me thinking about 1 Timothy 4:2, when Paul says “preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season”.  I can do the same thing at times in my spiritual life.  I dig into the word because I’m gonna be teaching on that passage soon.  I spend some extra time with Jesus cause I’ll be leading worship.  But sometimes I forget to just stay sharp and hang with Jesus because He is.  Because I’m meant to be.

In the same way that I won’t be ready to race a triathlon if I don’t continue to train, even out of season, and definitely won’t get better, I won’t be ready to meet the increasing challenges that God has for me if I don’t work to say spiritually fit as well.
So what are you doing to “be prepare?”  In season and out?

That being said, I need to get lots of Tri training in during the next couple weeks.  And just for fun, here’s another pic from Pacific Grove that I thought was kinda funny!