My Worship Revolution

So last night I rolled down to The Catalyst for the first time along with Ryan.  An old friend from Revolution has this band called The Autumn Film.  They were supposed to play at 9pm.  We got there and found out the show was pushed back to 10:30.
Sorry.  I gotta sleep.

Got to say hi to Tifah though.  It was good to catch up.
Promise…there is more of a point to this post.

She is playing an acoustic set by herself at Asana Tea House tonight at 8pm.
I highly recommend it.
Do yourself a favor and head downtown tonight and enjoy some good music.
Enjoy.

A friend pointed out to me this week that I totally missed this last week.
Of course, I knew that.  But I guess it’s good to know someone else noticed to.  I guess I’ll keep it up then. 
I was thinking it’s kinda like high school.  Trying to get the jocks to have lunch with the band geeks, or the waterpolo players to talk to the football player, introducing the worship blogger to a mom blogger, or the leadership blog to the random rants blog, the “mega-blogger” to the friend who has great thoughts about life and faith.

Anyway, time to share some link love again this Friday.

Meet Ben Arment.  I started reading Ben’s blog, History In The Making, after he planted a church in Reston, Virginia.  He is now one of the organizers for the Catalyst Conference, and hard at work on Catalyst West Coast (which I’m looking forward to attending with our staff).

Of course I started reading because of my passion for church multiplication and I wanted to follow his experiences.  But I keep reading now because of his great leadership insights.  Truth is, I have other friends who have great, deep, insightful…and long posts.  I like to read them, but have to wait til I can set aside time to get through the whole post.  The thing I like about Ben’s blog is they are usually bite sized leadership learnings and principles that pack a lot of punch and really make you think.  So go by and check him out today.

What good blogs are you reading that challenge you as leader?

Here’s some pics of Caleb to go with the rest.
One more installment after this of Caleb and Micah together.
After that, back to more than just photo blogs.
Starting with my personal favorite…

What can I say, except…
Man!  My kids are cute!  Good thing I married a good looking woman!
He even looks pretty darn good with daddy’s haircut:

Early in the morning, before we hit the train bridge for family shots, Joel and Kenny took some studio shots of the boys, especially Micah.  That was really the primary reason they came.

Here’s a few of my faves of Micah.

A few weeks ago, Joel and his business partner and friend Kenny came up to visit and take some shots of the boys and the fam.  There are so many killer shots, it’s hard to even decide which one’s to post.

I’ll share some of my favorite shots of the family he took that afternoon out at the trestles by the boardwalk late that morning.  Then I’ll have a few more posts later this week with shots of the boys.
And eventually I’ll get em all on Facebook, too.

Photos by TenEleven photo.  Hire them.  Wedding.  Engagement.  Barmitsfa. Quinceneta.  Whatever.  They’re money, baby.

Click on pictures to enlarge em.

This past weeks message focused on the topics of heaven and hell.
In addition to last week's video, we also asked those people what they thought about heaven, hell, and life after death.  Here's what they had to say:

One of the biggest impacts of my faith early on were some books I read by Randy Alcorn, primarily Deadline.  The book presents some amazing thoughts on heaven and possibilities of what it could be like.

I tend to think that because of our lack of understanding in our theology of heaven, there are a lot of followers of Jesus that actually still fear death because they are afraid heaven might be "boring."  This is one reason I think it can be important to spend some time studying scripture in regard to a theology of heaven.

I know all sorts of different backgrounds swing by here, so it's time to anonymously share your opinions.  3 polls below.  I'm curious how many of you believe there really is a literal heaven and a literal hell.  And for those of you who do think there's a heaven, especially Christ followers, are you looking forward to it?
Or do you tend to agree with the classic Billy Joel lyrics:

The list of podcasts (in order) I listened to on the way back to Santa Cruz the other day:

Man.  That's a whole lot of challenge for one drive!

So, what have you listened to or read that has really challenged you lately?

Yesterday I left Temecula to head toward Santa Cruz at approximately 1:00 p.m.
I finally arrived at my home at approximately 3:15 a.m.
How did a drive that can be accomplished in 7 hours end up taking 14 hours?
Simple.  I grew up in Southern California.  I worked in Southern California.  I have lots of relationships in California.  So I can't drive through cities without stopping to spend time with people.
So I stopped to hang with a portion of the staff from my Long Beach church family.
I stopped to hang with an old friend who's a college pastor in Downey.
I stopped to literally meet my half-sister in Thousand Oaks.  Well, I met her once when I was 14, so this qualifies as meeting in my book.

I realized on the drive home (which left lots of time for thinking) that this is a microcosm of how I view and approach life.
1.  It's more about the journey than the destination.
2.  The journey is all about the relationships.

So my encouragement…slow down today.  Take a moment to stop sprinting to the finish line without much regard for the people or the process.
Don't get me wrong.  The finish line is important.  But the reality is, in real life, it is either moving or just leads to a new finish line.
You'll spend a lot more time on the journey.  So put a little extra investment in a relationship along the way today.  In the end, it will probably be worth the time.

Started a 3 week series at church yesterday called The Other Side.  Talking about stuff beyond this world.  Spiritual warfare, angels, demons, heaven, hell, etc.

Yesterday was on the "parallel war."  The battle between God and Satan for our souls.
To kick off the series, thought it could be really interesting in a place like Santa Cruz to go downtown and get some opinions on the existence of another dimension.  The interactions didn't disappoint.

Check out the video we used to open the series:

Next week we'll hear what those people had to say about heaven and hell.

And in week 3, we doing a panel discussion of the pastoral staff on common questions about the topics.  We've encouraged our church to submit their questions over here.
Should be a fun series!

Wow.  Week 2 and I already almost forgot about this weeks flava.
But I didn’t disappoint.  Better late than never.

As I said, one of the goals here is to uncover some hidden gems to segments of people that read this blog that may not read the other segments.
A huge contingent of bloggers out there right now are all you crazy mom bloggers.  It’s insane to me the amount of traffic that some of those mom blogs get.

Well, I have a friend who has a blog, and she’s a mom, so I think that qualifies.
If you are another friend from the Revolution days, you probably already read Liana’s blog.
For the rest of you though, allow me to introduce you.

I might get in trouble for using that picture.  But hey, she posted it on her blog today.  Maybe if enough of you go over there and visit her, she’ll forgive me?

She lives in Long Beach, works as Starbucks, is married to worship leader and graphic designer who is also pretty awesome (sometimes awesome people marry awesome people, and that’s cool), and is the mom of a 2 year old little girl (she is 2 now, right?).  Whether you know her personally or not, she has a hilarious and pithy (am I using that word right?  Pithy…yeah) way of writing about life with her family and being a mom.

So go and enjoy the life of Liana at her blog, Look @ Me, Look @ Me.
And make sure you scroll down far enough to see her husband, Keith, singing Material Girl at the church.  Well worth the watch.

See ya again next week with some more link love.