Groovy Sputum

2007

In our quest for a new direction in life, we wanted to be open to where God was leading but we also wanted to allow Him to speak through circumstances.  In other words, we put our house up for sale with the idea that if God wanted us to stay, the house wouldn’t sell.  I truly believe that God can and does do things like that.  One of my favorite quotes in life is from a former pastor in Lynchburg.  He would say, “Where God guides, He provides.” Rather than re-write the story of how we sold our home and bought land, you can click here and read that post. In short, we did sell and a few days later found what I think is the perfect place for us.

Since we didn’t have a house yet, we moved in with my Mom temporarily. We started attending a church near where we wold build and God began to lay on my heart the desire to build it on a cash basis (no mortgage). You can read about that more here.

I forgot to mention that our 5th child was born in May of 2006 and by August of 2007, #6 had arrived. We officially had to buy a 12 passenger van. I call it Moby.

There were a few athletic things that happened this year, too. I had purchased a road bike back in 2005 and had been getting pretty serious about riding when I heard that Mark Schultz the singer was riding across the US. I had the opportunity to ride 100 miles with him as he came through Ohio in June. Pretty cool. You can read more and see a video here.

I also competed in a few triathlons. I hate to see my running times diminish and I am not able to put the needed time in to running fast anymore, so now I have the excuse that I am running after a swim and a bike to blame my sorry slow 5k times on.  The tris I did were local YMCA ones.  I finished 2nd in both.  Big whoopty do.

So, that should bring my long lost Facebook friends up to speed with the highlights of my life the last decade. At this point, we are expecting child #7 in September and our house is currently under construction. If all goes well, we will move in this fall sometime.

Now you know! And knowing is half the battle!

2006

By default, I found myself the leader of our little church plant in January of 2006.  Many of us felt that, although we had lost our pastor and were also loosing members, we should not fold up quite yet.  I for one have seen God do great things after great loss, defeat, or weakness, and I wanted to see if He would raise up this church after such a time.  I felt that God would either bring a pastor with a heart for church planting to us or He would move us on to other things.  By July, we realized that God had the later planned for us.  We officially held our last service in July and we became homeless (churchwise, anyway).

There are many times that I can look back on my life and know that God has specifically lead me to certain places: Liberty, for one, and the church plant in Marion for another.  It is a strange to have that which God has so clearly lead you to taken away so quickly.  I guess you could say that I questioned God, but not necessarily in the bad, write-a-book-about-not-questioning-God type of way.  I honestly just wanted to know what direction He wanted us to go.  We were willing to leave the Columbus area and move to a place where the biggest thing is a nasty bologna sandwich in order to plant a church.  Now, with that gone, we wondered if God wanted us to stay or move to a completely different place. I find it difficult to wait for direction when I am in a place I don’t want to be anymore.

I had grown a lot in the area of leading worship while with the church plant and so we decided to see if God wanted me to do that full time.  There were a few churches that we interview for, but in the end, it just wasn’t meant to be.

So, we decided to take a sabbatical if you will and attend a church where we could just rest and heal a bit.  We started going to Rome Community Church in September.  My dad had pastored there for 15 years and I would say it was the church I grew up in.  I know just about everyone and feel comfortable there.  We just wanted a place that we could rest.

There were many unsettling things going on at my school in 2006 as well.  The teacher’s union was renegotiating our salary in February and March and since I was not a union member, things got a bit weird.  Let’s just say that union membership has it’s privileges and one of those privileges is being a nice person to other union members.  Did I mention I wasn’t a member?  Yeah, things got weird.

Needless to say, I began looking for a different job and decided to go to work for a virtual school. It’s a new model of education and allows me to work from home on my laptop. Oh, and there is no union! I started in the fall of 2006 and are still teaching from home. It nice, although the morning commute can be a drag.

We continued to search for what God had for us and I wish I could say that He answered, but that would be a lie. We pretty much just ended the year still searching for His direction.

Next up: 2007. For sale by owner and the promise land.

2005

The church plant began to struggle in 2005. For whatever reason, some of the people we thought were core members and committed to the new church began to pull away. We lost a few families early in the year and our numbers were down through the summer. Looking back on it a few years removed, I see that it was part of the bigger picture, but at the time I really struggled to see why God would have us plant a church only to see it die.

I did learn a lot about people’s motives when attending a church through this, though. There are many people who God brings to a ministry and they all have different spiritual needs, gifts, and desires. Some people have a sincere desire to serve and use their gifts to serve the Lord. Others are looking for a place to push their own agenda and gain power and influence. Others simply want to be spoon fed and consume the latest thing. It seems that a new church plant will attract some of each category. My father had enough experience and wisdom to know this in advance and he had a vision to disciple those coming with less than pure intentions and move them to a place where they were using their gifts to serve the body rather than play politics or consume. There was only so much that we could do, however, and we saw some people leave the church when challenged rather than mature in their faith.

Although the church was struggling, none of us were prepared for what happened November 5th.

It was a typical fall day. The Buckeyes were playing in Columbus and it was the first day of pheasant season. The weather was unusually nice and I went out for a morning spin on my bike. I remember seeing a pheasant in a field as I neared Waldo and I pulled over to watch him for a bit. I thought of all the times dad and I had hunted together and wondered if I could convince him to get out with me in the next few weeks. When I got back, I called dad to ask if he wanted to go with me and my two year old son to the Skull Session in Columbus. It started at 1:00 and we could get down there and get back in time to see the game on tv. He told me he would enjoy it, but that he needed to work on his sermon for Sunday and he would have to take a rain check this time.

I headed off to Columbus around 11:00 and enjoyed the band practice with my son (his first one!) and as I was driving home, mom called. She asked where I was and I could sense that something was not right. I told her I was headed home and she asked me to come to her house as soon as possible. At this point, I knew something was wrong so I pushed her to tell me. She hemmed and hawed a bit, but finally she just said it. “I think your daddy is dead.”

I remember the shock but I also remember not feeling the way I thought I would feel. In movies people always freak out, loose control of their cars, and go into a seizure when they are told things like this, but that didn’t happen to me. Obviously, I was sad, shocked, and stunned, but I distinctly remember keeping my wits and remaining calm. I immediately called Valerie and told her and I stopped in Waldo to drop off my son and then headed to mom’s.

As I pulled up, my sister was just pulling in from shopping and was going to get the mail (she lives next door to my mom). I rolled down my window and asked her if she had spoken with mom yet (I could tell from her chipperness that she hadn’t) and told her to get to mom’s right away. I pulled in mom’s driveway and we all kind of met in the front yard. I already knew, of course, but when mom told Leigh Ann that dad was gone, she didn’t quite understand. I think she though that he had gone to the store, but then mom clarified and it sank in. That was a tough moment, let me tell you.

Mom needed to go to the hospital to sign some papers and I decided to take her. A strange thing happened when we go there because the Chaplin on call met us when we arrived and tried to counsel us a bit. Let’s just say he was a pastor of a church that emphasizes works rather than faith. He asked us some questions and our responses were probably not what he was used to hearing. Obviously we were sad and surprised by the death, but we were not sad for dad. We were grateful that he was with the Lord and just kind of jealous that we couldn’t be there, too. I am sure that he was used to dealing with the freaking out, loosing control, seizure folks who didn’t have a hope in a true, living God. We could tell from his responses that he hadn’t seen this kind of thing before.

I don’t mean to ramble so much, but I am kind of writing for my own sake at this point.

It was determined that dad had a massive heart failure. As best as we can tell, he had finished his sermon, taken off his glasses, and leaned back in his chair to take a cat nap. His “to do” list had sermon crossed off and watching the OSU football game was the next thing on the list. Mom found him in his office chair when she returned from shopping. We think it was quick because there was no indication that he tired to get out of his chair or even reach for the phone which was right beside him. We like to think that he just went to sleep and woke up in heaven. Obviously we don’t know for sure, but we like to think that.

The next week was a fury of funeral arrangements, difficult phone calls, and planning the memorial service. The funeral was for family only as we desired to have as many people as possible at the memorial service scheduled for Saturday morning. May people did attend and I heard from many that it was one of the best memorial services they had ever been to. It was a nice mix of worship, remembering, saying good by, and the gospel.

Up Next: 2006. The search for a new direction in life.

2004

Hope Community Church officially launch in late fall of 2003 and for the next two years, we pretty much focused on getting it up and running.  My job was primarily to be the worship leader.  I pretty much got this job because I was the only one who could play modern worship songs on a guitar.  I learned a lot and I enjoyed finding new songs to teach to the church.  I also applied my sound tech skills to design and run the portable sound/video system for Hope.  Oh, we were an Evangelical Free Church, by the way.

Hope started small and didn’t experience the growth that we had anticipated.  We had about 40 people by the end of 2004 and were trying to prepare for further growth.  We went through “A Purpose Driven Life” and had a very good children’s ministry started as well as a discipleship program designed to train up leaders in the church body.  We tried to target young families and felt like the family was our niche in the Marion area.  It was hard work and discouraging at times, but the joy of serving the Lord and knowing that we were doing what He wanted in this church plant well outweighed the negatives.

I also inherited the head track and cross country job at my new school in 2004.  The teams were small and had not experienced much success in the last decade or so, and I was determined to change that.  I started a distance camp in in July called Camp Elijah.  I named it that for a variety of reasons.  First, the story of Elijah outrunning the king’s chariot after he defeated the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel has always impressed me.  Secondly, the new school I taught at was called Elgin, and that is fairly close to Elijah, right?  I only had about 10 people that first year at camp, but it was good.  I was able to show the kids what was needed to be successful in running.  One of the reasons they weren’t very good was because they didn’t have anyone showing them how to train.  They wanted to take June and July off and then run 30 miles a week starting in August and expected to run fast times.  Sorry.  Ain’t going to happen.  Ok, maybe it would for Bob Kennedy or German Fernandez, but not for the masses.  We went from being the perennial last place team in our conference to a middle of the pack team (5th out of 10 teams).  Not bad for the first year, I guess.

Child #4 was also born in August and we officially had to upgrade to a Windstar. For a while, we actually had 3 car seats in the back of our Taurus. Talk about a tight fit!

Up Next: 2005.  A struggling church and a father’s passing.

2003

We had our first son in April and as soon as we saw him, we knew that something was not right.  He had a small protrusion at the base of his spine.  It looked like the end of your little finger sticking out of his back.  The skin was sealed and he didn’t seem to have any other abnormalities, but the next few days of X-rays and CT scans revealed that he had Spina Bifida.  He had a mild form of SB which means his spinal cord was longer than it should be and his last vertebra had a gap in it. The protrusion that we saw was actually the end of his spinal cord poking through his spinal column. The doctor at Children’s Hospital in Columbus suggested surgery as soon as he was able. So, at 6 weeks of age, our son had open spine surgery. He seemed to have felling and movement in his lower legs and that was a good sign that he may not have any nerve damage, but only time would tell. He came out of surgery fine and recovered well. By 10 months of age, he was walking. Amazing. The child that we worry may never be able to walk is the one that walks the earliest. God is good.

My mom and dad had moved to Marion, Ohio, to take care of my grandparents in 2001 and by 2003, my father felt the Lord leading him to plant a church here. He pitched the idea to Valerie and I and we felt the desire to help, but we were in Columbus. We began to pray that God would provide a job and home near Marion so that we could be a part of the church plant.

Over spring break, we were in Marion visiting my folks an decided to drive through a little village called Waldo, just a few miles south of Marion. We didn’t know if there were any homes for sale, but Waldo was on the way home anyway, so why not just drive through and look. We immediately saw a sign in front of a small house there and as we pulled in, the owner did as well. He took us through and we decided to come back with my realtor cousin Sara. A few days latter we decided to make a bid and see what happened. Well, they accepted the bid without even a counter offer. So we had our home. A week or so later I discovered that a local school near Marion was hiring a science teacher. The same school also needed a track coach, so, they hired me in May.

Some would call it luck, others circumstantial, but I like to think that God provided a home and job for us so that we could help dad plant a church.

Up Next: 2004. Church stuff and #4.

Done…Finally

After much delay, our WordPress church web site is up and running. There is mostly static, for-visitor info on it right now, but we did manage to launch with 6 posts. There is a testimony, a message from the pastor, a brief summary about some recent events, and a few technical articles explaining how to use the rss feeds and explaining social bookmarks. Check it out here. I would love to hear some feedback about what you think.

New VBS Idea

One thing I know about myself is that I have big ideas and good intentions, but sometimes (read usually) fail to follow through on them. As I have been mulling this summer’s VBS over the last few days, I realized that I am not realistically going to be able to write, design, and produce a VBS from scratch. Maybe next summer when that is all I have to do I can devote myself to it, but not this year.

So, I decided to take one more look at the kits available this year and have settled (I think) on Lifeway’s Outrigger Island concept. It is the only kit that comes close to what I had in mind as far as teaching and doctrine. Basically, it is set in the south Pacific and the kids are on the island to “Learn the Truth, Speak the Truth, and Live the Truth”. Each day has a basic doctrine that is the focus and a verse that supports it. I am tweaking them a bit, but for the most part I am keeping them the same:

• Truth 1: God is real and made everything
• Truth 2: The Bible is God’s word
• Truth 3: Jesus is the Son of God
• Truth 4: Jesus is the only way
• Truth 5: My life should reflect the truth

Although I don’t like the music very much and am only planning to use 2 songs from the CD, one song stuck out that I REALLY like. It’s called Wiki Wiki and is the gospel message Hawaiian style. You can listen to it here. The other song is called Jesus Is and is nice, too.

I think this theme will be good for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that there is a ton of luau crap available from every church/school resource catalog. I also like the fact that all the logos, t-shirts, name tags, flyers, promo stuff, etc. is already designed for me. Basically, I need to get someone to decorate the church, volunteers to help me, and a few creative people to decide on which crafts they want the kids to make and we have a VBS program.

Oh…I also am going to try out online registration this year. I am not going to subscribe to Lifeway’s service (although I am sure it is nice), but will be using Google Docs new form feature. Check out my sample registration form. People will enter their info ahead of time and the data will be dumped into my Google Doc spreadsheet. I can then sort the students, assign them to classes, make up name tags, print out class lists, etc. ahead of time. All the kids have to do is show up on day 1, drop off their signed permission slip, and WHAM…they are on Outrigger Island! I can also send out email reminders each morning for kids who missed a night.

Now I have to dig out my kukui nuts, ukulele, and grass skirt. Good times.

VBS 2008

I guess our church didn’t do VBS last year because no one wanted to be the director. I inquired about this coming year and no one has stepped forward to lead it yet so I told Pastor Matt (our youth pastor) that I would be willing. He seemed pretty excited about the possibility of having a VBS again and said I could pretty much pick out what I wanted and have it whenever I wanted. That’s nice.

As I usually do, I came home and immediately started to plan every intricate detail of this endeavor. I began by looking at my schedule. Due to fact that July is going to be totally crazy for me this year, I am leaning toward holding the VBS June 9-13 in the evenings. I think I will have better luck with workers if I do an evening VBS and I really can’t get away for 4 hours each morning for a whole week in June.

After I considered the date, I looked at the themes that are offered by the major VBS publishers this year. While they all look nice, none of them are what I really want in a VBS. The all seem to be geared toward church kids and are not very evangelical. I am of the opinion that VBS should be more for non-Christian kids and the primary focus should be on instructing them about who Jesus was/is and what salvation is really about. Most of the kits out today focus on Christian character (which is fine) but I just don’t think we should be spending time teaching that when the majority of the kids attending will not even be saved.

So, I decided to brain storm to see if I could come up with my own theme. I have a ton of great kids music that teaches scripture so that is not a problem and there are plenty of resourses for teaching Bible stories, making crafts, and plyaing games. The real trick it to come up with an idea for the decorations, opening skits, and what key points will be taught each day.

I did a quick search for what kids movies and toys were popular in 2007 and one particular trend developed: Transformers was a big hit last year. Then I got the idea to do a parody of that but instead of robots taking over the world, we could focus on the idea that Jesus is The Transformer who can and will totally change your life forever. Each day can be a different aspect of who He is. I was thinking about Him as Savior, Creator, Lord, Provider, and Healer. Those could be the daily points. He saves us, He made us, He is in charge of our lives, He provides for us, and He heals us.

The opening skits could center around one or two special agents who work for some agency. They have been assigned the job of collecting information about and identifying a mysterious being called The Transformer that came to Earth. Obviously, The Transformer is Jesus and each day the special agents will discover a new aspect of this mysterious being.

As is custom with me, I have been tooling around with designing a logo for this VBS. I found a transformer-like font and a dingbat font that has fake transformer-like head symbols. I choose Romans 12:2 as the key verse mostly because it is the only good Bible verse with the word transform in it. It fits, though, and we can use it to focus on the fact that Jesus is The Transformer.

Anyway, I would love to hear what you think. Feel free to make suggestions…I have a ton of writing to do before June and I haven’t even begun to consider a set design.

Racers…Start Your Engines!

The Awana Grand Prix was held tonight at church (finally). We were flooded out two weeks ago and iced out last week and nearly snowed out this week, but we managed to hold the event. We entered two matchbox cars and two pinewod derby cars. The boys loved being able to finally hold their cars and play with them. S took first place in the preschool age group and I was impressed with the speed of his little red racer with wings. N had a traditional dragster which didn’t go so well. At least it looked cool.

The girls cars were right at the weight limit of 5.0 ounces and I really thought they would be fast. S took third in the early elementary group, but I honestly think there was a mistake in the timing or the adding because she never placed higher than 3rd in her heats. They assured me it was correct, though. I was told that the places were determined by the cumulative time of four runs. Whatever. A’s car looked nice, but wasn’t very fast.

One thing that I thought was neat was a comment that A made on the way home. “The homeshchool kids obeyed the teachers every time we were told to sit down or line up against the wall. The school kids didn’t”. It was true. The 6 or 7 girls that hang out together at Awana are all homeschooled and I don’t know if their good behavior is due to that fact or if it is just that they are a bunch of goodie-goodies, but I appreciated their obedience nonetheless.

The Blog That’s Not A Blog

Sunday was supposed to be our launch of the new church website, but due to many things, it has been put off until March 2nd. I think that date is pretty solid, mostly because Pastor Mike announced it from the pulpit on Sunday, gave out the web address, and said it would be up on that day. I figured that I would spend some time explaining a few things about the site that I think are rather unique.

When you think of a blog, even a church blog, you typically think of a Blogger or WordPress layout: a header image that changes with the seasons, one large column with the 5 or 6 latest posts, and a side bar filled with widgets and such. This is fine for a personal blog, but it’s not what I had in mind for our church site. I wanted to have an area where we could put static data (like service times, a map, statement of faith, etc.) but reserve the majority of the page area for posts. Here’s the catch: I wanted to display a number of posts from a variety of categories on the page in a way that readers could see them all.

After investigating many themes available for WordPress, I found that 99% of them don’t separate posts based on category nor do they display posts in multiple places. Then I discovered the phrase magazine style theme. After a Google search with that phrase, I found a number of themes that would do what I wanted. They all are built primarily for newspapers or magazines that display their info in separate categories. Some of my favorites are The Morning After, Mimbo, Structure, and Grid Focus. Others I found are Gridlock, Visionary, and a number of themes by Upstart Blogger.

After trying a few, I finally settled on the Mimbo theme due to it’s classic styling and use of custom fields. If you are a Seinfeld fan, you will recognize the name. Funny stuff. Anyway, I made a few changes to the sidebar and the CSS file, but not many. The first thing you see when you go to the site is the latest post from the pastor. Below it are the three latest testimonies as well as the latest post from the children, youth, and adult categories. The announcements are in the top right corner and are actually posts with only theirs title showing. The nice thing about this is that they show up on the page as bulleted lines, but are sent as posts via the rss feed.

When visitors come to the site, they have access to 12 posts from 6 different categories as well as navigation and special event banners. This is exactly what I wanted. A traditional blog format shoves all of the content to the bottom or the archives and the viewer has to search for the content they want. With a magazine style format, the viewer always sees the latest post from each category, regardless of when it was posted.

The static info that rarely changes is confined to pages and can be accessed via the drop down navigation bar at the top. The titles showing are the parent pages and the drop down choices are children of those parents. The only pages that will change much will be the events. I am planning to create a new page for each special event we have and then link the side banner ads to them. When the event is first presented, it will be written up and categorized into either the children, youth, or adult areas as a post. As the event approaches, I will create a post in the announcement category so that a reminder is sent to any one subscribing to the site feed.

So, that’s it. I think the overall visual appearance is nice (conservative, yet modern in a techie way) and it functions the way I had it in my head. I would love to hear what you think about the concept and design. We haven’t gone live yet, so who knows, maybe something you suggest will be worked into the final product!