my life has been very busy lately.  here are some of the things I’ve been doing:

• getting ready for our high school fall retreat; october 24-26
• preparing for and putting on our 2nd annual “battle of the bands.”  we had 5 local bands and over 400 people in the underground.  we had 35 people accept Jesus as their savior during this event…I will be calling all 35!
• preparing for a new series in velocity called “what happens in high school stays in high school.”
• celebrating my sisters 22nd birthday with my family.  nothing like ordering lobster to take home, and having to stare your food in the face while you eat it.

well that’s about it.  I will try and post more as life happens.

This was very revealing to me.  Reminded me of the “5-a-day” challenge I blogged about a while back.

I love Saturdays.  Especially the ones where you sleep in, and still have the rest of the day to accomplish stuff.  I am sitting in a very comfortable booth at the Grand Traverse Pie Company preparing for my talk in Velocity.  This place has pretty good salads, phenomenal desserts, and free Wi-Fi…enough said.

peace out for now.

I’m excited for this weekend for a couple reasons.

1.  I’m in Muskegon right now enjoying some down time on Lake Michigan.

2.  Sunday night marks the launch of a new ministry season at NorthRidge Church.

Proverbs 21:31 encourages me to work hard and yet rely fully on the power of God.

amen.

Just Kidding.  This is a picture of the 18th hole at Hill Top Course in Plymouth…it was my 6th stroke (par 4).  I had the priviledge of golfing with two volunteer leaders in Velocity.  We had a great time of fellowship, ending the evening with some delicious Burger Spot.

My small group decided on “The Bean” as a meeting place tonight.  It is a grass roots coffee shop located Downtown Plymouth.  We chose the back room for obvious reasons.  Who wants to have an in-depth discussion among complete strangers?  As irony would have it, sitting no further than 8 feet away from us was a slendor looking fellow making phone calls to people I’m sure he’s never met asking them if they would consider voting for Barack Obama.  The entire length of our small group I was summoning the courage to start up a conversation with him.  Unfortunately the moment passed.

I recently read an article in RELEVANT Magazine that tackled some of the tough issues of being a Christian in todays political world.  It is worth the read.

I spent an hour today talking with 3 students in the High School group here at NorthRidge Church about things that could make Velocity better.  They had some real concerns and some great ideas.  It was encouraging to know that there were other people besides us on staff that care and are thinking of ways to be more effective in ministry.

Now, completely unrelated to that, the video below makes me laugh every time I watch it.

My morning and early afternoon was consumed by our Small Group event called “Lead Small.”  It started with worship led by Josh Collesano.  Then it launched into vision, motivation, and training about small groups this year.  One of the highlights was having Greg Bowman from the Willow Creek Association come and speak to us.  His insight and leadership on groups was incredible.

I have been slowly learning all the programs that I have on my MacBook.  Below is a video I made in After Effects with some help from Josh Isenhardt.  It is the bumper for a series Velocity is in called “Beautiful Contrast.”

Today we worked all day in our conference room.  Both RustProof and Velocity had one major task to do:  put together the promo piece for our Fall Launch series.  To that end we labored over photoshop and came out with a great design.  Below is the front of our postcard being sent out.