Last Sunday I had the opportunity to teach in all three of our main gatherings here at church.  I always appreciate the opportunity to teach.  For me part of the process is unlocking the creative imagery for whatever topic we are discussing…  This week we used the book by Maurice Sendak, “Where the Wild things are” to help illustrate the teaching time.  Here is the video that was seen in the morning gatherings and was supposed to be seen in the evening gathering.

This week we were talking about God’s Love.  Here are a couple thoughts and questions to think about…

• How often do you run to where the wild things are?
• How does it make you feel to be reminded of the truth found in Romas 5:8? “But God demonstrates His own love toward us that even when we were sinners Christ died for us.”
• You have never experienced a loveless day in your life!
• Which lie do you have the hardest time not believing?
  • I’m to dirty for God to love me
  • Everyone else is against me, my world is falling apart, God can’t love me in all this
  • If I’m good enough I can earn God’s love
• How does understanding the depth of God’s love for you motivate you to love others?  Should it?  Does it?
• 1 John 4:11 “If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”

Just some good Wednesday morning thoughts…  What do you think?

~Peter

Seriously, just when you think that you are funny, someone else always shows up to the party that is infinitely funnier!  Totally ruins the mood!  So, whenever I look for a good dose of humor, I turn to non other than my friend Jon Acuff.  We’re facebook friends, that proves friendship right?  I mean, we all have deep and meaningful relationships with every single one of the 4.25 million people that we are “Friends” with.  So, then you could say that I am friends with Johnny as I like to call him.  (I can do that cause we’re friends…)

Today’s post was too funny not to share… Here is today’s post from his blog, Stuff Christians Like.  Check it out daily for a good dose of humor!

Today’s post is on the subject of: “The V neck”.  And as you know, I am a fan of the V.  So, head over here… check it out, and enjoy!

~Peter

These are the moments…  that make you go AH!

Find them and capture them…

~Peter

This week has come and gone with the greatest of ease.  Man!  I’ll tell you what, time slips by before you know it.

This week I was in meeting after meeting it seemed.  We ended up in the hospital with Noah’s forehead…  I met up with some other youth pastors discussed long range goals… I stressed out.  I cleaned our whole front yard(all million walnuts and all) and it seemed like life flew by.

Today I am going to try and slow it down.  Take it in.  Listen to each moment.  Spend time with the kids doing silly things… drawing dinosaurs, birds in nests, cranes, and whatever else Noah’s mind can think of.  We’re going to play pirates, build blocks, and legos.  Grace will run around and play kitchen, and tag along with big brother.  Today won’t come back…

The next time I’ll visit today will be in my memory.

What is one thing you want to slow down and enjoy today?

~Peter

Here’s what I want to know… Is this even possible?  I mean honestly?  $29.95 will get me that sculpted body, in 6 simple minutes a day?

So, here’s what I think.  I think that it’s crazy!

What do you think?  Do you think the shake weight can actually work?

Seems like a short cut to me…

I’m shaky on the shake weight…  Are you solid, or shaky?

~Peter

The other night I was hanging out with a good buddy of mine, Rob.  Rob and I go way back… We go back to the days of middle school.  We were young morons that grew up together and lived life in the fast lane together.  The stories could go on forever.  So we got our families together for a fun evening of hanging out and catching up.  We ended up playing cards but then the card playing digressed into talking…  Which was awesome…  So I started building…  My hands are always doing something… Got to keep them busy… I started building a card house…  Didn’t get very far.  But then I thought about a little experiment…  Let’s see how many cards I can get on top of this card structure.  Here’s a few pictures…

Besides the obvious skill involved in getting all of those cards to balance there was a vital and necessary element to the whole production; the foundation.

Foundations are essential…  It doesn’t matter what you are doing…  Foundations are vital…

They are vital in:

• card houses
• real houses
• friendships
• marriages
• jobs
• school work
• sports

It doesn’t just stop there.  Foundations are essential in your relationship with God and your understanding of Him!  With the simple card hut in mind, what kind of foundation are you establishing in the spiritual corners of your life?  Do you find yourself strengthening those foundations? Are you spending time reading God’s word? Are you finding times of quiet where you can pray and commune with God?  Are you finding times to be silent before the whole world and ask God to speak to you?  Are you finding times to spend with other christians so that you can encourage one another/build each other up/pray for one another and sharpen one another?  It’s these moments and efforts that help us strengthen our foundation.

Let’s try it.

~Peter

You can thank me now!  This made me laugh out loud… I truly love the eyebrows…

Whenever you find yourself wondering why God allowed YouTube to exist this is the answer…

~Peter

Here’s the deal…  I like some crazy stuff…

I like peanut butter on top of my poptarts

I like Ketchup on my taco salad

I like a little bit of coffee in my creamer

I like pork roll at anytime of the day…

Here’s one other thing that I secretly like… I’ll let you in on the secret…

I love the song Umbrella… ella… ella… eh… eh.. eh…

But seriously, Rihanna gets me every time that song is on… It then lingers in my head for the rest of the day.  So, when I heard this song I thought man now this is something to truly celebrate.  Usually I wince whenever christians try to imitate art/culture instead of create it… but this was pretty good, I must say.

What about you?  What funny thing do you secretly like?

~Peter

Ministry happens…

It’s true.  I’ll tell you what, I do a good amount of reading, wether it is blogs, books, tweets, or online papers…  I want to know what is going on… I want to be apart of it…

Recently I’ve been reading and thinking about what service looks like.  What does it mean to serve your community?  How can serving our community make a difference in the kingdom of God?  How can our church community jump in on it?

I haven’t arrived at any concrete solid answers yet.  Probably never will, (every place is different, and circumstances always change) but I do know that there are certain avenues that I want to head towards.

This past weekend we did just that, service.  There was a handful of us and we did just that.

It was pretty simple…

Our tools were:

• 1 VW hatchback
• 1 EZ-Up tent
• 1 mostly working grill (Grease Fire and all!)
• 1 camping grill
• 200 hot dogs
• water bottles/soda cans
• a couple coolers
• 1 small vat of sauerkraut
• 1 small vat of chili (I’m still not convinced it really was chili)

Here’s a few pictures…

What we were able to do was give away a whole bunch of hot dogs and make some great connections with people headed over to Del. Val.’s football game.  It was great.  A huge win for us (CONNECTION with people!) and for them(free hot dogs)!  This is a win for us because we were able to honestly say, this hot dog is truly free,and we don’t want/expect anything from you.  We just are here to serve you.  And in the words of my friend Rick, “We are here just trying to do whatever we can to help our community.  We’re from the church up the street.”  Love it.  It almost even sounds like a great name for the church…

What church do you go to, where are you from?  ”Yeah we’re from  the Church up the Street”…

So, I think that there are two more home games.  We should be at both.  Let’s try and double our connections, double the amount of hot dogs given away and make this place a better place to live because of the difference that Jesus has made in our lives…

Thank you to Kris & Jan Gellar, Keith Cooper, Rick and Sarah Craven, Bruce Houser, Tiffany Gowesky, and many of you who donated food!  We are in this together.  Let’s keep serving our community.

Remember MINISTRY HAPPENS!

~Peter

So, if you’ll remember several months ago I won a book from a drawing on Twitter.  The book was Tony Morgan’s Killing Cockroaches, and other scattered musings on leadership.  I love reading.  Especially good books.  Even more so when they are free books!  So, if you have any free books that you think I should read, send em my way!  But anyway back to it…  This was a great read.  It was definitely scattered in thought… If you are expecting a logical progression of thought from start to finish you won’t find that.  What you will find is short brief, few paragraph, progressions focused on a certain aspect of leadership, or church life.

There are several topics that really resonated with me, here are a few:

• Compel them to come in:  Are our church services compelling?  Is there more value attached to what we are doing than going to Starbucks and sipping coffee, playing golf, or sleeping in?  Great thoughts, provoking questions…
• Evangelistic Enemy?: “I wonder if we’ve inadvertently designed our ministries to isolate Christians from the places where God really wants them to be.”  Are our programs keeping our church from having a greater evangelistic influence in their communities?  This one will make you think.
• Gunky Build Up: “Sometimes I believe the life that the more I do, the more valuable I am to the team.  The reality is that I’m not being effective if I’m busy doing the wrong things.”  What kind of gunk is building in my life that is keeping me from being the best possible leader I can be ?  Great thoughts…
• Marketing Mistakes:  First off, the biggest mistake is thinking that the church shouldn’t market!  But beyond that Tony has several great thoughts here.  These two are my favorite.

thinking other church’s are your competition.  ”We are competing with todays culture.  That means that other churches are on your team!”

Publicizing church programs that compete with one another.  ”Figure out what you do well and what God is using today to reach people for Jesus— And do that!”

This book is a great read… I would highly recommend it.  Don’t read it if you don’t want to think.  Don’t read it if your not ready to make some potential changes, don’t read it if you think that your church has totally arrived and is perfect.

Read it if you want to be more effective in whatever ministry you are doing…

That’s my prayer…

~Peter