Article here.

I stayed home all day Wednesday with a 102+ fever and saw the doctor on Thursday morning. My doctor gave me a ZPack antibiotic and swabbed my nose to see if I have the Flu. I’ll find out hopefully tomorrow. She also said I have an upper respiratory infection and bronchitis. Two of my favorites.

Today I have been fever-free, but I feel as though I’m breathing from the bottom of a swimming pool. I also sound as though I have a smoking habit I’ve been trying to hide. I don’t.

Jess has been incredible during this whole thing. Bless her heart, she has put up with my lack of ability to do much of anything and still keeps both kids fed and clean! I am so thankful that Jess doesn’t get sick like this – I doubt if I could keep up with things like she does!!

Speaking of issues. I recently switched from being a strict MS Outlook-guy to a strictly Google-guy. I ONLY use Google for my e-mail and ONLY use Google for my calendars. Kind of nice to have made that switch just weeks before owning a phone that works very nicely with Google’s e-mail/contacts/calendars, by the way.

Anyhow, Cloversites doesn’t play nice (or at all) with Google’s Calendars App. They have their OWN calendar built-in that apparently they offer to those who may not even know what Google is, I guess. I asked Clover about integrating the two and they said, “Sure! Just point a link to your Google Calendar.” Not the response I was hoping for, but a solution we are using nonetheless.

The problem, however, was that I pointed our “link” to a public-version of our church calendar that showed strictly church-events, but I also have another calendar for our youth-events, and imagine having other calendars in the future that show other ministry-events that don’t necessarily need to be listed on just the main church-calendar. So, our link ONLY showed our church-events, NONE of our youth events. This bummed me out, but I didn’t have a solution.

Until today.

Today I stumbled upon someone else with the same problem and they had a solution!! Hurray. Here’s the site that I digested and solved our church calendar issue – http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/displaying-events-from-multiple-google-calendars-in-a-single-embedded-calendar-view/. Now our calendar page on armbrustwesleyan.com is a link to a calendar that lists BOTH our whole-church calendar AND our youth-events calendar! (now if I could just make them show up as different colors…)

Tonight I took my small group of guys (7 of us total) to a presentation of Heaven’s Gates & Hell’s Flames at the local Assembly of God church. I had seen this presentation in my teen-years and even had the opportunity to be a part of the production while ministering in Indiana. It has been at least 4-years since I’d seen the production.

I went in tonight very curious – I wondered what advances would’ve been made in the technological-side of things. I wondered if the scenes portrayed the few times I’ve seen it would continue to be acted out in tonight’s performance.

#1. Nothing has changed technologically. They still show the same video clip segments that they showed the last time I saw the presentation.

#2. If I’m not mistaken, EVERYTHING tonight was exactly the same as we presented it four years ago.

I tend to watch these sorts of presentations with a critical-eye – watching and listening EVERYTHING to form my opinion about its usefulness and relevance in today’s culture.

Tonight I enjoyed the performance and reminisced a bit about being a part of the thing back in Indiana. What blew me away, however, was watching the response of people in the audience when the opportunity to make a first or re-commitment to Jesus Christ. In our service tonight, at least 50-people responded and came forward to make a public commitment to serve the Lord. Each of them was then ushered out of the room for a personal time of prayer and for the staff to get their information.

I was reminded of a few things tonight:

#1 – Not everyone else has been “spoiled” by stage-performances like Cirque Du Soleil, Blue Man Group, etc. My experiences in being blown away by technology, acting, etc., on stage is NOT what everyone else has experienced. Someone else there tonight was probably impressed that there was a smoke machine, while I reminisced about the days of having one in my youth room!

#2 – The Holy Spirit still works amongst D-list actors. No offense to the church family that presented HGHF tonight, but I’m pleased to know that God chooses to use people like ME to get His message across.

#3 – Some things DO still work. HGHF hasn’t been “updated” in 4-years (at least!) and yet it’s still being performed in churches across the world every week. The clips are old, the audio isn’t professional, the stage-design isn’t amazing… and yet, it still works. HGHF doesn’t use the latest technology to run the show, they don’t even have two projectors with the same lumen bulbs (at least it looked that way tonight), and yet people were still impacted by the ministry and responded to the Gospel.

I’m glad I went tonight. I’m really glad I took students with me. 4 of the 6 of my guys made recommitments tonight at the close of the service.

Praise the Lord!

I felt good about the sermon after both services and received some good feedback that always helps know how those listening responded.

Sermon audio, if you’re interested:

Some more thoughts on the Pre for those who are interested:

1. Battery life is STILL my nemesis. If I’m in the office all day, by the time I get home I have to put the phone on the charger if I want to use my phone at all in the evening. This is depressing especially when my old phone could go at least a day-or-two without a charge even with a lot of use.

2. The “Touchstone Charger” that I bought with the phone promises “cord free charging” – the technology is incredible, to be able to place my phone on the Touchstone (that’s plugged in) and it auto-magically charges the phone via some “inductive method” that makes me feel all futuristic. Sadly, this only sometimes works. I can charge the phone on the Touchstone for a bit and then my phone goes a bit nutty and charging turns off and on, off and on – which is especially annoying at 3AM when I’m trying to sleep. I will be asking for a refund on the Touchstone, or a replacement when my Sprint-guy returns from his vacation this week.

3. With the finicky-ness of the Touchstone and the need to charge my phone during the day if I want to use it in the evening, I recently purchased another “micro-usb” cord on eBay and will keep that one at the office for charging and syncing the phone.

4. Palm’s attempts at making the Pre compatible with iTunes even since I’ve owned the phone has been on-again, off-again. They now claim that it does sync with iTunes, but I’ve yet to figure out exactly how.

5. The online App Store has continued to grow over the past two weeks, but I’m still not overwhelmingly impressed. As opposed to Apple’s App Store, MOST of the Pre-apps cost money, only a select few are actually FREE. I haven’t purchased any apps for the phone yet.

6. My phone does some weird-things when the battery gets too low. For one, my screen doesn’t come back on after a phone call, so I can’t exactly hang-up. That’s pretty annoying.

7. A positive – I still LOVE having all my Gmail and Facebook contacts synced with my phone. And the intuitive WebOS software knows to combine “Sher Sheets” my Gmail contact with “Sherilyn Sheets” my Facebook contact. Productivity genius.

8. Another positive – I have been using Amazon’s MP3 store for some time because of the better-pricing that they have versus iTunes. The Palm Pre has the Amazon MP3 store built-in as a standard-app. I have downloaded a few FREE mp3s from Amazon and have already used my phone in my truck plugged in via the 1/8″ headphone-jack cord. This is convenient, though I don’t think I’ll be getting rid of my iPod Touch anytime soon like I originally thought.

9. Some other people are frustrated with the glitches and failings of the Pre, too:

In 2009, the battle wages on with churches across the country coming up with new-ideas to attempt to use the time of year as a launching pad for a church-event.

One idea that has taken off in the last few years has been the “Trunk and Treat” idea. Families decorate their vehicles and park in the church parking lot allowing kids to nab candy from the comfort of their church parking lot instead of their neighborhoods. Our church attempts a “don’t dress scary” disclaimer and this year we’re presenting the Gospel through a musical-skit before the trunk-and-treating begins.

Another idea that I just stumbled upon that Brand New Church in Arkansas manages to pull off grabbed my attention. They call it “Hallowin” and it involves a costume contest at their church on the night of Halloween and then they pass out a few hundred DVDs featuring information about their church as well as a clear Gospel message to all the families and ask them to go out Trick-or-Treating and to pass out the DVDs to the homes they visit! I love it! More about Brand New Church’s “Hallowin” here.

So, how about your church?