Easter Weekend Eclipse

I'm here in this field early on this cool (cold) Easter Saturday morning taking pictures if this Lunar eclipse.

While taking pictures I'm thinking about Easter and what it means.

An eclipse is an interesting thing.  The Earth is moving between the sun and the moon.  Its cutting off all light the sun provides.

How often do we as Christians let things come between us and the light Christ offers?  It might be work, or family, or even church work itself.

Now, while this is going on, how many people will pay no attention that the light is getting dimmer, that it’s being blocked by something. Do the notice?  Do they care?

Also, how often do we as Christians allow our actions, behaviors, language, clothing, etc. block the light we're supposed to shine on others?  We're supposed to reflect Christ's light aren't we?

A third aspect that I see while looking at the eclipse is that while it’s going on.  Few people stop to notice.  This morning, most people were either sleeping or driving to whatever beckons them.  But Spiritually, how many people notice when the light dims?  We should stop everything and address the issue right then, not wait.  Like this eclipse.  There will come a time, the light’s gone and we’ll wonder how we got here, and unlike this eclipse, it may not be a simple matter to get that light back.

So, how's the light you're receiving?

How's the light you're reflecting?

Think before he speaks!

My mom and my sister are both preachers wives and over the weekend they went to a preacher's wives conference.

When I saw them this weekend at my parents house, they showed me and dad this video (over dial-up which took forever)

Anyway, this is too funny. Maybe it's because I'm a preachers kid and they are talked about as much as preachers wives. Maybe it's because I've gone to church my entire life, and I've heard many a sermon illustration with their wife and or kids.



Go ahead and watch it. It's not long (unless you have dial-up and even then it's worth it).

It's too Funny!

YEA!

We voted today on a new pastor at church.

I'll give more details later. Just excited.

Church Web Page.

Wow, I've been gone a while huh?

I've been busy doing all sorts of things.

At the top, I've set up a web page for my church. You can see it at www.tricountyskiatook.org You may, or may not, be surprised at how hard it is to find a domain name.

I think it looks pretty good. I've got some help to keep it updated. So, we'll see how it goes.

Merry Christmas Eve!

Well, it's Christmas Eve morning.

And from the Santa NORAD radar, Santa has been sighted in Japan.

This will be an interesting morning.
See, I'm preaching this morning. Yep, you read that right.

I guess I'm about a ready as I'm going to be.

Anyway, tonight we go to my in-laws for our big Christmas get-together there. I can't wait!

I hope everyone has a very merry, and safe Christmas Eve today.

Children's Christmas Party

Saturday's Children's Christmas party went well. We ended up with 13 kids. And they had a blast! One of the kids said it "was the best Christmas ever". This is really good to hear. Some of this kids haven't had the best home life, so having something that was entirely made just for them was what many of them needed.

We watched the 2 movies. They got to decorate Christmas cookies, make Christmas cards, make bookmarks, and candy canes (non-eatable). The clowns where a HUGE hit! All of the kids just loved them.

Dinner was also a big hit. It all tasted good and I'm pretty sure I surprised a few people that didn't know I could cook. The turkey and ham both turned out wonderful. I almost burned the rolls, but I didn't.

When 7:00 rolled around, I was ready to go home. It had been a long day. I got to church Saturday morning at 10:45.

I'm glad we did it, and I would expect us to do it again. I'm just glad I have a year to rest.

Living Christmas Tree

The Living Christmas Tree at First Baptist Church Bartlesville was really good last night. I really enjoyed it and I think so did my son. Afterwards, we went to one of the local parks, and looked at Christmas lights.

When we left, I decided to stop and put gas in the van since we'll be taking it Wednesday to see the Rhema lights. So, I put gas in the van, and tried to clean the windows (stress on tried). Struggled to put the locking gas cap back on the tank, and by the time I did that, I got in the van and we left. I got about 3 blocks away, and realized I left the gas receipt. Normally, I'd probably just left it, but since I need the receipt to get reimbursed, we turned around and went back to QT for the receipt.

Next stop was Braums from some ice cream. I had a single scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough. My son had a double dip of chocolate and strawberry.

It was a really good evening. And as of this moment, I'm really looking forward to tonight.

Cables

I've recently found what appears to be a very good source for ordering cables.

monoPrice.com

I recently ordered 2 - 50ft RCA cables and a 75 ft monitor cable for a projector installation we've done at our church. I got the 3 cables with shipping for only $57.59

I've installed the cables, and the monitor cable looks great. the RCA cable is for use with a VCR (if needed). Anyway, the quality appears very good. I wanted to pass it along. I got all the cables cheaper than I expected to pay for just 1 cable.

Oh, and BTW, they have other stuff besides cables.

Fall Festival - 12 pounds of candy

Tonight at our church we had our Fall Festival. We had it tonight to hopefully have people that don't normally go to church come. That way we may hopefully have some good prospects.

Well, my boy had a great time. He went as Darth Vader.

When we got there, they had a "Guess How much candy is in the jar". He ended up guessing 279 pieces of candy then we went off to play games and collect booty.

He collected so much candy and snack cakes. A couple of balloon animals too. About an hour later, we got word that he had won the jar. 266 more pieces of candy.

We stayed for about 2 hours. We came home with a HUGE bag of candy.

I weighed it before letting him have at it.

Have you ever wondered what 12 pounds of candy looked like? Well, here it is.

Men's Retreat

I've been promising an update all week, and haven't given one, so I guess I'll try now.

Last Thursday, I got up and around and my dad and I went to Roaring River State Park. My uncle and grandfathers (that's too people, cause my uncle is not my grandfather, that would just be weird) church was having a men's retreat there. It's a chance for a group of men to get together, do some fishing or golfing and praise God.

The trip down was nice. (As was the Dr. Pepper I had. It had almost been 4 weeks since I had one.) Once we got down there, we found us each a bunk and unloaded the car. Then we headed down to the meal cabin to grab lunch. Just a quick sandwich, then we went down to the River for some fishing. This was my first Trout fishing trip, so I had to figure it out. Man are those trout tricky. I did manage to land 3 (my grandpa put one on my line, so I wasn't able to get my 4th, but that was fine).


Dinner Thursday night was lasagna. It was ok, but not as good as what I make, course most frozen aren't. But it was still pretty good.

The worship service was great. Good music, and a good message. The man there has been preaching at an inner city church in Dallas... did I mention it was a black church? 75 Baptist men was a deafening experience I'm sure. (He mentioned they cannot even do announcements without some "amens" or "preach it" from the people.) As soon as we were done for the evening, I crashed. I was exhausted.

We woke up bright and early Friday morning with fishing on our mind. My dad and I got to the river around 6:30ish or so I guess since the flier we had said fishing started at 7:00. Well, come to find out, that is August timing. In September, fishing starts at 7:30. So we had to wait a bit longer. I caught 2 and my dad 1 before we left for breakfast.

Breakfast was soooo good. Scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, biscuits and gravy, and hash browns. It's making my mouth water just typing it. After breakfast, we went back out to finish catching our limit. But when we got back, the fishing had slowed WAY down. When we FINALLY finished catching our limit at 12:30, I was more than ready to stop (mainly cause it started heating up). We got the fish cleaned and took it back to the cabin to drop off. I wanted to take a picture of the ice chest that was FULL of trout. We go there, and they had already took out 120 trout for dinner so they could finish cleaning them up and stuff like that. But even with 120 gone, this was still a lot of fish.


After that, we went out on a hike.

I've been looking forward to hiking up there ever since I decided to go. For my birthday, my wonderful wife bought me a really cool hiking stick with built in compass. Very nice, and very helpful climbing those mountains. I had lots of good pictures. Overall, the hike was at least 3.5 miles long. Maybe longer.



Dinner that night was smoked trout, corn on the cob, green beans, brown beans, salad, and baked potatoes. Again, delicious. I was so full afterwords.

Again the worship service was terrific.

I wasn't as tired Friday night as I was Thursday night so I stayed up a bit longer, but nothing crazy. We again set the alarm for 6 a.m. so we could pick up our bunk areas before the morning fishing time. But when I woke up, it was thundering and lightening. No fishing thing in that. I reset the alarm for 7 and rolled over. By 7, the storm had moved on. We contemplated not going fishing since fish don't usually bite very well after storms, but we decided to go. I'm glad we did. We both caught our limits before the 9:00 breakfast time. Once my dad finished catching his limit, we loaded up in the car, went and cleaned the fish, and headed back for breakfast. We got there about 10 after 9, but that isn't bad. Well, breakfast was over. Not sure they really had it. But it was already packed. In fact, everything was just about done. Nothing for me and dad to do except go and pick up our bunks and make sure the cabin was clean (which it was).

We finished up, and checked in to see if there was anything else we could do, (there wasn't), then we hit the road.

I so needed this trip. To get away from my kids, and work and everything really (except for my wife, I don't usually need a vacation from her). The worship services were really good.

If you are interested in seeing more pictures of the trip, you can see my Roaring River Flickr set.

Funeral

Today is one of those mixed blessing days.

Monday night, one of the men from my church, Lyle Tillinghast, passed away.

He lived a good long life, loved and served God, and was always there to lend a helping hand. I believe he was 75.

He had accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior, so when he passed away Monday night, he went from a weak and hurting man into the presence of our Lord.

So, that, as you can guess, is the mixed blessing. We will miss Lyle very much, but we know he's no longer in pain and he's in Heaven right now.

His funeral is this morning at 10:00 at Floral Haven.

If you would, please when you read this, pray for his wife. They have been married for a VERY long time. I know I miss my wife when we are separated for short time and we've only been married 8 years.

(Now you know why I haven't posted on my trip last weekend)

Left Behind: Eternal Forces

While glancing through the News headlines today, I saw this very interesting story from Yahoo News of a popular Christian book spawning a video game.

The only popular Christian book that I could think of was the Left Behind books. And I was right. There is going to be Left Behind Games.

Here is the description from the Left Behind Website:

Wage a war of apocalyptic proportions in LEFT BEHIND: Eternal Forces - a real-time strategy game based upon the best-selling LEFT BEHIND book series created by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Join the ultimate fight of Good against Evil, commanding Tribulation Forces or the Global Community Peacekeepers, and uncover the truth about the worldwide disappearances!

• Lead the Tribulation Force from the book series , including Rayford, Chloe, Buck and Bruce against Nicolae Carpathia – the AntiChrist.
• Conduct physical & spiritual warfare : using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world.
• Recover ancient scriptures and witness spectacular Angelic and Demonic activity as a direct consequence of your choices.
• Command your forces through intense battles across a breathtaking, authentic depiction of New York City .
• Control more than 30 units types - from Prayer Warrior and Hellraiser to Spies, Special Forces and Battle Tanks!
• Enjoy a robust single player experience across dozens of New York City maps in Story Mode – fighting in China Town , SoHo , Uptown and more!
• Play multiplayer games as Tribulation Force or the AntiChrist's Global Community Peacekeepers with up to eight players via LAN or over the internet!

This could be a very good game. There is a downloadable demo of the game from their web page which I probably will download and give a shot.

The news article talks about how some people are in an uproar because this game is violent.

"It's reprehensible," said Florida attorney Jack Thompson, a critic of video game violence. "They're basically using the phrase — Christian game — to disarm parents into thinking it's going to be OK for our kids."

Well, I have a something I'd like to point out to this guy. No one said the Bible was not full of violence. It is. Lots of it. The Bible is full of lies, murder, deception, adultry, wars, insest, and probably much more stuff that I can't think of as I sit here and type.

Now, the Bible isn't a "How to" book on doing these things, but this stuff is in there.

Also, this is a GAME. Suppose to be fun to play. The developers are also trying to reach people with the gosple of Jesus Christ and at the very lease talking about things that will have eternal importance. A game with a Teen rating is about the same thing as a PG-13 movie. Most parents don't flinch an inch about letting their teen's watch PG-13 movies.

I acutally like how the developers responded when asked if the violence was needed to make the game fun. They replied "Violence is not required to make a fun game. However, it is required to make a game about the end of the world in the Left Behind book series. We have taken great care to make certain that there are real consequences for poor gamer behavior, unlike most games in the market. For instance, unnecessary killing will result in lower Spirit points which are essential to winning."

The game is expected out in October, but as I've said before, a downloadable demo is already available. I think I read they expect this game to cost in the $50 range and be rated Teen.

Pastorless

Today was the last day of our pastor at church.
He accepted a position as BCM (Baptist Collegiate Ministries) Director. He will be very good at this, and I'm excited for him, but I will miss him.

This now puts our church without a pastor. Our Search Committee has met and we're starting our look.

This is really an exciting time for our church as well, though not everyone realizes it. When God moves in one place, He is moving elsewhere. Since God is moving our pastor away from us, He already has a man planned for us.

The search will last for a while since you don't want to rush into finding a new pastor. I'm on the search committee. First time to server on a Pastor search committee. This should be interesting.

You've got to be kidding

File this under "You've got to be kidding".

according to this Breitbart.com story it appears that Presbyterians can now change the divine Trinity of "Father, Son and Holy Spirit" to other gender neutral wording.

Some options listed in this article were:

Mother, Child, Womb (not gender neutral)
Rock, Redeemer, Friend
Lover, Beloved, Love
Creator, Savior, Sanctifier
King of Glory, Prince ofPeace, Spirit of Love (um king and prince are men, they missed the gender neutral here)

Ok, Now listen to me. I am NOT bashing Presbyterians. I guess I'm just a nice conservative Baptist that thinks that we should leave the wording in the Bible alone! I'd be upset if the Baptists suggested this change.

Here is a quote from the article: One reason is that language limited to the Father and Son "has been used to support the idea that God is male and that men are superior to women," the panel said.

I've always liked this saying.
God made woman (Eve) from man's (Adam's) rib, not from his head for her to be his ruler, or his foot to be trampled on, but from his side to be his equal.


This is also on a church by church basis from the way I read the article.

Death for a convert?

Have you heard this story coming out of Afghanistan. And this is not a story from when Afghanistan was lead by the Taliban, this is out of current day. Today.

Abdul Rahman, a 41 year old father of two, is awaiting trail for rejecting Islam.

He had approached police on an unrelated matter, but told them he had converted from Islam, and was carrying a Bible. They arrested him. Afghan law is based on the Islamic law. And in that law, conversion can mean death.

Here is a quote from this CNN article:

"They want to sentence me to death, and I accept it," Rahman told reporters last week, "but I am not a deserter and not an infidel."

That is what having faith in the One True God is all about!

There is more to the story than this as you can imagine. There are the political twists that are involved. Take the time to read the whole article, but what strikes me personally is that here is a man that is truly willing to die for Jesus Christ! Some may think that this is no different than what the homicide bombers do, but I disagree. See, these men blow themselves up to kill "infidels" to earn their way into heaven. Rahman has already done everything he needs to do to get into heaven. He's accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Savior which means he's given his life to Him, and letting Him lead him.

As Paul said in Philippians 1:21

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

If Rahman dies, he gets to see his God. If he lives, he gets to keep living for Christ.

I know that I for one will pray for Rahman and his family as they goes through this.

More on Prayer

Why is it that many Christians do not spend quality time in prayer? With so much pain and suffering of those around us, you would think we would spend much more time in prayer than we do.

What I think that people probably fall into 1 of 2 groups. Either 1, they don't believe prayer really works, or 2, they are lazy (aka selfish).
I mean, really, look at the power that prayer can have:

Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any cheerful? Let him sing psalms. Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will cure the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up. And if he has committed sins, it will be forgiven him. Confess faults to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous one avails much. Elijah was a man of like passion as we are. And he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it did not rain on the earth for the time of three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth caused its fruit to sprout.

James 5:13-18

The Bible has even promised us that is we follow Christ, we will have problems in our lives' which should be more reason to pray.

I'm not saying I'm perfect. In fact, I'm not. Far from it (just ask my family). But I've really felt God teaching me lately about this. I've just been to complacent with my Christian walk. So, I guess I need to stop walking and start praying.

Therefore to him who knows to do good, and does not do it, to him it is sin.

James 4:17

Coincidence?

For a while now, my pastor and I have been working on a soul-winning outreach program (which I may blog about more later). I've really been spending some time praying about this.

The other day, I was watching Fellowship of the Rings, and felt compelled to turn it off and read. First, turning off one of my favorite movies is something I do lightly. But I turned off the movie. I took a look in my bookshelf, and pulled out Fresh Wind Fresh Fire which I've talked about in some earlier posts. Anyway, this book really focuses on the power of prayer. Too often, we just don't pray as much as we do, or if we do pray, we pray not expecting results. Well, in this book, Jim Cymbala talks about the growth the Brooklyn Tabernacle has seen because of prayer.

I believe what Chad and I are working on is God lead. And the leading of me to this book showed me that we have to base this in prayer, or nothing will change.

Well, to top it all off, on my trip to OKC this weekend for the coaches clinic, I was looking for a CD to listen to once I lost my radio signal. Most all of my CD's in the car were scratched, I tried several and ended up listening to Casing Crowns. Here are the titles linked tot he works of 5 of the first 6 songs.

What if his people prayed
If we are the body
Voice of truth
Who am I
Here I go again

These songs talk about prayer, showing Christ's love, and sharing your faith with others.

So, coincidence that this CD seemed to be the only CD that would play Saturday?

I think not.

Prayer

How much time in prayer do you spend each day?

Seriously, stop and think about that. 5 or 10 minutes maybe?

How much time does your church devote to prayer?

I've been reading through Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire by Jim Cymbala again (good book BTW), and I found a quote in there that really struck a cord with me.

You can tell how popular a church is by who comes on Sunday morning.
You can tell how popular the pastor or evangelist is by who comes on Sunday night.
But you can tell how popular Jesus is by who comes to the prayer meeting.

That is so very true.

But the same can be said about our own lives. We can tell how popular Jesus is in our lives by how much time we spend in prayer and Bible Study, but especially prayer.

I've seen in my own life where I've spent more time in the Word than in prayer, and though I know I learned a lot, I didn't have that closeness that I've had when I've spent considerable time in prayer.

I know that I'm currently guilty of not spending the time I should in prayer. Why? Because I'm lazy. I've let other, less important things come between me and my relationship with my Lord.

How about you? You going to do anything about it?

Lords Army

Last night we had a Sunday Night Sing. Basically, anyone in the church that wants to sing can. We also had a woman from another church sing last night too. It was awesome.

However, in my own personal highly biased opinion, the best song sung all night was from my boy.

Listen! - Sorry, I'm having technical difficulties. The link I posted earlier isn't working.

I was so impressed. He stood up on stage while I held the mic for him, and he just went to town. Especially on the second verse. He didn't do the motions, but that was ok.

I was so proud of him! The people in the audience didn't phase him a bit. He even looked around at the people while he was singing and didn't just stare at me the whole time.

:)

The week to come.

This is going to be such a busy week!

Today, I woke up early and once I get to work I have about 10+ things I HAVE to get done, and it will be hard getting them all done before the end of the day.
Tomorrow, we are going to my parents place. My sister and her kids are up. This will be the first time I've seen it since I helped move them in, and definitely the first since they've unpacked.
Wednesday is Church.
Thursday, finish getting ready for my daughters 17th birthday party.
Friday, my daughters 17th birthday party! We are having a Mexican extravaganza as I put it. Home make corn tortillas, cheese dip, home made guacamole and who knows what else. She's planning on inviting a lot of her friends over.
Saturday, my sons last soccer game this season.

Anyway, this should be a very busy, and hopefully good week... If we can get to the end of it.