casting crowns concert video

Busy Week

it has been a really full week...
youth board meeting on monday night
church stuff on tuesday
youth group on wednesday
casting crowns, leeland, john waller concert on thursday
mitch mcvicker concert on friday...

finally it is saturday! i actually got to sleep for more than 6 hours!
praise Be for Sabbath days, i couldn't survive without them!

i'll have videos from the casting crowns and mitch mcvicker concert up soon.

they were both incredible by the way.

over and out

"The Fears That Limit Leaders"

Pastor's Teaching & Retreat at Camp Quaker Heights

Good Fears Vs. Bad Fears

*Fear makes people move to some sort of action

- Fight - Flight - Surrender

* What causes me to feel I need to take action? What doesn't?

Part 1: Good Things To Fear

1. Being disconnected from yourself

- Disconnected leaders develop lusts

*Power *Recognition *Flesh *Substance

- Being disconnected from your true gifts & passions

*Find out who you are *What are my gifts and talents? *What does that look like?

2. Be aftraid of being unaware of what others are saying or seeing about you

- Leaders who do well use that feedback

* Take the toxicity out of being screwed up, and embrace it and learn from it

- Check in with people - How've I been doing?

3. Being disconnected from the hearts of the people that you are leading

- Listen to their problems

- Maintain trust

- Human heart seeks to be known

4. Personal Isolation

- When isolation isn't replenishing, it becomes an escape which isn't healthy

5. Leading in a way that is not sustainable

- Leading should be tiring but motivating

- Otherwise, you go into overdrive & damage will follow

- You should move to set different limits if you can't keep up with the pace

6. Personal and organizational infrastructure deficits

- If the pace is increasing but the support isn't there, that's a train wreck coming

7. Be afraid of being defensive

- We have lost power & some sort of functioning when we become defensive

8. Be afraid of God

- Live life fearing God in a protective way

Part 2: Bad Things To Fear

1. Not looking good

- Image management

*Leaders do make mistakes *People are forgiving if they take ownership of their faults

2. Seeing your faults & weaknesses

- Don't be defensive: Be hungry for feedback & criticism

3. Other people getting credit

- Leaders nned to be able to release people to achieve

4. Giving others freedom

- Giving others freedom equal to responsibility equal to accountability

- Micromanagement drives good workers crazy

5. Problems

- Embrace negative realities

- "No problems, No profit"

Pastor's Teaching & Retreat

it's april 15... tax day! and we have already gotten our return check! praise Be! audrey and i are up at camp quaker heights in eldora, ia. it's 5:24 p.m. and we are on a 1 day pastor's teaching and retreat. we are staying in Tall Oaks Lodge and have had a wonderful time so far... and the retreat hasn't even started yet!
we arrived on site about 3:00 p.m. and decided to take a walk through the woods and down by the Iowa River. it's about 60 degrees and sunny, but also 30 mph winds. so walking down into all the trees was a blessing. while we were on our 2 hour walk we saw a herd of about 10 deer on the other side of the river (audrey spotted them), and then we saw a hawk which had caught a fish in it's large talons (napoleon dynamite), and then i spotted a herd of about 20 deer on our side of the river. we were only about 50 to 75 yards away from them, and one had a gimp back left leg which slowed him down, but there were 2 other deer that stayed behind to help make sure he didn't get picked off.
it has been a great time so far, and i'm still looking forward to supper, and the teaching for tonight! and a good night of sleep!
i'll let you know tomorrow how the rest of the retreat goes!

peace

April 12th, 2008

usually by april everything is green, the sun is shining nicely, birds are chirping, flowers are in bloom, there is a nice westerly breeze blowing, kids are outside playing in the new found wonder of spring....

BUT, not here, i thought april 3rd was bad for snow... well guess again. let's try april 12th this time. it once again snowed here in carlisle last night, if i didn't know for sure that we didn't live in the far northern hemisphere of the world, i might believe it with the weather that we have had here. IT'S CRAZY!

Good Times

"GOOD TIMES"

April 5th - Audrey and I ran in our second "Loop The Lake" Race in Des Moines, IA. We finished in 40 minutes. Audrey got 48th out of 285 female finishers, and 6th out of 24 in her age division. I got 128th out of 245 male finishers, and 27th out of 48 in my age division. not too shabby if you ask me!

April 7th - Rock Chalk Jayhawk Go KU! Kansas University Men's Basketball Team upsets the Memphis Tigers to claim the National Title! Mario Chalmer's is my hero, and it was a crazy game to watch.

God's TIming

I have been thinking alot about the timing of God lately. Here's why. Before our mission trip to Mexico, I had a trailer all lined up ready to go. No problems, I thought that I had it all figured out on my own. We left on a Friday for our trip. The Thursday before I went to get the trailer, and it was stuck in about 4 ft. of snow, the tags were outdated, and the owners couldn't find the title.

This was a huge setback. Now with a week till we left I had no trailer. So i figured that since we were going on this trip to expand the Kingdom of God I would pray about it and announce it at church. And Praise Be! Right after the service I had a guy come up and tell me that he knew of someone with a trailer and he would pick it up on Tuesday evening. But God had different ideas again. Wednesday morning, I found out that this trailer wouldn't be able to cross into Mexico! So God provided one more trailer, and this time it was his timing. We were packing all of our stuff Wednesday night, and we got the trailer back to the church Wednesday afternoon.

I think that God uses timing in our lives so that we fully depend on Him. That it's His plan, and He will make it come to fruition at the best possible time, not when we think it will work. And we think that we can have everything planned out, but once we do that we start to rely on ourselves instead of being fully dependent on God.

Snow

yeah, it's april 3rd and it's snowing in carlisle....

don't think global warming is occuring in iowa.

The Desert

"The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically inamical... It's forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of sky above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forest lands... In an unobstructed sky the clouds seem more massive, sometimes grandly reflecting the earth's curvature on their concave undersides. The angularity of desert landforms imparts a monumental architecture to the clouds as well as to the land...
To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality."

Paul Shepard - Man in the Landscape