Retreat!!!!

this past weekend we had our fall retreat. we had about 40 students attend. we brought in a speaker who spoke 4 times. we also had worship and a bunch of hanging out and playing games. it was a really good time for growth, both on individual levels as well as in a community aspect. i am excited to see how the retreat affects the overall community life of the ministry. i am sure that God will use it in some pretty exciting ways!!

God is Good!!

as i mentioned yesterday, i was not feeling terribly confident about the lesson that i was teaching last night at DIG. i just felt like i was having a lot of trouble putting things together clearly and i wasn't feeling very confident about the material.

but God is always so good to provide!! he is truly perfected in our weakness! this morning, i came to the coffee shop where i usually work on thursdays. one of the girls that works at the shop also goes to campus house and when she was getting me my diet coke this morning, she told me that she really liked DIG last night and that she felt like it was really what she needed to hear.

in my mind, that makes the whole lesson worth while. i hope and i pray that many other people felt like they got something out of the lesson, but at the same time, just knowing that one person is still thinking about it the next day and processing it the next day makes it well worth it in my mind!

God is good in the way he uses us despite and sometimes in spite of the way that we feel about things.

Teaching...ups and downs...

there are just some weeks where putting together a teaching/preaching type of a lesson is just really challenging and it feels like it just won't come together the way that you want it to.

my lesson for our large group study tonight is definitely that way. i am teaching on luke 4, and it is causing me a lot of uneasiness. i think that it is good for me to have times like this with teaching because it keeps me humble and it reminds me that i must constantly trust God...but in the moment that is a little bit hard to remember.

i am also wondering if a little bit of this feeling is a result of the fact that i have taught 5 weeks in a row now. maybe it is, and maybe it isn't...i guess i really have nothing to compare it to since i have never done it before.

hopefully next week will provide me at least a slight bit of a respite because i will be teaching a section of luke that i taught last year at purdue and so i shouldn't have to do nearly as much prep work. that should really ease my stress level for a week. hopefully that will provide some rejuvenation in the process. i guess we will just have to see...

Amazing People!!

have you ever had those times in your life when you are intensely aware that God is surrounding you with amazing people that are not there by accident at all. i'm not talking about a pastor or someone like that, but rather someone who is just your average joe. someone who comes upon your life in the midst of the everyday living of life, and who comes along side you or into your life for a season and represents to you a piece of Christ. what a refreshing experience it is!!

cailyn and i have had the pleasure of one of those experiences recently. we are beginning the process of building a house and we have spent some time recently meeting with the guy who is doing a lot of our building, and he has been an amazing blessing to us. he is a guy who is all about Christ and being like Christ, and amidst a society that is all about making an extra buck anymore, it was so refreshing to see a guy that was interested in something very different than that. what a blessing!!

thank you, Lord, for your unannounced angels that we sometimes find right in our midst!!

Purdue Basketball!!

i just found out yesterday that with the new addition of the big ten network to dish network, we will be able to see almost all of the purdue basketball games on tv this year!!!

now to some of you, this may not seem like a big deal...but for those of you that know anything about me, this is HUGE...

seriously...one of the things that i was the saddest about in moving to missouri was that i didn't think that i was going to be able to see much of purdue football and basketball. however, it looks like that will not be the case at all, which is amazing!!

also...i just realized that on december 8th, purdue plays at missouri, and so i think that for my birthday cailyn and i are going to go on a little road trip to see our beloved boilers whoop on the tigers of missouri. what great fun that will be!!

Meetings...Meetings...Meetings...

one of the biggest challenges for me being the new director here at the central missouri campus house lies in some of the administrational meetings, such as staff meeting and student intern meetings. not that they are things that i feel like i cannot do, but i just don't have any experience with running those meetings, and so that poses some challenges at times.

God truly is faithful, though, to provide in those places where we are unsure of ourselves! in the past two days i have had this weeks student intern meeting and staff meeting, and they have both been the best that we have had by far. i truly feel like God has just guided our time and that He has been the one in charge and it is a great feeling.

things are by no means perfect, and they new will be. but the Great God that we follow is always faithful to provide enough glimmers of hope to keep us filled and encouraged, and that is most certainly my emotion of this morning!

Enjoying God...

i have been thinking today about what it looks like for me to enjoy God and about just how important it is for me to enjoy God as i minister to those around me. i want to strive to model what it looks like to truly model enjoying God.

i am not really talking about enjoying God in a personal quiet time kind of a way (although there is absolutely nothing wrong with that) but rather, i am talking about enjoying God in the everyday of life. enjoying Him as i hang out with the best friend He has given me in my wife, enjoying Him as i see the beauties of His creation all around me, enjoying Him in the midst of the passions that He has given me...enjoying Him in every part of life!!

i pray that God would teach me more and more what it looks like to enjoy Him in the midst of doing ministry and simply in the midst of living life...

God teach me and teach us all, one moment at a time!!

"Should"ing...

one of the best teaching thoughts that i have heard is that we must stop "should"ing on ourselves. i have been struggling with this idea a lot the last couple of days. i have been feeling like there are a lot of things that i "should" be doing in my personal life and in my spiritual life, and all it does is take me away from doing what i am doing.

i think that more times than not, when we feel like we "should" do something, it is not from God, but from Satan...trying to get us distracted from what God is really doing. "should"ing on myself makes me feel guilty and unfulfilled which are feelings that are not from God.

the life that God has given me here is awesome and i am so very blessed and it just seems like such a waste of time and a waste of life for me to spend time "should"ing on myself.

Ketchup...or wait...i mean Catch Up

i am sorry that it has been so long since i have written...it has been a very busy week and a half and time has just slipped by. because of the long delay, i am just going to write about a bunch of different things, so this may be a little long...feel free to skim liberally...

our second DIG (wednesday night study) went well...we kicked off our community groups and it seemed to do as well as we reasonably could have hoped. i was also noticing this week that because of the location of my office, i have a couple of windows that look over where the students enter for DIG and it is a really neat thing to be able to watch the students flooding in from different directions...it is something that i will look forward to watching on a weekly basis as i go through final lesson prep...

this weekend, my parents and brother were here for the first time for a few days and it was a great time for both Cailyn and i. we greatly enjoyed our time with them! we got a chance to go and meet with our draftsman who is drawing the plans for our house and we are getting very close to being finalized for the plans, we took them to see the land where the house will be built, and we also met with the builder which was very encouraging. the family was such a great help in the process of thinking through different things for the house...we truly are grateful...

we also received word this morning that Cailyn's uncle (who has been battling cancer for a very long time) finally passed on to be with the Lord this morning. this means that we will be back in indiana for a few days later this week sometime. we don't know the specifics on the funeral yet, but we should know soon and so we will make at least a quick trip back to the home front. it is a very good thing that he has passed as he was in a lot of pain, and we are also quite excited about the chance to go home for a little while.

well, i am sure that this doesn't even cover everything, but it will have to do for the time being. i will try to not get this far behind again.