iPhone 3G

Have you seen the new iPhone 3G that is coming out? It is going to be a great product. I thought the iPhone was a great product already, but they have improved the speed, the 3rd party support, the way it works with things like exchange, and best of all they are dropping the price by $200. It isn't often that you can get the newest model for half the price. I just might have to purchase one when they come out. I've been wanting one for a year now, but I wasn't about to pay $400 for one, but for $200 it just might be worth it. I've always wanted email on my phone and GPS would be nice as well especially when I'm out of town.

It looks like I'm going to have to take my new iMac to the shop. I think there is something wrong with the power cable. It will occasionally just shut down. I worked with technical support on the phone and we did all the diagnostics and it looks like it is the power cord. The unfortunate thing is that I have to take it to the store for them to check it out and make sure that is the problem. The store said it could take up to 5 business days to get it tested and get the right part in. I know it isn't Apple's fault, we just don't have any Apple stores around here, so the only one that works on them around here won't have the part on hand. Oh, well. I'll just schedule it for a time when I'll be out of town for a few days.

Am I getting old?

It is days like today that you start to realize your age. I started out ministry as a youth minister. When I started youth ministry, Josh Lee was a little wild 12 year old that drove everyone nuts. Of course, over time he matured into a great leader in our youth program. Fast forward to today. He is getting married at 6:00 tonight.

My family and I will be traveling to witness this great event. Thankfully, it is in north Alabama so I only have to drive 2.5 hours to get there. It is awesome to see people that you love grow up and succeed in life. Josh has grown to be an awesome guy. No thanks to me of course. There are so many that I worked with that I'm so proud of the things they have done in their lives. Josh is definitely one of those guys. He and his bride to be are praying about what mission they want to serve together on. My job tonight is to pray about that specific thing in their wedding tonight.

If you know Josh, take a moment and pray for him and his bride to be that God will give them opportunities in missions to serve together.

I love you Josh and I'm proud of you and may God bless you and your new wife.

My First Alabama Post

It is official. I'm an Alabamian. I never thought I'd ever live in Alabama, but so far it is great. The church here in Montgomery is wonderful. The people here are some of the most loving people we have ever met.

In just 5 short weeks, we are already starting to love the people here. This has definitely been a good move for us. We have already seen all of Summer's family twice since we've gotten here and that doesn't include her parents helping us move. My family is coming to visit next weekend.

Next weekend I will be preaching at Vaughn Park for the first time. I'm kind of excited about it actually. It is kind of funny that the first week my family get to see the church, they won't even be seeing me do what I do which is lead worship. Oh, well, I'm sure they will visit again sometime when I am.

The staff here is great. There are 6 ministers, including myself. We have 2 youth ministers (a guy and a girl), our senior minister, a children's minister, and a connections minister (small groups and involvement).

I will be taking Outreach as well as Worship. It looks like one of my roles will be to co-lead the Upwards program at Vaughn Park. That should be fun since I love to play basketball.

On Fridays, one of the other staff members and myself go and play basketball with some guys at Faulkner University at lunch. This has been good because I need the exercise.

I'm running a new iMac 20" with 4 GB of memory. I love it. The Entourage email client is not as robust as Outlook, but it does everything I need it to do.

I hope everyone has a blessed day.

My Quartet "Speakeasy" at International Prelims

We are qualified to go to International this year to compete against the top 45 quartets around the world.  This year it will be in Nashville, TN.  Right now we are going in ranked number 15.  I hope we can move up from there.

Move Date

Our official move date is April 27-28.  We should arrive  on Monday afternoon to our new address.  We are excited about the move.  We will only be a few miles from church which will be great for commuting to work.  

3 weeks away and lots to do.  the house still hasn't sold yet, but hopefully it will sell soon.  Please stay in prayer about that.  

Montgomery Bound

My family and I have accepted a position in Montgomery, AL.  I will be the new worship minister for Vaughn Park Church of Christ.  My family and I are excited about this move because it gets us closer to family and we will be able to live within 5 minutes of the church instead of 30+ miles away in a high traffic city.  We are not for sure of our move date, but hopefully by mid April or beginning of May our house will have sold and we will be transitioning to Alabama.  It was a tough decision because there are many things about Preston Road that we loved.  However this will be a good move for our family.  We look forward to seeing our friends and family a little more that live in the TN and KY areas.  I hope to also get back involved with PBC.  

I'm only 2 hours from Atlanta, so I'll hopefully get to jam a little with Mike Polutta occasionally.  Maybe we should start a worship band.  :)

I will greatly miss the relationships that have been built while here in Dallas.  Please be in prayer that our house sell quickly in this stagnate market.  

Did you know I'm published?

I'm not much of a writer, but i did an article for Heartlight online several years ago. It is still up on the site. Here is the link:

http://www.heartlight.org/articles/200007/20000720_imitating.html

PRCC's Got Talent

This Sunday evening we are having a talent show that we are naming PRCC's got talent. It is going to be an awesome night. We will have our normal great acts that volunteer, but we have added 3 judges that impersonate 3 judges from America's Got Talent and American Idol. They will be impersonating Ryan Seacrest, Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, and David Hasselhoff.

We have also planned some "bad" acts as well as put together a staff tryout for the show which is hysterical of our staff singing badly.

Lots of video editing to do.

We might get freezing rain tonight. Probably not, because every time they forecast it, it almost never does what is says it is going to do.

Spurt Blogger

I'm a spurt blogger. I blog in spurts. Most of my hobbies are done in spurts. I will barbershop for a while, then I'll play Warhammer for a while, then I'll play a video game a while, and then I'll rotate back to something else again.

Blogging for me is the same. I will blog for a while and then I take a break and then I'll blog again. Some times my spurts last longer than others.

I can't tell you how long this blogging spurt will last, but time will tell.

I had Friday off and I switched my day off this week from Friday to Monday and I took a personal day yesterday on my birthday. (by the way 33 is such a forgetable age. )

My children and wife also had Friday, Monday, and Tuesday off so what did our family do over this long weekend? Go on vacation? Sit around and be lazy? Go shopping? None of those. We painted and painted and painted and painted.

We've had paint for months and have only painted the kitchen, the living room, and the two girls room. Left to be painted is the hallways and stairwells (the most difficult project), the two front rooms, our bedroom, the downstairs bathrooms, and the kitchen again since Summer didn't like the color.

We finished the two front rooms and the hallways and stairwells, and all but a little trim in one of the bathrooms (we ran out of paint)

This Sunday night at our church we are having a talent show called "PRCC"S Got Talent" We will have 3 judges and some really terrible acts planted along the way. It will be a hoot.

Kids are doing well. We are trying to get Bekah to potty train to no avail. We have tried everything. Literally. When I was a new parent I heard some really wild ways of potty training that I thought were a little out there and borderline cruel. I don't know that I think that anymore as I'm rather tempted to try some of those myself.

She won't budge. She has control, she just wants to go in her diaper. She hates the potty. I think it goes back to an event of sitting on the potty in a target and the automatic flush activated while she was sitting there. She hasn't been the same since. We did have a small victory over the weekend though. We were able to get her to pee in her potty once. Yeah.

Thats all for now. Sorry about the randomness.

Quiz Time

Ok, I created a quiz, but it is extremely easy, but it was fun coming up with questions.


Click the Title Quiz time and it should take you there. If not here is the URL:

http://www.quizyourfriends.com/quizpage.php?quizname=071108113626-636586&

Toothless Wonder

Micah lost he first tooth last week. He is so proud. It is one of his bottom middle teeth. He also won 2nd place in the readathon for the 1st grade. This kid loves to read which is a great thing. We highly encourage that.

How about them Cowboys? They are looking great. The big question is can they improve enought over the next 8 weeks to take it all the way to the Superbowl and give the Patriots a run for their money? Also, don't count the Colts out. They gave the Patriots all they could handle and that is with 3-4 guys injured and not playing.

I'm getting back into Greek. I've put my greek stuff down for several years and I decided that if I don't start refreshing now, I will lose any knowlege of Greek altogether.

It is getting cold in Texas. Yipee. It got down to 46 last night and will be potentially in the high 30's tonight. High today is only 64. It feels great.

Gotta go. sorry for the total randomness of this post.

Restful Weekend-Maybe

I'm hopeful that this weekend proves to be a restful weekend. There are things on the agenda such as 2 soccer games and parties afterwards, but nothing that should be too hectic. Summer is taking the day off tomorrow and I have tomorrow off as well. We are going to volunteer in the morning in Micah's class untill aournd 11:00. Then we are kid free until 2:30. I feel a lunch at On the Boarder coming to mind.

I just figured out that my new quartet has a myspace page. It is www.myspace.com/speakeasyquartet.

It has some tracks from our 3rd rehearsal which are not the best, but imagine that we sound good and you'll have an idea of what we have the potential of sounding like. :)

3rd Place

I have a quartet I'm in called Speakeasy. We have only had 5 rehearsals and competed in a contest. We ended up in 3rd place and missed out on 2nd by only 3 points out of a total of 3600 points. In 5 rehearsals our average was a 76.5. A 76 is a qualifying score to go to international. Though we don't qualify til March, we should only get better which means we should be heading to the International Convention in July.

this year, the international convention will be in Nashville, TN. I'm excited about it being so close to home because my family will be able to come.

I took a 6:00am flight out of Corpus Christi on Sunday and was able to make it back to church for tech rehearsal and worship. Afterwards we had lunch with the whole praise team. We had a great time.

Advair

It is funny looking at all the things that a new medication might cause. I've been prescribed Advair which is for Asthma. It helps me with that, but it has potential to cause any of these side effects:

Serious side effects include:
bronchospasm (wheezing, chest tightness, trouble breathing);
fast or uneven heart beats, restless feeling, tremor;
fever, chills, cough with yellow or green mucus;
stabbing chest pain, feeling short of breath;
white patches or sores inside your mouth or on your lips; or
worsening asthma symptoms.

Less serious side effects include:
headache, dizziness;
nausea, vomiting, diarrhea;
dryness in your mouth, nose, or throat;
stuffy nose, sinus pain, cough, sore throat; or
hoarseness or deepened voice.

So will this medication really make me better? I guess we will find out soon enough.

Asthma

When I was a kid I had an incendent where I was breathing in and felt a sharp pain that seemed to come from my heart. I did all kinds of testing back then and it was determined that my heart was rubbing against my lung and that I would grow out of it.

Well, I never did. I've had those symptoms since then though only occasionally.

I went to the doctor today to take care of a nasty cough that is in my chest. He did a breathing test and treatment and told me that at the minimum I have allergy induced Asthma. He prescribed me a inhaler that I will be using twice a day for six months and then he will do a workup on my lungs. He did say he is not officially diagnosing me with Asthma, but it very well could be that.

After coming back to work and letting the staff know the results of my appointment, one of our admins said that she had asthma and describe those same symptoms that I described at the top of this post.

So it looks like I have Asthma. I don't know what to think about it, but it looks like I got it. At least there is treatment.

Book Recommendation

The lastest book that I've read is "The Secret Message of Jesus" by Brian D. McLaren. This is an excellent read as he dives into the gospels and looks at the message of Jesus with a fresh perspective. This book focuses on the kingdom message of Jesus that is such a focus of His teaching.

He takes you on a journey of Jesus' times and the religious and political makeup of the culture. As you begin to frame Jesus' message in this context, the message of Jesus comes alive in a way it never has before.

He was also at the Zoe conference as a keynote speaker. He was excellent as usual. He has a new book that was just put out called "Everything Must Change." I'm eager to see what he has in store as he claims this to be his pinnacle work. I'll try to let you know when I read the book.

2 CD recommendations

As I sit at my desk, I look at my iTunes and see 7500 songs. If I pushed play and played every song running 24 hours a day, it would take 19 days to listen to all of them. On top of that I've got about another 200 CDs I've yet to import into my iTunes. I'm amazed I've gotten this much of my library on there to begin with.

Out of what I have, I definately have some favorites. Two that I would recommend today are Bart Millard (Lead singer for Mercy Me) "Hymned No. 1." He takes his favoirte old hymns and has a jam session. It is very enjoyable. You get to hear new takes at good old hymns.



The second recomendation is Casting Crowns' new CD "The Altar and the Door." This CD has got some incredible songs including my favorites, "East to West" and "Slow Fade." Pick up this CD if you don't have it. It rocks.

Bekah with not so long hair

Bekah with long hair

Recent Family Picture