Icy Hills, Coffee Houses, and Baby-Ques

This past weekend was a fun one.  It started at my Dad's house on Friday.  As many of you know, I'm recording a cd with the guys, and it's been a loooooonnnnnggg process.  After our most recent trip to Nashville, Alex, Aaron and I were listening to what we had just recorded when I got an idea.  "Let's get my Dad talking about the unchanging love of God" before the song, "You Never Change".  Needless to say, we recorded it on Friday.  I'm always amazed at my father's faith in the midst of the most difficult thing that our family as ever faced.  His love for God is a testimony to the life he has lived.

Saturday, I went to something called a "Baby-Que".  Basically, it was an excuse to cookout so that guys would go to a baby shower.  It worked!  There were a lot of guys there eating a burger, drinking a beer, and talking about guy things: cars, sports, etc.  The highlight of the afternoon was watching six grown men see who could drink milk from a baby bottle the fastest.  It was definitely an interesting moment in my life; surreal and awkward.  The guy who won cheated.  Shocker.  It WAS  a group of guys.  It was 51 degrees outside.

The reason I write the temperature of the day is to help you understand the oddity of Kentucky weather.  By 7pm that night my car was covered with snow!  If you know anything about Kentucky's dealings with snow, you know that everything goes into a complete state of anarchy.  Suddenly, you can't by bread and milk at the grocery store.  Schools, churches and businesses close their doors, and people who already couldn't drive, drive even worse.  Needless to say, I knew church would be interesting.

Sunday morning I woke up around 5:30, got ready and headed out to the church office.  As I was driving down the hill toward our office, I realized that there was a serious problem.  The back end of my car had decided that it was a good idea to have a race with the front end of my car.  Luckily, the front end won, but I had to make a phone call.  I got a hold of Dave and shared my concern for driving a 15 passenger van hauling a 12 foot trailer up an ice covered hill.  We had to really think on our feet.  

Being a church plant, you aren't able to just show up for church and have everything ready.  It just doesn't work like that.  Every week, we have to basically bring our entire church with us to a high school.  This week, that wasn't going to happen.  Luckily, we rent the cafeteria at the high school each week for our children's ministry.  This gave us an idea, and we went with it.  With all the round and high-top tables, we decided to turn our church service into a coffee house.  We went all acoustic with the worship, and pipe-and-draped off the room.  It went better than we ever could have imagined.  I guess God doesn't need expensive equipment or flash to get His message across.

Needless to say, it was a great weekend.

Old friends...

Today, I'm sitting in one of my favorite coffee houses, Main and Maple, working on about a hundred different things when, out of no where, I get a message from a good friend of mine.  Lyle Baker sent me a note on facebook telling me how excited he'll be to see the JKB leading worship at the Ohio Teens Conference.  Lyle has been a friend of mine for years.  We were college roommates, bandmates, and always seemed to watch movies throughout the summer.  Lyle is a great guy.  When we were asked to lead worship for OTFC, I forgot just how many friends I have that are youth ministers in Ohio.  I've been out of youth ministry now for a couple years, and I've kinda stepped out of the network that I had built up over about 11 years of ministry.

Being able to see some guys that I've lost touch with over the last several years is an exciting thing for me.  There are a lot of things that are important to me, and one of the biggest is the friendships I've made over the years.  I'm not old by any means, but I really feel like I have a lifetime of great friends that I've made over the years.  Any time I can rekindle those relationships or simply get back in touch with them, I always get a little excited.  I've always been a people person.  I definitely live for those moments.

Not a long blog today, but just a little happiness on my part.

Oh.....and this season of Lost has been amazing!!!!!!