You add the caption.

So, I was looking back through iPhoto for a pic for my new Twitter account, finally decided to give it a try, and I found this photo.  Jen and I are cracking up, it has to be one of our funniest pics.  You add the caption.

 

Remember back when I used to Blog?

OK so I have been in hibernation or something, Sorry. Things have been and are going to be busy around here. I started Seminary yesterday I going to Liberty University. I’m excited to get started but a little overwhelmed at the amount of reading. I’m taking 2 classes and have 6 books to read in each class, plus a 10-12 page report and 4) 1-2 page “discussions” in each class so my next 8 weeks should be interesting. I know alot of you heard about all the tornados this past weekend and we were fine. We got some rather large hail and bad wind but that was all we got. Atlanta wasn’t so lucky. Jennifer had fun at her Mom’s house in Florida and she got back fine. The girls and I had quite the super fun time, with the high light probably being the 2+ hours that we had the inflatable play center to ourselves on Friday. I had the best time running around and sliding and the girls did too. It was a good time for all of us to regroup a little bit.

We have quite the busy week at work with our Good Friday services and Easter. Its easy to get wrapped up in t busy-ness of it all and forget what we are doing all this for. I know this is all over the place but I just needed to blog again so maybe you got something out of the Randomness.

 

My wife

My awesome wife’s birthday is today. She is turning 30

Her Gift is a trip all by herself with no kids or husband to Florida. Its a little weird not having a big celebration but… I know that she will really love some time to relax and unwind and not have to take care of anyone else for a few days.

 

Evolve conference

Monday and Tuesday My wife and I attended the Church Planters conference. We had a good time. Being in ministry it is tough to have opportunities to worship and hear good teaching with my wife so this was really special. Jen and I fell in love Chasing after God together and I really miss opportunities to do this. I know we spend some time together talking and we each have our time with God alone but there is something so fun about singing in a corporate environment with her when I’m not working. The conference was a great one and there was so much that we learned and we made some new friends and connected with fellow bloggers. for a good run down of the sessions go see Jay.

 

Wintery Wundahland

Well guess what. Its snowing! Pretty crazy for these parts. The girls have had fun playing in it a little tonight. Here is our snow man.

Its supposed to freeze tonight so it may be pretty slick tomorrow. Hopefully it will keep snowing for a while so the girls can play in the snow more tomorrow.

 

Happy New Year!

Happy new year!  I pray this year would be one of your most memorable years!  For us we are going to be more intentional about enjoying life.  I am going to spend more time praying, reading and just listening.  I want to spend time with God, not just trying to get answers from Him.  I really want to live in the present I have a really bad habit of always concentrating on the next thing instead of being fully present in the here and now.  I want to invest in my family.  I want Jen to have the best year ever and for the Girls to really grow and remember this year as a good one.  I also want this to be the last year we ever have to talk about being in Debt.  We have come along way and this year should finish the drill.  Well,  Happy new year!

 

Merry Christmas

Well we have had a wonderful Christmas so far. Sunday went well. We had a great service with some really good worship and Communion went pretty close to perfect. I am always amazed at how awesome our volunteers are. They handled everything very professionally and worked hard. We were finished cleaning up in a bout an hour after the service. Pretty amazing considering how much we had to clean.

We had a good time at Grammy and Grandy’s yesterday. The Girls loved their big gift from them. It is a camera and microphones that plays back on you TV while they sing. We have two little superstars. We had a great meal and some more pretty funny cooking stories. I think that is usually the highlight of a meal with my Mom, The hilarity of the culinary mishaps. Don’t get me wrong everthing tasted awesome but it was her first experience with a “real” Turkey and she hates to touch any type of meat so you can only imagine her retelling a story of trying to deal with giblets and turkey necks and trying to handle the turkey. Pretty funny.

We had our Christmas Breakfast at our house and some of the Grandparents came by and enjoyed Breakfast enchiladas and Cheese Blintz. MMMmmmm. So we’re two christmas’ down and two to Go. We’re really enjoying this year we didn’t go crazy about getting and buying for everyone and we paid cash for everything we did do. Here are some pics.  I hope you have a wonderful Christmas too!

We might need to work with Em a little on the whole concept of Make up and some application principles

Here’s our Gift from Bella,  her teachers helped I think!  The Grandma’s teared up a little bit.

 

The Fam

OK, here are some pics that Tyler took of us last weekend. There are a lot of fun pics and Tyler did an awesome job with very little notice. We called him up a little before lunch and he took these around 4pm.

Man, I have some beautiful women in my life! If you’re looking for a good photographer check Tyler out. Comment here and I’ll send your info to him if you want.

 

Rambling through to trust

Psalm 46 is full of terrific pictures of trouble. Things that would overwhelm us. Disastrous events and verbal pictures of catastrophe. And in the middle of all this turmoil where we would be screaming God what can we do God answers ” Be still and know that I AM God.” But there is too much to do to just “be still”. I am too important not to act. They need me. I looked up the Hebrew word used here for Be still which is Raphah. It kinda bothered me it is basically to let drop, abandon, relax, refrain, forsake. The verbal picture is to lower you hands. To let drop? Abandon? Refrain? Forsake? Really? I can be OK with relax because I picture that as doing something fun, but if you think of it as a muscle or your efforts towards a problem then its not so easy. I am generally a laid back person but with my family I feel so much responsibility that I might tend to get a little stressed out and over protective. It causes me to try to stay out of situations that I can’t control. I’ve been thinking about this a lot especially with all the Christmas time to dos. I know that God can protect my family way better than I can but I just have such a hard time relaxing and trusting him to do it. My biggest fear is that something would happen to one of my girls or Jen but if I live in fear then I am hurting them and stealing their joy and memories. I guess thats why the rest of that verse is “and Know that I am God”. If I know that God is God and He promises to be our “refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble”, then I can let go of the reigns. God has shown Himself worthy to be trusted time and time again to me and I am fairly good at trusting Him in most areas of my life but I’m just not their in the Husband/Father role…yet.

 

Shane & Shane

Jen and I went to our old church, Riverstone, to see Shane & Shane this past Saturday.  I was fun on many levels.  We spent a lot of time at that church and have a lot of friends and “family” there.  They have opened a new facility since that I helped on many of the construction aspects including pulling all kinds of wire and building the stage.  I was also in on many of the first design meetings, it was a lot of fun but I started my job the week before they opened so I have never seen the finished product.  The place looks really good and sounds good too.  I can remember all the different rented facilities they mett in along the way and its really fun to see them in a building of their own.  I sort of felt a little like a family get together seeing people that we know and love but haven’t seen in a long time.  I really enjoyed Shane & Shane.  They were completely un-produced.  Just the two of them and a guitar.  Very laid back and comical even a few forgotten lines to Christmas songs.  It felt very real and I liked that, even when Shane was rambling.  Their was a point in worship that I really felt the nearness of God  and it was so refreshing.  And the best part of the night was that I got a couple of hours to enjoy and talk to my beautiful bride.  She is so awesome and I hate that we get so busy sometimes that we don’t have time or space to enjoy each other.  I really loved that time and we even managed a Starbucks on the way home.