Review: I recently picked up the How to Use Your Head to Guard Your Heart: A 3(D) Guide to Making Responsible Media Choices by Walt Mueller, founder of the Center for Parent & Youth Understanding. It is a sweet little resource that will empower you to help your students in the high-speed, ever-changing world of media. Using what they call a 3(D) approach (Discover, Discern, Decide), it is a practical tool that parents, youth workers, teachers, and other caring adults can use to engage students in discussion about media. Rather than just telling kids they can or cannot watch or listen to or play something, this tool encourages discussion about how to make wise choices in terms of what we should and shouldn’t be embracing from the media. Only 12 pages long and small in size, it is a great little booklet to keep handy next to your computer or television. Dirt cheap at only about $1.50 each, youth pastors would do well to purchase them and give them to parents … Perhaps as a little Christmas gift. (Hint! Hint!) You look great to parents. Parents will get involved in their kids lives in a deeper way. What could be better than that?
We are engaged in one of the most intriguing, polarizing elections of my lifetime. Whichever ticket wins it is going to be an historic first. Either the first black president, or the first woman vice-president. I am interested to see what happens, and I am praying for GOD’s will to be done.
GOD’s will.
Not MY will.
I think we too often pray for elections, pretending that we are praying objectively, but secretly praying that our candidate will win because we “know” it’s God’s will. It’s kind of like praying for our team to win the Super Bowl and linking it to God’s will. God is so much bigger than our favorites! Let us humbly pray, “Father, not my will, but Yours be done”
Now, I must be totally honest and say, hopefully without getting shot for saying it, that while I care who wins, I really don’t care who wins. Policies and positions on issues are important. I believe a candidates’ professions need to translate into their policies, and I believe we need to vote prayerfully, according to how a candidate’s values line up with our convictions and our understanding of God’s nature revealed in His Word. However, while choosing a leader for our country is an important responsibility we have as citizens, my identity and security do not rest in a man in a position; my life is defined and secure because I am a citizen in the kingdom of God, and more importantly, a child of the King.
My concern is not really in who wins or looses. My concern is that the Church resist the temptation to operate in either panic or in a false hope based on a man in a position, and rather be found praying for (not against!) whichever candidate wins and, most importantly, doing the work of advancing God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, not celebrating a man as our hope or complaining about a man in fear.
Idiot Paparazzi
Today I have been working on two additional lessons for the Youth Specialties project I have been privileged to contribute to. I finished my 20 lessons last week, but since I was the first one done I offered to pick up a couple more to help out. Once these are done I am looking forward to a bit of a break and then taking on some new writing projects Lord willing. I have another book of 500 questions just about done that I put on the back burner in order to fully devote myself to this project. So, I’ll dust that one off, clean it up, and see if anyone wants to pick it up and publish it.
I am also beginning to receive a lot of invitations to speak. A few weeks ago I taught a class at NYACK college in Manhattan. Next weekend I will be upstate New York. The following weekend I will be speaking at a youth retreat in Michigan. I have also been asked to speak at a retreat in February, so I am hoping I can get the time off to do that as well.
I am excited for these opportunities of greater influence. Please keep me in your prayers. Thanks!
What do all of the following things have in common?
A grandma eating 4 spoonfuls of baby food. Uno. An Alpha-Bits Cereal spelling contest. A beautiful time of sharing and praying together. Hours of Spoons. Jenga. Waking up and looking out over the ocean from a balcony. Lunch at a place called Shagwong. A trip to the Montauk, NY lighthouse and bluffs. Four hours in a shuttle.
Answer: Our Adult Leaders’ Retreat 2008!
Last weekend our leadership team shared a fantastic weekend of relational connection and a bonding of our hearts together as friends. Youth ministry is not easy. Usually fun, often exciting, hectic, busy, sometimes frustrating, adventurous, tiring, but never easy. That’s why we need times to just get away and rest in the spirit of Jesus and His disciples.
In Mark 6:31, after some intense ministry adventures, Jesus said to
His disciples, “Come aside by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” It’s easy to forget the importance of rest and relaxation in the business of ministry. But if we want to avoid burnout and want to serve Jesus for the long haul, we need to give our minds and our bodies time to rest and recharge.
I love retreats, especially with my leaders, because more than a time of rest, they are also a time of relationship building. In John 15:15 Jesus said to His disciples, “No longer do I call you servants … I have called you friends.” Do you think Jesus said that simply because the disciples were in ministry with Him? I don’t think so. All of those conversations walking from place to place, the conversations in the evenings when they couldn’t fall asleep, the meals they shared together, the getaways—these were the times during which their friendships were built; times of BEING together. While very important, the other stuff was doing-oriented. I have come to the place that I am simply not interested in just working together to get a job done. I want to be able to say, “I served Jesus faithfully, reaching students for the kingdom, and I didn’t do it with hired guns. I did it with friends. We worked hard. We played hard. We laughed. We cried. We prayed. We struggled. We learned. And through it all, we were friends.”
Today let me leave you with a Scripture to live and a statement to ponder.
“Serve the Lord with gladness” (Psalm 100:2).
The following is a rather full statement that I came upon recently in a devotional. Read it through a few times slowly. Meditate on it. Wrestle with it. Digest it in your spirit.
“In all the ordinary forms of Christian life, service is apt to have more or less of bondage in it; that is, it is done purely as a matter of duty, and often as a trial and a cross. Certain things, which at first may have been a joy and a delight, become after a while weary tasks, performed faithfully, perhaps, but with much secret disinclination, and many confessed or unconfessed wishes that they need not be done at all, or at least that they need not be done so often. The soul finds itself saying, instead of the ‘May I?’ of love, the ‘Must I?’ of duty … I am ashamed to think that any Christian should ever put on a long face and shed tears over doing a thing for Christ which a worldly person would be only too glad to do for money.” – Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911) in The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life
In promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity.
Let your conversational communications possess a compacted conciseness, a clarified comprehensibility, a coalescent cogency and a concatenated consistency.
Eschew obfuscation and all conglomeration of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement and asinine affectations.
Let your extemporaneous descants and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and voracious vivacity without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast.
Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolificacy and vain vapid verbosity.
If you are really interested to know, the above means: “Be brief and don’t use big words.”
Tonight we had the privilege of having a team from the Colorado Springs Youth With A Mission (YWAM) with us. They ministered to us through dance, music, and preaching, really challenging us to be active in partnering with God to fulfill the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20). It was fantastic and many students responded with great interest in learning more about how they can serve the Lord. www.ywamemerge.org 
The Early Bird Special Ends This Week! Save $40 when you enter promo code SYMPODCAST.
Dad just sent me this hilarious video. Follow the link and enjoy: http://www.funny-city.com/1766/
REVKEVJR.COM 