It is with some sadness, yet great joy, that I share with you some recent developments in my life.  After serving at MCC for four years, I have decided to accept a position with Church Solutions Group (or CSG), a church consulting firm based out of Chicago.  This position allows me to share all that we have learned at MCC with other church around the country and eventually around the world! This has been a dream of mine for a long time, as some of you are aware – to serve many local churches in the way I have served at MCC.  I am confident that God is guiding me into this new chapter in my life, and I greatly appreciate your prayers, encouragement, and support.

June 26th will be my last Sunday serving on staff at MCC.  I will be moving to the Chicago area to join the CSG team, the following week.

My time at MCC has been amazing and I am so excited for where the church is headed.  I will miss my friends in New England but hope to visit often.  New England is home to me now.  I know its people and consider many as family.  Please visit Chicago and I will do my best to be an amazing tour guide.  If for some reason I missed you with personal communication, please don’t feel hurt.  It was a short time frame and I would love to hang with you in any way I can.

Stay Classy New England!

I know it sounds crass, but in the new Series on James we are dealing with people with problems and James simple yet profound answers to them.  Today’s picture is the stage design going along with the series.  It still needs to be tweaked a little but it turned out pretty well.

The first picture I am choosing to submit, granted not some of my best work, displays one of my favorite places.  Today I was able to have lunch with some friends from Harbor of Hope Christian Church in Chelmsford, MA.  Spending a couple hours with these guys re-energizes me.  The creative space of their auditorium fills me with a sense of comfort and ease.  The meet in the basement of a remodeled mill building.  How could you not experience God in an awe inspiring place like this?  This is my place of beauty today.  What’s yours?

I decided to start out anew with an idea that came to me recently.  I wanted a way to slow down and see the small stuff that makes life beautiful.  I can’t guarantee that my pictures will be totally awe-inspiring or that the ideas I put down here will be anything that will move the earth. But this project will allow me to slow down each day for a little bit and maybe improve my photography.  So stay tuned and I will do my best to post every day.

Anyway, so thus far I am enjoying living closer to work and to friends.  I actually woke up at 8:15 this morning and still made it to work by 8:52.  On Sunday I had an extra 15 minutes that I had no idea what to do with it.  So that part is exciting.

Next wednesday we start up yet another semester of small groups.  I have a few new people in my group and a couple of great friends.  I am really looking forward to getting this semester started off right.

Tony and I went down to the WFX conference because I was asked to be apart of a Tech Director Panel.  It was an awesome experience and I really enjoyed being a part of the conference.  We were able to go to a few of the breakout sessions and really experience some new technologies and understanding how to best utilize the technologies we currently have.  A few of the sessions were totally focused on team building and how to organize the team.  I really enjoyed being able to hear from other people in ministry and see what they were doing and really figure out ways to apply it to our team.  

The tech director panel was amazing.  We were able to get up on stage and talk candidly to other tech directors from our experience.  I got to meet some amazing tech directors from some of the largest churches in the Country.  It was amazing how down to earth and normal everyone was.  Overall my experience at WFX was awesome.  I am now making public speaking appearance for $1500 an event… well just kidding but it was fun.

This morning was an amazing morning with a great video encouraging us to slow down our lives and back off from the rush of the day.  This hit so much as I got home at 8:00 from being at the church from about 7:30 this morning.  We all need to take some time out and enjoy the things that give us a break from the speed of life…

     So back to the study.  Tonight the lesson was entitled “The Clean Daughter.”   The dvd lesson tonight was centered around Matthew 5:21-34.  This is the combined story of Jairus’ daughter and the unclean women touching the edge of Jesus’ robe.

     The teacher, Gary Burge, laid some historical background that I knew but never really connected to the story.  He was talking about how the woman was religiously as well as socially unclean.  Connecting this to the story he helped us to realize that there was Jairus’ side to the story.  He has this daughter who is sick in bed not doing so well and this lady comes along a ruins a lot for him.

     Jairus is a synagogue official so he knows all the rules.  Not only is Jesus taking time out for this lady and not healing his daughter but also this woman is ceremonially unclean so that therefore makes Jesus unclean and unable to do any religious activities.  How much would that tick you off.  Now I know this is totally just speculation but if he was thinking that or you were in that situation what would you think.  That bleepity bleep woman or bleepity bleep Jesus.  

     Our group talked about this a little.  Jesus noticed someone had touched the tassels of his garment.  Essentially, he noticed power going out from him.  The apostles are thinking what in the heck there a million people here, someone is bound to touch you, quit being so OCD.  But Jesus recognizes the woman who touched him and said, “Daughter, Your faith has healed you, go in peace an be freed from your suffering.”  How cool is that Jesus considered this outcast from society the same as the Daughter of Jarius.  He healed her the same that he would anyone else because he faith caused her to go into a situation to see Jesus, where she was not invited and probably despised because of her condition.  What an amazing step of faith for her to jump into a situation she was probably having her own doubts that it would even work.

    At this point I ask myself how many times have a decided not to go into a hard situation because I don’t think that I can be healed or even be forgiven.  Are there times in my life that I know if I reached out in faith my situation would improve not for my good but for God’s.

     In biblical times a good jew would wear these garments with squared off corners and they would put “tassels” on the end of them.  These tassels came to show the religious authority of teachers and rabbis.  So when a person wanted to really bow to the authority of a teacher and ask them a question they would grab onto these tassels. 

     By reaching out to the tassels she was showing a humble act of faith in the authority of Christ.

So this video might be the funniest video I have seen in quite a while.  Even if you have no clue what the DTV transition is, you will get a chuckle.  I will probably have to blog about the DTV transition now won’t I.  Anyway this is just a really really funny video that I ran across on a tech blog.

     Tonight I have been watching a program on the History Channel called “Fort Knox: Secrets Revealed.”  It is quite a complex from what I am seeing.  Fort Knox started in 1918 as an army base.  In 1932 Camp Knox turned into Fort Knox and in 1937 the US Department of Treasury turned Fort Knox in to a Bullion Depository.      Fort Knox has be guarded with the world’s greatest technological tactics since the opening of the Bullion Depository.  It was interesting to me that the base is THE training spot for all army men training for artillery.  In fact the base itself was named after a great army artillery general named Henry Knox who was a good friend of George Washington.  The history of this Fort is really quite amazing.
     So all of this to guard some of the most important stuff in this country.  On the show they brought up the statement, “In Gold We Trust.”  The Gold Vault at Fort Knox is said to hold 4,570 Metric Ton valued at about $134 billion dollars.  Little did I know but this isn’t even most of the the US’ Gold suppository.  The Federal reserve in Manhattan has 5000 metric tons of Gold.  
     So with all this said.  If someone comes in and steals all of the gold in this country.  Does our money become nothing more than paper and metal.  Because really all of our money is supposed to be backed by this Gold and if our government no longer holds it, what would happen?  I don’t totally get the economy and how our money works.  I just think it is crazy the trust we put in this thing we call money.  I am not trying to question it rather trying to understand the complexities of our world.