Last night I have never been more thankful for taking so many classes I didn't need for my degree. I had one of my students text me about committing suicide. I had multiple counseling classes that touched on this subject. None of them prepared me for how draining it would be dealing with that kind of revelation form a student. None of them talked about how this could come after a particularly long day when you wouldn't even want to look at the message. There have been many times I get a message well after 11 that I don't see it because I've already put my phone away for the night or just … [Read more...]

So we are planning a camp this summer for our area youth. We've secured a location and quite a few volunteers. I just worked out the preaching arrangements and we will be letting some of our volunteers handle the majority of the planning. This leaves me to deal with some of the more important details like the camp trophy. I'm thinking we go with a guys/girls competition for the week instead of pitting churches against each other since we are going for unity. The big question is what the trophy should be. It needs to be pretty absurd and also really cheap. I thought the random people here … [Read more...]

Um, so if you haven't been following along I'm a Youth pastor and we meet on Wednesday evenings for Youth. The group is growing and if you are here to figure out why … well please let me know when you do so I can keep doing whatever is working. Honestly God is good and He is honoring tons of prayers and my faithfulness to take every opportunity He gives to reach out to the lost Youth of our area. It seems that every time I am able to reach out to some student in the community another student shows up in Youth. I'm not directly affecting the ones that are showing up and I don't know if I'm … [Read more...]

So how familiar are you with the Star Trek movies? Can you name them all and give a synopsis? Can you quote most of Khan? Are you familiar with the odd number curse? Yeah I can do all that but don't worry that isn't required for you to read this post. Well you do need to know about the odd number curse. If you have seen the movies you are probably somewhat aware of this curse. Each odd numbered movie was significantly worse than the even numbered movies. Think about it. Star Trek the Movie. The first, the suck. Seriously, who's idea was it to cast Kirsty Alley as a bald Vulcan? I'm … [Read more...]

Wow, this weekend was an absolute blur. It really was great though. Early Saturday morning I wrote about things that happened on Friday night so I won't rehash those details. I will give a bit of info on the lead up and Saturday.This was an event that 3 different church ministries worked together on from our area. We ended up getting 125 tickets, 30 for us, for $20 each instead of nearly $50 so right off the bat God was blessing this venture. I brought 31 people to the event from my church. That was much better than last year. The frustration was that I had 5 people drop on me one week before … [Read more...]

There is so much to talk about for this trip. Mostly things have been frigintastic. One thing that is not frigintastic is the traffic and parking situation in downtown Baltimore. That is just wrong. In fact I'd go so far as to say it is down right sucktacular.The trip up was really nice. I love that particular route and I think most of the students did as well. We made it the whole way without any pukers. That's always a big plus in my book especially considering last time we went this direction things didn't work out so well.I do have one other complaint. One of the girls that I have … [Read more...]