When belief systems fail

Kem Meyer has a great post on belief systems and what happens when they fail. Makes me think about what my assumed belief systems are, how I define myself, and whether or not my actions show that I believe what I say I believe.

a ghost, a witch, and a pirate ship

that is what we made tonight. You know, there's nothing like cutting open a pumpkin, reaching in and pulling out all the slimy grossness one finds inside pumpkins. I actually find it interesting that pumpkins are hollow. Why is that? I suppose if I really wanted to know, I could find out, but i'm feeling quite lazy at the moment.

Anyway - I've always carved pumpkins with kitchen knives and have found it to be a rather good way to end up with several band-aids on my hands, thus have had a reluctance to carving pumpkins...especially around small children. For the past few years, we've drawn on them with markers, but by doing that you really miss out on the backlighting effect when you place the candle inside...which I must admit is really pretty cool.

So we bought a carving kit which contained 2 small saw-like utensils, a small drill (plastic & non-motorized), and for lack of a better term - a little pokey-wheel, which helped you transfer your design from paper to the pumpkin (I think I've seen one of these used for sewing once before).

This was amazing. No more trying to saw through the pumpkin thinking that at any moment the knife may slip and cut off a finger (i wonder if others have similar thoughts). The saws give you great control and allow for a great amount of detail. So, here's our creations from tonight.











Happy Halloween!

are you Innovative?

check out these videos of all the main sessions from Granger's Innovate '07 conference. They have some pretty sweet stuff going on.

Dream On

Here's a great remake of Aerosmith's Dream On by Kelly Sweet.

Everything is spiritual

Rob Bell, creator of the popular nooma series, went on a tour last year entitled 'Everything is Spiritual'. It was just him, a white board, and 2 hours of incredible teaching. After he finished, a man in his mid-forties who was sitting in front of me stood up and said to his wife, "that was the most amazing presentation I have ever seen". Anyway - if you know nooma, you know the quality, and they have just released the DVD of the everything is spiritual tour. I highly recommend it. There are some video clips available on their site.

5 Conferences in 5 days!

The church I serve has one week in October that is quite literally insane. This is that week. we have almost 2,000 people coming from all over the country (as well as several other countries) to gather, worship, learn, reconnect, network, and learn about communicating the message of Christ in today's world. We have compiled several different conferences together so the energy is contagious and they seem to feed off of each other. There is an IT roundtable, a Contemporary Worship Institute, some Pre-Institute intensive sessions, an all-day conference hosted by Group Publishing on the 'Me to We' phenomenon, and then finally the actual Leadership Institute.

Things are going great, on the line-up is Greg Scheer, Doug Flather, Len Wilson & Jason Moore (Midnight Oil guys), Sally Morgenthaler, Adam Hamilton, Emanuel Cleaver, and several other great presenters. I'm totally stoaked about the night of worship that our contemporary music ministry is hosting tomorrow night...should be pretty tight! Hope to see you there.