I don’t think it is possible for me to be more worn out than I am right now. This past weekend I took 130 people rafting on the Kern River. We managed to do 18 trips down the river in about a day and a half. This is quite possibly the best Family weekend trip that I have ever been a part of. There is something amazing about putting families in rafts and watching them go through rapids. Its a great experience for them and causes great growth. I’m tired but I’ll blog a bit more regular this week.

Later today I’m going to put up a post of some of the things that I have been learning in recent weeks. I feel like God has given me a bunch of new opportunities and experiences that are pushing me to grow in new ways…..more later.

Sorry I’ve not been posting in a couple of days. I’ve been down in Mexico with a couple of good friends for a celebration of my friends coming marriage. It was a great weekend filled with some napping, some reading and some great theological discussions. I’ll blog some more about it tomorrow.

I spent most of today in a meeting discussing goals and plans for our church in 2006. We brought in a couple of guys who are entrepreneurs and marketers to help us think. Overall it was a great day. These guys had a much different approach to how to make decisions than a bunch of pastors had. One area that we talked about at length was “What is our product?” It was an interesting conversation to discuss product and Jesus. Ultimately I decided that I’m glad I am not a marketer but there are huge things that they can teach us about reaching people. I’ll have to do more thinking about this stuff.

It feels slightly nihilistic to know that I bought my name as a web site domain name today. It is pretty weird to think that for the next 10 years I own larsrood.com I bought it just to create a simple way for people to find my blog. As of right now after a couple of weeks only a few people have checked out anything I’ve posted. I guess the reality is that blogs are slightly selfish. We write hoping that someone will read what we say and think that we are smart, whitty and “worthy” of reading. I like what Donald Miller wrote when he says that part of his reason for writing is so that people will “like him.” I’m doing this blog thing partially for that but more so for a chance to get my feelings out of my head. Some of what I blog will be theological and perhaps even worthy of responding. A lot of it will be just an opportunity to find out what is going on in my life. I apologize now if you are reading this hoping that I am writing something that will change your life. I’m 35 years old and I don’t really care if your life is changed by my writing. I hope that as you get to know me you’ll see a little of my heart. My heart wants you to be changed by Jesus. I am not Jesus and can only point you to him. So, try to use this blog just as a way to see what a guy with a couple of kids and a wife and a mortgage thinks about how he connects with Jesus in his everyday life.

Just a quick update to the blog world. This last weekend was a bit too busy for me. Great stuff happened but just too much of it. I was at the Switchfoot Bro-Am surf comp fundraiser on Saturday at Moonlight beach. A cool even to raise money for the Care House in San Diego. I’m pretty impressed with those guys and have a huge amount of respect for what they are doing to give back.

Last night I preached from the book of James. It was one of the harder messages I’ve ever preached. We have 5 services every weekend and I used Mark’s notes and outline to preach the message to the last service. It was a great experience to try something new like that but it was tough. I struggled with doing justice to the text and to his notes.

More later…..

So yesterday I went to a conference at Biola University. The conference was titled “Conversations with the Emerging Church.” The idea behind it was to have Biola and Talbot professors interact with some of the leading people in the movment aimed at reevaluating how the Church needs to change in reaching out to culture. “The Emerging Church” is a lose affilitation of these churches. There was a lot of anticipation about this event as Biola/Talbot seems to be very wary of this movement. Several of us went just wondering if Biola was using it as an opportunity to slam everything about the movement.

I was a bit surprised about the event. Firstly, they billed the Emergent speakers as the “leaders” and “experts” in the field. I felt this claim was slightly exagerated. Although I did feel that they brought in some knowledgable people in my opinion there were others that could have added to the conversation but were not invited. The Talbot falculty were also an intersting bunch. The contrast between the two groups was amazing. Where the Emergent guys were an interesting crew to listen to and obviously were very concerned with church and culture several of the Talbot guys were obviously resting on the laurels of their academic degrees and their “knowledge” base. It was particularly disturbing to see that the first two Biola guys just read pre-written talks. At one point I passed a note to a friend saying “this is the reason 20 year olds don’t go to church.”

There were some good things that came from the Talbot side though. The Homiletics professor gave a great talk encouraging the Emergent Church to continue to “preach” and “teach” and make it Biblically centered. He seemed to be excited that some of the “Emergent” churches are reaching people that traditional churches are missing. I was most impressed about he spoke he and Dan Kimball stood just outside the tent and had a 30 minute conversation about preaching. The interesting thing is that this seemed to be the only “dialogue” between the groups that I saw all day.

All in all I would say that it was a good start. It seemed that none of the speakers really had the opportunity to flesh out their ideas enough. Perhaps I should say “Tease it out” as one of the Biola professors continued to say about McLarens ideas. In particular I wish that I had more opportunity to hear from research of Ryan Bullger from Fuller Seminary. He had done the most research on “Emergent Communities” and it woudl have been nice to get more info. I am impressed with Biola/Talbot that they decided to put on the event. My thoughts for next time would be to try and create more time for dialogue, find a place that has air conditioning and expand the conference to longer than 1 day. Oh yea one more thing, why do we feel that in order to support our positions we have to attack the others. I was discouraged at the beginning when the first Biola guy just attacked and attacked.

So, those are some of my thoughts.

Its funny to put this post under the category “current affairs.” I guess it really deos fit but it reminds me back to what life was like my senior year of high school. We took a class with the same title. Each week we read through NewsWeek magazine. There was always a quiz which was sort of like a Jeapordy thing. I was pretty good at it. Or at least in my memories I was pretty good. I’m starting to reach an age where my memories make me out to be a much better person than I probably was.

So, back to the point. What’s going on in my life? Things are pretty busy here at Castle Rood. Danielle is going to have a baby in about 5 weeks. She finished painting the babies room today. I did the majority of the work prepping taping and painting the top 2/3 of the room pink. She painted the bottom brown. We have a crib to pick up from some friends this weekend. Its funny to think we’ll have two cribs in the house and a bunkbead. Makes me feel like I have a huge family but the reality is that its just 3 kids.

Since I’m a little ADD I can switch topics whenever I want….unless they put me on meds. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the realestate market. I really want to buy a small piece of land with a cabin or a doublewide on it up in Kernville. Just something that will pay for itself and I can just manage it. The perfect place would have two lots and I would rent the place out and slowly begin to build a cabin on the 2nd lot. Its been pretty funny now that I live in San Diego most of my friends are businessmen and not pastors. Because of that they are always thinking about stuff like this. Its bringing out a side of me that I like. They force me to think about different ways that I can do business type things. Danielle is very supportive but we need to find some money for downpayments.

Not much else going on really. Work is busy as always and I’m a bit stressed out but I’m working on releasing myself from the stress. More on that later.

I thought a good way to start out this blog is by listing a number of things that I’m not. This may sound slightly self depreciating but its an incredibly helpful exercise for me. Don Miller in Searching for God knows What tells a story about an actor who said that he does a lot of stuff just so that people “liked him.” Miller then made a statment that I think about a lot today. He said that what he wanted was for people to (loose translation) “Know everything about him and still like him” My desire to post this list is so that I can enter into a place where people know a lot about me and I no longer have to hide behind things that I am not. So, here it goes:
1. I’m not a very good writer.
2. I’m not incredibly insightful.
3. I’m not a very good speller.
4. I’m not a great Bible scholar and my theology is at times messy.
5. I’m not a particularly good student.
6. I’m not a great pastor.
7. I’m not the person people run to when they want counseling.
8. I’m not the most creative person.
9. I’m not the model Christian.
10. I’m not very detailed.
11. I’m not very focused a lot of the times.
12. I’m not a great speaker.
13. I’m not a great visionary leader.
14. I’m not in shape.
15. I’m not very compassionate.

As I started working on that list I began to realize that I was feeling a little depressed. So, I thought I’d add a few things that I am good at so that I didn’t wallow in my own self pity.

1. I’m a pretty good dad.
2. I’m a pretty good husband.
3. I’m a great reader.
4. I’m a good friend.
5. I’m pretty driven to do things well.
6. I’m good at taking care of my family.
7. I’m good at fixing things.
8. I’m good at tearing things apart.
9. I’m good at listening to others talk about theology.
10. I’m good at making students in my youth group feel comfortable.
11. I’m good at minimizing my weaknesses.
12. I’m good at figuring out how to love Jesus within my culture.
13. I’m good at being organzied for big stuff.
14. I’m good at contingency plans.
15. I’m good at having fun.

Now I’m done. There’s probably a lot more that I left out but this is a start of a healthy self-awareness. If no one ever reads this blog I think I’ll still post regularly because its helpful for me.

I good place to start is by giving a quick update about what I do. I work at a church in North San Diego County called North Coast Calvary Chapel. My title here is Pastor of Student Ministries. What I actually do is hang out with a bunch of High School Students. The job has many pluses which I love and only a few bummers. Right now I’m sitting about 1/4 mile from the beach. THe weather is not so great and the waves were pretty gone when I drove by on my way to the office. I moved here to Carlsbad only about 11 months ago. Before that I worked at a church in Los Angeles for six years called Bel Air Presbyterian Church. My time there was awesome and I still miss the students and staff. What I don’t miss is Los Angeles. I was made to live by the beach and life down here is so peaceful and slow in comparison.

I have a great wife named Danielle. She’s the creative one in the family and has some serious abilities in design and scrapbooking. She’s also a pretty level headed gal and doesn’t hesitate to put me in my place. To be honest I often need that. Its a pretty cool thing that God did when he made her. She’s hot and smart. My boys are pretty cool too. Soren (4), always the crazy one, has major natural athletic abilities, he’s also a bit of a computer geek (like his dad) and has a sensitive side (unlike his dad). Kaije (2) is our little fireball. He’s young, but full of energy and and spunk. You’ll want to be very careful when you take something from him. He doesn’t stand for that. Recently he has begun to stand up for the smaller kids at Bible club.

That’s all about us. I’ll tell you more about me in my next post.