Tonight we had our second Experience Jesus Project at Youth Group.  It was pretty cool.  Completely student led worship night that was very interactive.  They had 8 stations with different ways to worship. My role was picking songs and sitting on a couch praying.  Thanks to Phil Cunningham from YWAM Seattle for the great idea.  They did this as a part of the training for our Missions Adventure Trip last summer and it was an amazing experience for the students in my youth group.  I think that so many students don’t really understand how to worship God and almost never take time out to sit for an hour and do anything like that. 

So, I liked it.

Tonight I was invited to participate in an underage drinking forum that happened in Carlsbad. My involvement was to host a table for our youth group which wasn’t much but it still felt significant. I like that in small towns they ask you to be involved. It’s nice to see a community coming together to have an impact on a tought issue. I was very impressed with it all.

This morning on the way to work I happened to hear a radio contest on 91X. The question was this “Perry Farrell just played at a festival in San Francisco called Purimpallooza. Which other 91X artist played at the festival?” Finally I think to myself I can put my seminary degree to good use. Purim is a Jewish Holiday and the only Jewish Singer I know is Matisyahu. So I called in and won. They gave me two free passes to Snow Valley to go snowboarding. The “catch” they are only good this year and I have to go pick them up. But, not a lot of complaints.

What was the coolest thing. My son Soren calling me and telling me he heard me on the radio. It was delayed about 30 seconds so I called Danielle and told her to turn it on.

So today I made another trip to the dentist. I was getting a cavity filled this time. After about two hours, lots of laughing gas and drilling I was home to take a nap before dinner. During dinner (a great salmon and steamed veggie one) I realized I was having trouble eating because I couldn’t feel my tongue or the bottom of my mouth. Fearing that there was something like a bean lodged in the bottom of my mouth I reached in and pulled out a inch long roll of gauze. Gross I know but at least I didn’t swallow it.

Lot’s of reading about Culture the last few weeks. Big paper coming up on how the church interacts with pop media specifically with the internet and print.

Soren and I had to take some friends to the airport early this morning. We decided to do a tour of San Diego beach communities on the way home. We had breakfast in Ocean Beach which was pretty cool and good food. After that we went to Imperial beach which was slightly seedier and also much larger. We cruised to the Cove in La Jolla and got lucky as the tide was out. Went through the cave and ended up finding a tide pool full of little crabs. Soren was stoked to play with them although they didn’t seem to enjoy it very much.

The best part of the day. We were both sporting our Crocks. Soren just got a new red pair and I had my normal blue ones. Fun to spend the day exploring with my son. Its good to take the time to do that. Did I mention that we ended up at the Apple Store………

Today was long. We started a 2nd Sunday morning student service. Now I’m teaching students 3 times every weekend. Funny how wiped out I was after the first morning service. I actually fell in the parking lot and almost knocked someone over. The great thing about my church though is how close Ralphs is. I walked over and got a power bar and was back in about 2 minutes. Spent the afternoon in the pool (not mine) with the boys and back to church tonight. I’m tired but it feels good to be tired.

How come some things don’t change and some things change all the time? Recently I was sitting with my boys watching TMNT (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) Same show that many of us watched growing up. I did a search on Netflicks and found out that they had a ton of TMNT dvd’s for rent. I find it interesting that something like this pop media show has really never changed and is still reaching kids.

As I started thinking through this I began to wonder why it is that in the church we are typically so enamored with change and constantly talk about being “relevant” to culture. But, then we go ahead and create our own culture of stuff that is often not very good media. I think that the Ninja Turtles could kick Bible Mans butt. So, can we figure out a way to “Reedeem” culture and use it instead of creating our own that is marganalized by the message?

I have been doing a lot of research lately about print media, pop-culture and how the church interacts with it all. Today I started reading “The Medium is the MASSAGE” by Marshall McLuhan. He’s best known for his book “Understanding Media” that he wrote way back in 1964. At the time he was pretty revolutionary in his ideas about where society, communications and the world. This book is pretty crazy because it was published in 1967 and is pretty far out there. Almost a work of art more than a book he interposes a connection between print media, visual media and all the visual senses. Maybe I’m not the best guy to describe since I’m not what you would call an “artist” but I do connect with asthetics and can understand when someone gets it. I need to interact more with that stuff.

Today was an interesting day. Took my boys to the Doctor this morning to have a wart frozen on each of them. I too had a wart that was going to be frozen. Soren took it well and didn’t even tear up. Kaije had a rough go of it. Afterwards we went and shared a smoothy at the shop where my friend Bobby works. He wasn’t there but smoothy and cinnamon role made the boys a little happier. Afterwards we went to the mall saw Tammy at Pottery Barn and played some games at the Apple store. Later we drove home and stopped at Brians to see his new tile. It’s fun to have boys and friends and to get to spend a lot of time hanging out with both.

Not much else going on. oops someone is crying……..

File this one under. What’s going on at Castle Rood. Well we just got all new tile and carpet at the castle. I really like the difference. Going from 12 year old light blue stained carpet and linoleum (hard word to spell) to chocolate brown carpet and tile in all the bathrooms was a big step. In fact just this morning I was rolling around on the carpet naked (kidding.) But, this has meant that this week has been all about moving furniture, discovering lost items and finding things we wish we didn’t (old milk cups under our bed.)

I’m glad its almost over. Their doing our master bedroom today.