We enjoyed a wonderful evening with our friends Tal and Carolyn Jones. Some of the highlights were the cutting of the shrimp, the creation of the chicken with an egg for fried rice and the onion volcano. It was a great combination of entertainment and great food. However, the best part was being with Tal and Carolyn. We are blessed by their friendship. Thank you.

We are in Sacramento area for the next 17 days. We are blessed to make connections with many of our friends and partners here. Henry, Debbie, Lindsey, and Emily Wells have opened their home once again to us and so we are loving getting to spend time with them as well.

We will get  a chance to give an update at the Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church missions potluck. If you are in the area and can take part in that evening July 13, please come by and say hello.

Here are some pictures from our wonderful evening out:

I was blazing through the bible on target to complete it again this year when Larry Crabb’s new book 66 Love Letters surfaced on my reading list. As I got into it I knew I would want to start over and walk with Larry and the Lord, so to speak, through God’s Word. So I came back to Genesis and started again through the bible.

I am now beginning Numbers and I am so glad that I decided to go back. The first five books of the Old Testament are called the Pentateuch and they are much like a woman giving birth to a baby. Through much labor and pain a chosen people are coming forth and learning to relate to their holy God.

There is so much in these letters I would urge you to read them, and if you can pick up Larry’s book 66 Love Letters to help you make a deeper connection to God’s words.

All of that is context to one of the things that has become more clear to me. That is that this life is not about me, nor is all about God, but it is about God and me, and it is about those that are around me too. It is about we. God is showing me a bit about the unholy energy that I give to self obsessive type thinking or behavior, but that He has provided ways for me to express holy energy in my relationships. There are so many opportunities to do this, which is also something that is more visible than it has been to me before.

Here is one opportunity that we just had as a family last night. We celebrated Lisa’s sisters birthday. It was fun to focus on her for a little while and just celebrate her life. I created a short video of parts of our time together.

I have heard it said that if you want to clean your house, then invite people over. The incentive to create a clean space for your guests will help you overcome barriers to actually getting to the task of cleaning your house. In a similar way when you get ready to embark on perhaps an extended trip, you overcome all kinds of barriers of home to do’s so that you can get your house ready to leave it for a while. That is our lot right now. We are preparing to be away tending to our additional responsibilities of connecting with our friends who partner with us, and perhaps meeting new friends who will join us, and so we are working like mad to get all these nagging home tasks completed (i.e. finishing painting the house, fixing sprinklers, pruning, etc.). We are wearing ourselves out.

We are looking forward to connecting with our friends as well as making some new one’s too. This is a part of our role that is both challenging, and yet super rewarding.

The work does not cease here in Orlando with theLAB. In fact, we are preparing to have a summer intern join us for the next 10 weeks helping us create media solutions for our mission. We have a dozen projects mapped out for the hot and humid days of summer.

We are mailing our latest update letter out (to those who prefer a hard copy) Monday. If you want to read it first here you can click on the link for it. Here is our update for the month of June. (june update)

I really do wish I were a better writer. I am counting on the axiom that pictures are better than a thousand words. Tonight at Keegan’s soccer practice I was reminded of our beautiful creator God. I trust you will agree.

What a show!

Trying to take in all the colors.

Lights on

Iphone pano

The tent looks like a minature Denver International airport from the ouside. It was set up in what we call the “quad” at our offices. They mangaged to set up A/C units to cool it and it is the perfect place for us to hold our local expression of our Worldwide Day of Prayer.

Two times a year our ministry calls all our staff and volenteers around world to set aside the day to worship and pray for our mission. Today was one of those Important days.

Technology served us today by allowing us to hook up with some of our staff halfway around the world. We used “Skype” like tools to connect in a video call. We joined them in praising and praying for many of our God’s activities overseas.

The theme of our day is “Extreme Dependence”. May God be honored by our need for Him.

Big Break 2010 Sharing

Originally uploaded by pechnique

In the past 3 weeks staff and students have initiated 13,449 gospel conversations at Big Break and 1100 people placed their trust in Christ! While 480 prayed to be filled with the Holy Spirit. And if that weren’t enough, $58,041.88 has been raised in the past two weeks for Haiti Relief. God has been at work in an amazing way.

Assembling meals at our Big Break Conference

Spring Break is here for some college students. Panama Beach in the panhandle of Florida remains a popular destination for “spring breakers”, it is also the location where we host a conference we call Big-Break. My team the LAB created the visual theme of this five week long conference that historically will have nearly 3k students attend (see the web page as an example of some of theLAB work). This conference always includes a number of great opportunities for students to learn to share their faith on the beach, and that will result in story after story of students who came to party their break away and found a life long relationship with Jesus.

Our thoughts and prayers remain with those facing incredible challenges in Haiti and we know students share this burden. An idea surfaced that we could leverage the students to help us assemble meals for Haitians while still getting a chance to share their faith. The plan is to still provide great worship, teaching and training in evangelism, and we will add meal assembly to the mix. We will break the conference into thirds. One third will canvass the beach and invite any student to come spend an hour or two assembling meals. Another third will support and supply those putting the meals together. The final third will continue to do tried and true strategies to connect with students on the beach. The goal will be to share Christ with as many who will listen, and in addition to that to assemble 1,000,000 meals! Pretty niffty huh? We hope and pray God will use the ideas to His glory.

This is the first week of Big-Break. Not too many schools break this early. Weeks 2 and 3 tend to be very large and week 4 will then thin out again. I will post the results when we have them about five weeks from now. Keep checking back for photos and stories.

Speaking of stories here is a news report on some of the activity taking place there this week.