After some time at work today I am ready to leave for Columbia. My wife, Kristen’s parents are moving into their home after the year long process of building a house. They have been living in an apartment with their son Drew, 18 who has cerebral palsy and their youngest daughter Emily, who is a really great artist and has a creative mind that is better than most that I have seen.

The apartment was incredibly cramped so this is a big celebration for them and I am happy to be a part of it. The house is equipped with all of the stuff that Drew needs and a studio-type bedroom for Emily. I can’t wait to share the fun and excitement with them as they move into the home. Pray for travels as we go. Probably very few blogs this weekend but you never can really tell with me.

out

As Ned said to me earlier this week, “For all the times we get to slime kids and ride on a segway, we have to do things like this” He was talking about some of the things that you don’t hear about often. (of course it depends on who your pastor is, how often you hear about them).

The negative emails, the interesting phone calls, the people that don’t want to serve, and the people that could care less if you fell off of the face of the earth. It’s the side of ministry that I am just beginning to get accustomed to. I am learning to love difficult people and more than that learn that not everything is always so rosy for everyone.

I definitely couldn’t imagine before I started working in ministry how dejected you will fill after you put your life into something and someone couldn’t stand it for some reason. It is honestly a terrible feeling. But I say all of this in order to encourage and challenge you to do something.

This past week at Adventure Week I got numerous letters from children, thanking Hanz and Franz for the fun times and thanked us for exploding things. We had numerous encouraging emails from first time people, staff members, and parents expressing their thanks. How often do we do this for our staff? For all of the terrible, no-fun emails there should be a number of encouraging ones. I challenge you today, write an encouraging email to a staffer at your church. Tell them how thankful you are for their service.

Incredible post today from Dave Wakerley about what Reggie Joiner says about what the role of small group leader should look like.

Check it out.

Reading through John 4 this morning I am hit with a few things:

1. God offers a living water to the Samaritan woman.

Tomorrow I have a meeting with staffers about this fall’s programming. This is my favorite part out of all of our meetings. We get to discuss where we see children fitting into our ministry. Yes I said it. The idea is not new but the implementation of it certainly is. That God has called children to serve is incredibly life changing. We must give them the opportunity to do so and also the training to do so.

I can’t wait to see what this looks like. I can’t wait to talk about it tomorrow. Please pray for us as we have these discussions. Wherever life change is happening, Satan attacks. We have already seen evidence of this. Please pray that Jesus works some things out as we try to move forward with our vision to get children to be involved in Service for Christ.