Sandy's Sayings

An Easter To Remember

It's been a very busy week with making Easter preparations at church. Our staff has been praying for a while for this Easter morning and what a morning it was!  On Easter we have three CPC campus': Foster City, Millbrae and our shopping center location, Charter Square.  Our Foster City and Millbrae campus' had live preaching and our Charter Campus was a video venue.  I was in charge of the Charter Campus this morning, making preparations, having a bunch of Jr. Highers helping me, and rocking out to the Never Ending Band as they practiced for the second service.  I took the Jr. Highers to go get a little Starbucks as a thank you for helping and I get a phone call from one of the gals in the band.  "Charters electricity is out", she says.  Of course, I think she is messing with me and told her, "there is an electrician in the band, he can take care of it!"  Then she says, "No the whole shopping center is out." As she is on the phone, our tech guy from the Foster City campus is calling me and whispering on the phone, cause he is in the service, "The electricity is out at the church."  I'm thinking, NO WAY!  I call our church administrator and ask him to get a hold of PG&E to find out the scoop. PG&E tells us there is a small electrical fire that is affecting 1-49 customers, 1 to 49!!!  Electricity will be back on around 12:15 pm.  (the end of our second service)  In the meantime, our teaching pastor is giving an invitation to receive Christ in the pitch black auditorium!  We all gather for a short pow, wow between services to decide what to do. What do you do when you are expecting 1000 people in 30 minutes and have no electricity? Obviously we prayed!  But do you have an Easter service or not.  Our church, bathrooms and other rooms have no windows and it's dark, not to mention the liability issues. Our faith story was on video, lyrics are projected on the screens and how are we supposed to make coffee? I'm glad to tell you our service went on at least at the Foster City Campus!  We had to cancel the Charter Square venue.  We opened all our closet doors and emergency exit doors to have some natural light come in.  One of our guys in the body had a generator, so we hooked up a small speaker, microphone, guitar and 2 flood lights to the generator so we could have a little sound and light.  We had people grabbing flashlights to light up the bathrooms and other rooms, the tech crew was getting things ready just in case the electricity came back on.  People were everywhere, along the walls, sitting in the closets, out in the lobby and courtyard. It was amazing.  Our worship team lead people in singing without words.  Of course this is a hard one for any guests we might have had who might not know the songs.  Our teaching pastor preached it and just as the generator was about to die, the electricity came back on!  What a crazy morning, but God is bigger than any power outage!  He was working in the hearts of people and many came to know Him for the very first time today.  I feel very thankful, in the craziness of the morning, we had so many people serving and working together as a team and going with the flow, or lack there of! For those of you who were guests, thank you for your patience. I hope you do came back and worship with us again.  And for those of you who worked so hard at Charter to have it cancelled, thank you for your wonderful attitudes. For the Foster City Crew, you all are amazing, thank you for your hard work today! And of course I have to thank PG&E for getting the power on 30 minutes before they thought they would have it on.  This morning was a wonderful picture of the body, using their gifts, talents, and treasures and I wouldn't have traded this Easter for anything!

He Has Risen

Untitled from sandy hughes on Vimeo.

My Favorite Posts of 2008

Usually around Christmas time I click through all my blog posts for the year to see what has happened as well as choose 11 of my favorite posts!  Here they are:

11. A Little Christmas Gift for Our Staff

10. Winter Camp Memories

9. Psalms From The Wildside 1 and 2

8. The Meaning of Life

7. Dirty Viruses

6. Alright Cara, I Give

5. Quote Of The Week

4. I Was Humbled

3. Finishing

2. After 43 Years

1. Operation Christmas Child Part Duex

Text-a-bration Holy Week Easter Sunday

Holy Week: Easter Sunday: He has risen! Read Matthew 28. See ya at church 8, 9:30 or 11:15 am

Text-a-bration Holy Week 6

Holy Week 6: Read John:19:38-42 & 1 Peter 4:1-19. Reflect: Have you suffered for the sake of Jesus?

Text-a-bration Holy Week Good Friday

Holy Week: Good Friday. Read Isaiah 53, John 19:1-37. Reflect: What does Jesus' death and suffering mean to you?

This Year's Devotional

We are teaching through the whole Bible in our youth ministry this year, so it has been fun reading through portions of the Bible I haven't read through in a while. Next week we will be in Judges. For my devotional time I'm reading through "Solo" by Eugene Peterson. I actually won this little devotional book at the youth workers convention at the "Th1nk" booth by answering some church history question. Th1nk is the youth section of The Navigators. They have some incredible resources that I've used over the years. So if you want to do something a little different with your devo's this year, check Solo out!

Good Friday

As I was making the announcments last Sunday during Jr. High I talked about our Good Friday service. One of our Jr. High students asked why we call it "good" Friday. To this student, she didn't really understand what was "good" about the suffering of Jesus. It's a great question. Without the death of Jesus, without the spilling of His of blood, there would be no atonement for my sin, there would be no celebration of Christ rising from the dead and the list could go on. Without "Good" Friday, we wouldn't have the "Good" News of Jesus, who came to seek and save the lost.

One of my favorite traditions our church does is the Good Friday service. People from the body have the opportunity to share their own personal reflection on one of the last seven phrases Jesus uttered from the cross. I thought I would post my Good Friday reflection from Good Friday 2000.

John 19:28-29 Later, knowing that all was now completed, and so that the Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I am thirsty.” A jar of wine vinegar was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus’ lips.

"Last summer I took a major road trip up and down the western coast. On my travels, I kept passing the Sprite billboard. On a large black background with white letters were the words, "Obey Your Thirst.” Every hundred miles or so, there it was, “Obey Your Thirst.” It was a stark contrast to what I had been studying over the summer. I was doing a study on Jesus satisfying our thirst. I focused my attention on John 7:37, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.” What a stark contrast between what our Lord says to us in John 7:37 and what our world says to us today, “Obey your thirst.” I find it very comforting to know that my Lord was thirsty at the end of his life, so much so, it is recorded as one of His last phrases.

“I am thirsty,” what a bold statement, what an honest statement. There have been so many times, I wish I could just call it like it is, pure and honest thirst; thirsting after significance, thirsting after possessions, thirsting after family relationships and community. Ultimately I realized, I was doing what the commercial told me to do, “Obey Your Thirst.” Do whatever it takes to quench the thirst in your soul: be the best at what you do, earn that significance you thirst for. I find myself working my fingers to the bone, because of my thirst for the Silicon Valley lifestyle. I find myself doing whatever it takes to keep my family together and connected, knowing that everytime I wish for they way my family used to be, more hurt and more pain seem to follow. Over and over again, my thirst is left unquenched, unsatisfied. And over and over again, I hear the Lord tell me, leave those thirsts at The Well. Let me satisfy those deep thirsts within your soul. I cannot fully explain how freeing it has been over the last 8 to 10 years to bring those thirsts to the one who can fully satisfy and quench my thirst. Jesus was the one who promised in John 4:14, “ whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.”

No matter how many times I am told to “Obey my thirst,” I know that Jesus is the only one who can really quench that thirst. I am so thankful that he recognized that thirst deep in our soul. And I am so thankful that he acknowledged his thirst on the cross, making him fully human, struggling with the same things you or I struggle with. I think singer/songwriter Chris Rice sums thirst up best with his song “Thirsty.” Let me read you the lyrics.

“I’m so thirsty, I can feel it
Burnin’ through the furthest corners of my soul
Deep desire, can’t describe this nameless urge
That drives me somewhere
Though I don’t know where to go

Seems I’ve heard about a river from someone who’s been
And they tell me once you reach it; oh you’ll never thirst again
So I have to find the river, somehow my life depends on the river
Holy River

I’m so thirsty
Other waters I’ve been drinkin’
But they always leave me empty like before
Satisfaction – all I’m askin’
Could I really be this thirsty if there weren’t something more?

Seems I’ve heard about a river from someone who’s been
And the tell me once you reach it, oh you’ll never thirst again
So I have to find the river, somehow my life depends on the river
Holy River

I’m on the shore now of the wildest river
And I kneel and beg for mercy from the skies
But no one answers – gotta take my chances
“Cause somethin’ deep inside me’s cryin’
“This is why your are alive”
So I plunge into the river with all that I am
Prayin’ this will be the river where I’ll never thirst again
I’m abandoned to the river and now my life depends on the river
Holy River
I’m so thirsty"

Holy Week Services

I'm really excited about our Good Friday and Easter services at CPC this week. Please feel free to join us to hear about what the risen Jesus is doing in the lives of people on the Peninsula. Our Good Friday service is at 4 PM and our Easter services are at 8, 9:30 and 11:15 am.

Bible Teaching in the Public School?

I just got my recent issue of Time Magizine and the cover made me want to open and read it immediatly, "Why We Should Teach The Bible in Public School." That headline will grab any Christian, Athiest or ACLU member. It was an interesting read. If you have some time take a moment to read the article. Being an English minor in college I took a course on "Bible as Liturature." It wasn't a bad class, but the teacher really had no clue about the Bible. I know some Christians are going to be "gung ho" about this possibility of the Bible being taught in the Public School, but just reading the few sentences they had about a teacher teaching the Beattitudes, I'm concernced about how they handle Scripture. In the article they talk about how our culture is Biblically illiterate and since the Bible has had so much influence in our country, our students should be educated about the Bible! They quote a Gallup pole of the churched and unchurched that studied how biblically illiterate our culture is. I look at our own students, those who have grown up in a church and they may know some of the "Sunday School" stories, but really have know idea where to find them in the Bible or how to use their Bible. In fact most of the time we only have a handful of students who bring their Bible to church on Sunday's. My concern is yet again, the public school system is going to carry another burden that really the family should be carrying. I believe it's the family's responsibility to educate their child about God and His Word and the church should be there to supplement that education. Granted, not every family believes in God or the Bible and that is where the church should meet the primary need. I don't deny that it would be exciting to have the Bible taught in a public school, but my concern would be who and how it would be taught. It will be interesting to see where this goes and what will come next.