Sandy's Sayings

Love Works Is Funner Than Video Games

This was our annual Love Works Weekend. We canceled church services and encourage our body to serve the community this weekend. I think this is our third Love Works Weekend. We had a ton of projects ranging from serving the homeless, doing repair and cleaning projects with different shelters, serving schools, helping out with beautifucation projects in different cities and much more.

Last night we had our celebration service where we had the opportunity to share how God moved while we served! There were some amazing stories that were told! Although, my favorite quote from the serivce came from a little boy who shared, "Love Works is funner than video games." There were some good laughs at his comment, but what this little boy was trying to say is that he had fun being the hands and feet of Jesus! He enjoyed interacting with those in need! My hope and prayer for our kids and students is they would continue to be broken–hearted over those in need and would be spurred on to continue being the hands and feet of Jesus. 

Here is a short little video our high school pastor put together for our project!

 

A Sacred Space Sunday

In our tween and Jr. High ministries, we are in-between series, so we decided to do something very different for our ministries.  We took a page out of  "Sacred Space" by Dan Kimball and Lilly Lewin.  We decided to set up stations in our room that represented Jesus last week on Earth. It was called Journey To The Cross.  I really wasn't sure how it would go over with 5th and 6th graders and then with 7th and 8th graders.  God showed up and really touched a lot of the lives of our students.  It was an incredible morning as I watched students interact with each station and interact with God.  We put a lot of work into doing this, so we decided to leave it set up for anyone who wants to go through it.  To those of you who live in the area, stop by CPC anytime on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday between 8 and 3 and take some time to linger at the cross.

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

Edgers Serve Up The Cookies

Each year our 5th and 6th grade ministry called The Edge makes a truckload of cookies to serve in between services!  This is one of their service projects to bless the body.  They are so cute bringing their cookies they have made and of course they always want to pass out the cookies they made.  Great job Edgers and Edge Staff!

Up Before The Sun

So it's about 3:30 am this morning and I'm wide awake.  I've been trying to sleep all night and I've given up on it.  My brain can't shut off and my heart is heavy. It was a tough day to come back from vacation and hear that one of our Edge students lost her dad.  My heart just breaks for this family and of course I wonder what God is doing?  I also received news today that a good friends mother is waiting to hear the results of a biopsy.  Waiting for that news is so hard and your mind tends to go directly to the worst case scenario.  So a lot on my mind and have spent the good chunk of the night praying. On a more random note, at 3:30 in the morning, there is NOTHING on TV.  So I'm writing and watching Sarah Palin's address on C-SPAN.  A couple more hours and Starbucks will be open.

Another Cake Issue

OK, so I think we need to find a new cake place. Can you see what is wrong with this cake?

Elevate Day 1

I would say there are about 125 folks here at The Elevate Conference. Most of the folks here are children's pastors trying to figure out what to do with 4th-6th graders. It's kind a weird, I feel like I'm the young one here and I'm almost 40! The two break-out sessions I attended were good. I took a class on pre-teen culture and strategies to reach pre-teens as well as how to use events in pre-teen ministry. Listened to a great guy named Patrick Snow who is on the cutting edge of pre-teen ministry. He was great and had some great reminders when teaching to pre-teens: student interaction, theme repetition, energy injection and small group connection. Patrick is affiliated with SuperStart which is ministry that caters to pre-teens and puts conferences together for this age group. So far, I feel our pre-teen ministry called The Edge is on the right track!

Off 2 Elevate

I'm off to The Elevate Conference in Rocklin. There are not many "tween" conferences out there and there are not many churches doing pre-teen ministry. I'm excited to see how this conference will be. Yes, I will be blogging from the conference.

New Web Site for Student Ministry

I'm in the process of re-designing our whole student ministry website. Here is the banner for Jr. High. Edge and High School are on their way!

Psalms from the Wildside part 2

I've got a few more Psalms that our Jr. High students and our Edgers wrote! Here is one from our Jr. High guys, Brad, Michael, Darren and Ben:

"Walking beside God, the two of us together
alone in the universe with the King.
I'm lost in the shadow, He leads me toward the light
He opens his arms and embraces me
We are together in peace.

And from our Edgers with Darc and the Boys we have a rewrite of Psalm 5 they call it
Psalm 5.5
"Yo what's up Lord, we need you to save us
Listen to our cries oh King because we pray
We pray for our request and hope you answer them
You do not tolerate our badness
bad people won't be able to stand in your presence
because they sin evil like
You will destroy evil
You love me so much you let me come into your house
I will praise you
Tell me which way to or I will die in my enemies hands
Give me a clear message through your angles which way to turn or I might die
All my enemies can speak are lies,
All they want to do is to destroy others
There talk is bad like the stinky garbage
May we all be caught for our guiltiness
Drive our enemies away and turn our sight and eyes to you.