My Journey, His Glory

I heard about this website shortly after bringing up the idea of a phonetree system at our church council.  The phonetree system seemed a bit expensive for us at the time, so I went and explored my options.  I saw lots of web services that seemed to do the trick, but all of them required a credit card or the purchase of minutes.  Finally I came across Phonvite.com.  This web service was awesome.  For those of you who don’t know I like FREE.  Phonevite knows how to do FREE very well.  Phonevite allows you to make calls to 25 people completely free of charge.  For small churches or youth groups this may be all that is needed.  Phonevite does add very brief advertisement to the end of each recording that currently just advertises for phonevite, the paid service does not contain these ads.  Phone also gives you real time reporting of who does and doesn’t answer and how long the person listens to the recording.  This is all included in the free version.  The paid version allows you to request RSVP and messages back to the phonevite system.  This truly is a phenominal system.  You simply have to see it for yourself.  Quite possibly the best phone recording system out there.  Try it out and let me know what you think.

My son walked up to me this morning with a glow in the dark plastic snake.  waiting for him to throw it at me or tell me it was broken he said “dad, this is like the snake that Moses used in the desert”  Huh?  Where did that come from?  So I said “Huh?”  He then proceeded to tell me the story from Exodus and all about the snakes.  I know a bunch of adults that would not have had a clue what he was talking aboyt.  We’re not talking about your normal Bible story here.  One of the great things about having kids is they remind you of the awe you once had reading the Bible.  Seeme like one more reason Jesus Himself said that we had to become like little children again,  maybe it’s time to gain that awe back again.

What can I say, a wife of almost a decade, three little boys under 8 years old, and some fairly interesting neighbors.  We’ll have plenty to share with you about how my family is impacting my journey.

I love working with youth.  I started working with teens while I was still in high school.  At that time it was either me or the preacher to lead the youth group.  I remember what the church decided to call me “Interim Leader of Youth Activities”.  It’s been a long time since then, I plan on using this section to talk about all things youth ministry.  Being on my own journey while helping to lead youth on theirs doesn’t get boring.  Stay tuned.

About a year ago I got a call from a buddy of mine.  He was running a computer company known as Banyan Data and some of his clients were requesting web sites.  He said he could build sites, but preferred not to.  Next thing you know I’m on board with Banyan Data building a site for an extremely choosy client.  Needless to say the project was completed, but we simply couldn’t handle the ongoing support for someone who needed massive changes each week.  Other companies asked for our assistance so we started building sites, but were unable to render long term support to each site simply due to time constraints.  We finally came up with a solution.  We began designing sites utilizing Worpress.  I can’t tell you how many problems this solved for us.  I hope to fill this category with various Wordpress tips, and theme reviews.  It’s been an interesting year with Banyan Data which includes launching ShareYourChurch.com.  The journey has only just begun.

Way back in the day, sometime before my kids were born and after your parents walked up the hill both ways in the snow I had a youth pastor named Grover.  Of course, he didn’t want us to call him Grover, he went by Newlie.  Not quite sure if this was better than Grover or not, but he seemed to think so.  I remember him telling the story of a refrigerator repair man one day.  He said the repair man got a call that a brand new, top of the line, extremely expensive refiregerator had broken.  This greatly agitated the women who owned it and she wanted him at her house NOW!  He came out and asked what the problem was, she informed him that all the food she placed in the fridge went bad a day later.  He made some adjustments and asked her to call him again if there were any more problems.  The next day he gets another phone call and the woman is now irate.  He immediately goes over to her house and takes another look.  All the meters inside the fridge look fine, yet it still isn’t working.  The repair man is perplexed until he look at the back of the fridge and discovers one very intersting fact.  This top dollar, advanced refrigerator was simply unplugged.  This woman’s groceries were going bad because the fridge was not receiveing any electricity.  All this to say, how are your grocereies doing?  Are you plugged into the power source for your life?  Jesus is our power source for life.  If you’re not plugged in to him, click here to find out how to meet your new best friend and Savior.  If you do know Christ as your Savior, then how are your groceries?  Are you daily keeping yourself plugged in, or have things started to get a little lax?  From the mouth of Newlie, “How are your groceries?”