Hey friends.

The statistics on this blog say hundreds of you visit this blog weekly. Thanks so much.

If you noticed, I started blogging 5x a week in January and stopped for the summer. Then when I got back it was fall and work, family, and coaching hit the full swing of fall and I got considerably more inconsistent.  Then the demands of several other writing contracts hit and well, I failed at blogging.

The main conflict with carving out time to blog was finding time to carve out time to write as I’ve been in the crunch season of my first “real book” that’s due out early next year.

It’s titled “As for me and my crazy house” and is tagged “Learning to protect your heart, marriage, and family from the demands of ministry”.

I’ll blog some more about it soon and am turning in my manuscript to the publisher today.  But in the meantime, I need some cover feedback.  I have one art piece from the publisher and one from a friend and I’m looking for your votes.  It won’t tell you who did what or which one I like and why, but I’m wondering what you think.  If you click on either of them you should get a bigger picture to view.

We’ll call this one COVER 1- the door.

We’ll cal this one COVER 2- the house.

So how about it?  Which one do you like?  Any feedback on colors and such?  Go ahead and comment away, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I was sitting in our high school youth group on Sunday and we were having a pumpkin coloring contest.  You know, like kindergarden where you have a sheet of paper with a giant pumpkin on it and a box of crayons to color with.  It was awesome I tell you… and it gave us 7 minutes of mindless and pointless competition to talk through as we raced to color the award winner.  It was great fun.

As I sat and colored during our 9am service and asked about how the weekend was, most told me about the homecoming football game.   I went to one this year for the first time in a long time and sat in the stands and tried to be an observer.  Since TJ was the first of 10 years of high school in the Berrytribe, my wife and I figured it was a good tradition to start.  So we took the family on Friday night for the homecoming game at Steele Canyon.

But as we talked, one of them said that a local high school in our community, Patrick Henry, elected a lesbian girl to be prom King.  I thought they were joking or surely had their story wrong.   But it turns out they did not.  I went searching and found the news story.  Patrick Henry High School named a girl “homecoming king”.  Why?   Because she says she’s attracted to girls and therefore can be king?

I don’t get it.

Is this just a way for high school students to mock the process and call the contest stupid in the first place? If so then I get it a little.

Or is this legit? And if so, I’m back to not getting it.  Regardless of your views on same sex attraction, isn’t homecoming King for a man and Queen for a woman?   If the school let the students give a girl the “homecoming King” award, what else can she/he do?   Does that mean she can use the men’s restroom at the dance?  What other gender specific roles will the administration allow students to redefine?  Can men now claim to be women and do the same thing?  What if a gay man wants to play girls volleyball, can he?

Is there really this much confusion over anatomy?  It’s not a sexuality issue in my mind, it’s biology 101.

I still don’t get it.

Turns out the girl who won homecoming Queen is the newly elected homecoming “King’s” girlfriend. But homecoming is not a dating couple contest, it’s one guy and one gal elected to be King and Queen of a dance and usually awarded during a football game.  So in other words, if they elect a lesbian girl as queen, her King is not her default date for the prom, he’s just a guy at school who won the opposite gender award.  So why the need to elect a dating couple of any gender combination in the first place?

But what do I know. I’m evidently crazy… and this officially makes high school ministry an entirely different world than the one I went to school in.  I’m gonna stop telling students it’s kinda like when I was in high school.  Evidently I’m late to the party I’ve been at for a long time.  Seriously late.

Only rich drug dealers used to have suitcase sized mobile phones. Now even drug-free students have phones smaller than my wallet.

Writing notes to people you liked used to be so cool & a way to cheat on tests.  Now you date, cheat on tests, and even break up with your date via text msg in an entirely different classroom.

I went to school in the late 80’s.  Now they have 80’s day at high school to mock my coolness.

And now the King is a Queen.

I sound like my grandpa.  I must be getting old.

I was at my son Tyler’s soccer game on Saturday when the referee walked to the center of the field to do the normal pre-game check with my team.  I lined them up at center field facing him and he checked all 13 of them for their equipment.  He checked to make sure they had shoes on, their shirts tucked in, and their shin-guards on.  He told 2 of my boys they could not play with the “drug free week” red plastic bracelet from that week at school, claiming they once broke another player’s finger when caught in them.  So we cut them off,

Last weekend we did this crazy experiment with pumpkins and a foaming mouth in the desert.  It was gross and the perfect illustration for a conversation about the power of the tongue.  We got the idea from Dangerous Devotions for Guys and is only dangerous cuz of nasty chemicals.  There’s no fire or explosions this time. This one does say you should measure stuff out all official like with a gram scale and stuff, but we just guessed using the estimated portions they suggested on some stuff and got close with others and it worked perfect.  Here’s how:

Have students carve a pumpkin- make sure to give it a big mouth.  Place it on a rock or bucket or something with a glass jar inside.

Add some liquid soap, food coloring, and some 30% hydrogen peroxide- which is essentially pool shock that you buy at a pool cleaning supply place- to the glass jar.  Then you mix some crazy chemical powder  that I bought online at the place the book says to get it.  You dissolve it with water in a separate container and then quickly pour it into the jar of other junk already in the pumpkin, then put the lid on the pumpkin fast… and almost instantly, the foam comes spewing out and it’s gross and it makes a big nasty toxic mess.

Which is just exactly what you want it to do when you’re talking about the power of our tongue and a lie. What more could you ask for to get students talking about how powerful our words are than a pumpkin spewing powerful foaming chemicals out it’s mouth?  Genius I tell you.  Sheer genius.

Add a healthy serving of James 3 and maybe a little John 8:44 and Isaiah 29:13 and maybe finish it off with with Ephesians 4:29 and bammo.  You have yourself a conversation about the power of the tongue and the danger/power in the word’s we speak for good or evil.

That my friends, is a great small group study in the bag.

There’s something beautiful about an object lesson that begins with, “Don’t try this at home.”

I really don’t know how Tim Shoemaker managed to get them to publish this, but his book, “Dangerous Devotions for Guys” has several cool object lessons that proved spot on for our man trip to the desert- cuz they live up to the name.  They are dangerous and dangerous was just what we were going for.  It was the perfect place for these object lessons too because there’s nothing to catch on fire, no carpet to worry about destroying, and no shortage of open space.  There is however a shortage of hospitals near by, so reading the fine print is kinda important. 🙂

The first night’s lesson would be after dark so we took advantage of the lack of light and taught our students how to use a coat hanger, a squirt bottle, a candle, some duct tape, and a bottle of Isopropyl Alcohol to make a flame thrower.

I didn’t have any time to test any of these experiments out before I did them, so I was concerned that one might bomb and then I’d be stuck with a lousy object lesson.  But not one proved to be this way.  And the personal flame thrower turned grown men into kids again.  It was legit and so much fun!

And this led perfectly into a conversation about the power of our choices.  We talked about how our decisions we make are powerful and dangerous.   We challenged young men to be dangerous for the Kingdom of God in all they do and to lead lives that were worthy of imitation.

1Timothy 4:12  Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.  (niv)

1 Corinthians 10:31–11:1  So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.  Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God—  even as I try to please everyone in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved.  Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ. (niv)

1Corinthians 11:1  Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.  (esv)

Thanks Tim for the object lesson.  I owe you one. It was nothing short of an epic memory maker for sure.