I have a wife, 5 kids, a full time job, still take one seminary class a quarter in pursuit of my ever elusive MDIV, and like everyone I know, also have an endless list of other things to do. Yet, despite these facts, every summer/fall I add 6 or 7 hours a week of soccer practice for 2 separate teams and coach 2 games every Saturday between Labor Day and Thanksgiving too.

A few years ago, we started holding an annual, 45 minute, school year orientation meeting for parents of students in our youth ministry.

Honestly, I have no idea why I waited so long to start doing something like this… I think I did one my first couple of years in ministry and then stopped when parents became familiar with my ministry and the demand/fears subsided. But I really never should have stopped. I honestly think it’s one of the very best things we do for parents all year.

Anyway, we did it again this last Sunday after our weekend services with parents of middle school & high school age kids. It was advertised on our ministry blogs and pushed it in the main church service as an important piece for all families with teens in our program. It’s still not got a great attendance (or at least what I wished it had), I think because most still think it’s old info or just for families with new 6th graders or freshmen… but hopefully in the years ahead we’ll be able to change the tide and see more families there.

Here’s why we do it:

• It reminds the new and old of why we do what we do cuz we talk philosophy and vision for a few minutes.
• It gives parents a chance to hear from our staff and for us to express our desire to team with them.
• Because we give them a big picture of all our major events and their estimated costs for the school year, it gives families a chance to budget their time and money if they want their student(s) involved in our program. This alone seems to me to worth it’s weight in gold as a parent who wants to see my student actively engaged in our ministry and plan our weekends and family life accordingly.
• It gives us a chance to share what volunteer needs we have and communicate ways to serve in alongside of us in both big and small ways.

I subscribe to a few channels on youtube and as a result, I get periodic e-mails telling me when there’s something new for me to enjoy.  Well, due to a crazy summer, the last 5 or so sat in my inbox and tonight, in an effort to clean it out, I watched several of the updates I missed.

In the process I laughed and cried.

These two are just funny:

This one made my heart hurt:

One of my students recently used one of those wordle websites to make my blog into a word picture.

If you want to know why I’ve been blogging so little the last 2 months.  This pretty much covers it:

Well my family had been trying to get to Idaho to visit some long time friends, Adam and Andrea Johnston for forever it seems.

We moved to San Diego 5 years ago, just about the time they moved to Idaho and we haven’t seen one another since. We’ve made several attempts to cross paths, but circumstances beyond our control canceled a cruise together in the Caribbean, a flight to Boise in CA fire season, and even a quick trip to Disneyland last winter… so we were determined to make our summer plans to see them a reality.

I’ll spend several posts summarizing some of my learnings and discoveries, but here’s some quotes I logged on our 2516 mile trip that took us through CA, NV, AZ, UT, ID, and OR in 8 days.

“WILL WE BE HAVING BATHROOM BREAKS?”- Tyler

• Shannon kept trying to tell our kids that our schedule was flexible based on so many factors and that they should just stop asking so many questions and “go with the flow”. Billy, in his attempt to still learn crazy English idioms tried to tell shannon to stop asking questions when we were in Vegas with this one. Too funny.

“I’M GONNA MAN UP, CUZ THAT’S WHAT MEN DO, AND I’M A MAN”- Jake.

• Jake said this after he asked me while camping if he could ride back to camp on his bike without his shirt on after swimming. I asked him, “What are you going to do if you fall and get scraped up?” This was his response. I have no idea what God has in store for this kid, but some days, I just can’t wait to see it.

“YOU NEED TO HIDE BEHIND SOMETHING BIG”- Becky to Adam

• This was Becky telling Adam that his hide and seek place sucked. He was “hiding” behind a light post and asked Becky if this was a good spot. Becky held our her hands to explain to him that he needed a “Biiiggg” item to hide his body behind. Adam repeated this phrase to us at least once a day for the rest of the trip.

“ARE YOU FRIENDS OR FAMILY?” – Waitress at Buffalo Wild Wings.
“FAMILY… WE’VE KNOWN EACH OTHER LONG ENOUGH”- Adam

• I met Andrea almost my first year in full time youth ministry. I then met Adam when he wanted to volunteer on our staff when Andrea was in college and serving part time on our admin team at church. Eventually they dated and I did their wedding. We’ve been on countless ministry related trips together and share tons of crazy stories…. so our history is long and deep. I was reminded how precious long term friends really are.