My Precious and other news

Hey all.
I am finally discovering that life can sometimes make it hard to post too regularly, but I have not forgotten about it entirely. We are having a beautiful fall in Wisconsin, with the trees looking so amazing right now and the temperatures holding pretty steady at this point. While it would be nice if I were still attentively watching baseball right now, I guess I'll just have to wait for next year and Mark Cuban's takeover of the Cubbies to make things right in the universe.

In other news...

My Precious: The 12 inch TV in my basement, which used to be in my room in HIGH SCHOOL, has now been replaced with a 52 inch HD beast with DOLBY digital sound. EXCELLENT!!! Even better yet for all you Hollanders out there is I got it as a floor model for only $350, which makes me even more pumped. We will be trying to have many of you over to enjoy it in the near future.

This Past Sunday: I got to pull double duty this past Sunday, delivering messages for big church and high school. In big church we looked at Paul's conversion (Acts 26:9-18) and talked about how Paul went from being out of control in his life (persecuting and even killing Christians) to being out of this world for God (telling everyone he could about Christ, even traveling to the ends of the known Earth to do so). Using my snazy pink vacuum with the clear container we talked about how easily our life can vear out of control, filling with sin, but that God can transform all that because if God could transform Paul God can transform all. One point I'd really like to make about Paul is that his transformation by God is fairly tantamount today to Osama Bin Laden all of a sudden become a Christian televangelist. That's how against Christianity, and even perhaps how violent (although we can't be entirely sure how personally violent Paul was, but his actions did lead to Christians being killed), Paul was in his own day. Yet God transformed him, which God can do for any of us.

This week: this is another big one around here. Wednesday night middle school will finish our series on the End times, and then Friday through Sunday middle schoolers will head to Silver Birch Ranch with about 400 other middle schoolers for a denominational retreat. On Sunday we will have our second Growth Night service, with a great set list of worship songs, a fun drama, a silly video, and my yapping about something. Hope to see a ton of people there. For now, I'm off to school.