This weekend was good and I enjoyed the opportunity to not think about our building project for a couple of days. Friday night I took my son to his first ever football game. It was a local high school and they are very good (I try to see them play a few times each year). They were winning 42 to 0 at halftime, which was a good time to leave and get my son to bed. He thought he had seen an entire game. His eyes were wide the whole time and it was a true joy for me to hold his hand and walk him into the stadium.
Saturday, my oldest daughter went ice skating for the first time with her mom and I stayed home to watch the other 2 kids. Saturday night we had a special dinner at my church to give core people an update on our building project. Several building tours went on and there was a lot of excitement about this special season we’re in. Also, our worship pastor (Scott), returned from leading worship at a Willow Creek conference in Germany. I hadn’t seen him in 2 weeks, so it was good to have him back home. We have a lot of catching up to do!
Sunday was a different kind of day for our church. We had an abbreviated service – in the service we gave everyone a sneak peek at what a typical Sunday will be like in the new reality. Not only are we building 3 new buildings, but as soon as we move into them, we start a huge renovation of our current worship space, which will be an amazing kids’ theater (like KidStuff at North Point), plus 2 other smaller kids’ theaters. We did a short music and preaching set, then played a video of KidStuff at North Point to cast the vision, heard from our Kids Pastor, then had our new FX Live (FX is for Family Experience) team do a short portion of a typical family production service with a host, actors, singing and dancing. It was a ton of fun and well received.
After that, we had a huge tent set up in the parking lot and after a challenge “to get plugged in and serve” from our pastor, we ended the service early to allow our people to go out to the tent, fellowship, eat (we had great snacks/food), sign up to serve (we had every ministry represented at different tables) and just have fun (we had a DJ playing music the whole time).
In between the morning and evening services I came home and we had a 7 year old birthday party for my oldest daughter. It was a fairy party and my wife did a great job decorating the house and making fairy wings for all the girls. I went back to church later on that afternoon for our night service and then came home to catch the last 2 minutes of the Cowboys game – which they won! (That’s right: the Cowboys are 8-1).
I get some air miles this week as my Audio Coordinator and I go to Atlanta this Tuesday for a full/intense day of meetings with Clark ProMedia. We leave at 5:15 and return at 10pm. Then Friday and Saturday, I’ll be consulting with a church in Phoenix. Pray for me.