Lake House Geocaching

This year was an original play called RSVP that takes place the day before a young couple’s wedding and uses the setting to compare the marriage relationship to our relationship with Jesus. Emily was helping with music and I was in charge of all things tech (mostly lights and sound). It was a great week and we are very grateful to everyone who donated to PBT in support of our ministry!

Looking for an opportunity to recover from MMAD week, we headed down to North Carolina last weekend with my sisters Sarah and Loree, and Emily’s brother Daniel. Emily’s grandparents have a house on Lake Gaston and we had a wonderful and relaxing weekend with them. Between tubing, fishing, playing music, and geocaching, we still found time to get plenty of much needed rest. Check out the photos from the trip in our photo gallery.

From there we drove up to Indian Lake Christian Service Camp where we have to opportunity to be the mission for a Sr. High week that our good friend Charles is leading. Emily is staying all week and helping out as a dorm mom and team leader. Unfortunately I am out of vacation days, so Monday night I had to head back home to work for the rest of this week. I’ll be going back on Friday to stay for the final night and to pick up Emily.

So that’s what we’ve been up to lately. Still no bids on our house, but we did have two people look at it last week. Our friend Billy says that the housing market is picking up and that we could have a sale soon. We’re praying that he’s right.

Take a look at this video that Adam Shreve (from the PBT media team) put together to be played at this year’s CIY events. Good stuff!

We used the small screen plea at Countryside to try to convince them to move forward in the auditorim, and just as it did at Ocean View it worked perfectly here also, so we will definitely be using that trick from now on. Having everyone together and close to us really helps us to communicate effectively.

We are the mission this year for the Seaford Christian Church VBS program. Tomorrow night we are going to be speaking briefly for the opening program. Seaford was where we did our first presentation back in May and we are looking forward to catching up with everyone there again.

During the beginning of the service (songs, communion, etc…) everyone was sitting all the way in the back, which is apparently the normal custom there. The first 10 or so rows on both sides of the auditorium were completely empty! I was just going to take my microphone and head towards the back of the auditorium when it was time for me to speak, but thankfully, just before that time the song leader explained to everyone that we inteded to use our own projection screen, which is small, and that they would need to move up so that they could see it.

Apparently this was a good motivation, because the entire group moved all the way to the front and completely filled those 10 empy rows! This lent itself to the intimate and personal atmospere that I feel more comfortable with, so I definitely appreaciated it. I later found out that this was a very special treat, and that they never are able to get everyone to come the front.

Thank you OVCC for giving us the opportunity to express to you our passion for the bibleless people of the world, and thank you for moving to the front of the auditorium!

The graphic here is a preview of the inside of the brochure. It folds in half from top to bottom and has a picture of us on the outside cover. It was designed in Pages and printed by U Printing. I’m definitely happy with the result and hopefully will be using this workflow for several more flyers and brochures.

We spoke at DCSC Monday for campfire. The campfire was rained out so we had to make do with candles. It’s Senior High week this week, and although attendance is down this year, they are a great group. Rather than our normal PD presentation, I took the opportunity to challenge them to give up everything to Christ, who will use it all in a much bigger way than we could ever imagine.

The praise and worship times were amazing. I haven’t heard that many people singing that loud in a long time. It’s great to be in room full of people who are singing there hearts out for God.

All day Friday was a Partnership Development workshop. This came at just the right time for us as we are just starting our PD efforts. We heard some great stories and picked up a lot of tips that we will be using over the next few weeks.

Our trip back home went well (although we had to get up at 5AM to catch our flight!) This morning we did a presentation at Discovery Christian Church, which went really well. Tomorrow night we’re off to camp to speak at the Senior High week campfire (should be a good story-telling opportunity).

You can view photos from our trip to PMI2 here.

In addition to the classes, there are main sessions every evening where everyone gets together for a time of praise and worship and for a presentation from each branch of PBT. There are many PBT missionaries who come to Dallas for this week to teach classes, so it’s also a great opportunity to meet people and build relationships. Actually, that’s pretty much what it’s all about.

We went to PMI 1 last year (on our honeymoon, actually), and are back this year for PMI 2. The classes we’ll be taking this week are:

• Translation & the Great Comission
• Transitions: What to do with them?
• Learning to live as good, rich neighbors
• Spiritual Disciplines
• Worldview & dealing with the unseen
• Intro to PBT’s System of Financial Accountability
• Physical Preparation for the Field
• PBT Computer Resources
• Sexuality & God’s Gifts: Celibacy, Marriage, & Family
• Mental Preparation for the Field
• Intro to PBT’s Missionary Care Program
• Translation, Literacy, & Scripture in Use Strategy in Ministry
• Partnership Development (3 parts taking and entire day)

If that seems like a lot, it is! We’ll be in classes five hours a day for the next five days, not including the main sessions and the other extra meetings that we are involved in. We’ll start posting photos soon, but in the meantime, here’s PBT’s PMI promo video:

This was the first time we used our own screen. It’s a really old Da-Lite screen that my mom bought at a thrift store like 15 years ago. I have no idea why she bought it, but Da-Lite is a great brand, and the screen seemed to work really well for us!

Speaking of old equipment, we also brought along my 10 year old Ghetto Blaster™ for sound for the DVD clip. It’s an old Magnavox CD player – the first one I ever owned and the only one we have. I remember saving up for months to buy it ($98.99!!) If you ignored the hissing and the sharp tone, I guess you could say it worked OK, but it’s definitely not going to cut it for larger venues, so I’m keeping my eye out for some kind of portable speaker/amplifier to connect to the computer for audio.