I’m sitting here watching the Giants / Eagles game after helping Christie clean up from dinner tonight.  My awesome wife fixes a dinner every Sunday night for Reid’s (our #2 son) Guys Cell Group.  It is always a fun night and enjoyable to see these young guys grow in Christ.  She pulled out all of the stops tonight and made Turkey, Mashed Potatoes, Gravy and Corn.  Of course there is always fresh Brownies.  Grif and I are happy with this set up as well.

I can’t help it but thoughts from the day are just rummaging through my brain.

*Pastor Amado did a super job speaking today as he delivered sermon number two in our Advent Conspiracy series. The theme of the day was Give More to follow up from last week’s Spend Less message.  Following each service we shared in a time of celebration and appreciation for Amado as he completes his ministry at Westbrook in December.  Special thanks to Anntoinette and Beverly for their efforts in making this great time happen.

* As a part of Family Weekend, we had our families together and then were led in worship by our Velocity (Student Ministry) band.  They were super.  Good job guys!

* I saw over and over again God’s grace and peace that was poured out upon people’s lives today by the power of the Holy Spirit.  As we prayed with people and encouraged people today His love made weak people strong.

* A strong, healthy church is led and directed by strong , healthy Christ-followers.  Westbrook is blessed to have some great leaders and great elders.  Thanks for your counsel and support is hardly enough.

* There’s no better way to end a super day than a prayer of Thanks and a good’s night rest. SO…  Goodnight!

After while I’ll be leaving to go hang out with some of the coolest people in the world as our annual Staff get-away Retreat begins tonight.  Our entire staff will be together for several days of connections, fellowship and intense planning.  Please pray for us as we look into 2010 and look deeply into the eyes of Christ to see what he would have us do. This is always a rich time to celebrate our different cultures and to celebrate and visioneer our upcoming year of ministry. I can’t to share what God is doing.  Here is a pic of last years group.  Thanks Mr. D for sharing your Varna house!

Earlier today we ended another fascinating CLD Tier II here at Westbrook.  These two day sessions are basically continuing education workshops for our growing Christ – followers who have completed the initial CLD process.  Over the years we have brought in some phenomenal speakers and this recent offering was no exception.  Our topic was Kingdom Work and Social Justice and our speaker last night and this AM was Arloa Sutter.  Arloa is the Executive Director of Breakthrough Urban Ministries.  She is an amazingly sharp, articulate and brilliant woman.  Her heart for Justice Ministries and for Community outreach is contagious.  The people who were at this session were all inspired to think deeply of our place in this ministry.  Her words were simple… If you love Jesus you will love the poor and the down and out.  PERIOD!

How much deeper do you need to go than that?   Periodically we encounter people who have been at our place and they get all hyper spiritual and think they need more and deeper~  and we are not providing that for them. How sad for them!   They are the very people who don’t even come to these sessions.  This woman was a deep thinker, a deep teacher and a deep theologian.  Even more, she challenged everyone of us to the very core of our Christian walk to re-think these issues.  Thanks Arloa for taking us all to a closer seat with Christ!

Hey Cyberworld… I know it’s been like forever since I posted anything on here. I’m still alive and kicking. It has been a crazy bunch of weeks since my last post. The big dealio is that Christie and I now have a high school graduate. I’ll put pictures on after tomorrow. And after tomorrow night we’ll have a second high schooler. We are so proud of Tyler (just graduated from Plainfield Central High School- in the top 20 of his graduating class of 670 students If I can brag). He’s headed to Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids in a few months. We are equally proud of Reid who graduates tomorrow PM from Indian Trail Middle School. He’s headed to Plainfield East High School in the fall.

We have been running with the boys, graduation parties and all that goes with this time of year. Baseball games are keeping us busy as well. The Dodgers are 5-8-1 after todays game. I missed becuase of spoke for Gente Unida today after preaching the morning three services…. Talk about being wiped. I kicked off our summer series entitled Missio Dei. The summer at Westbrook is all about the Sending of God. I mean who really cares how many people come to our church, if we don’t leave our church and serve the very people that He died for!

It has been a full and rich weekend. To the graduates in our family to the hundreds of people who came to help us celebrate to the worship time today…. Praise the Lord!

Well it’s Sunday night.  A full weekend of Easter worship is behind us, I was able to have a great nap and an awesome Easter dinner with my family this evening.  What’s greater still is that God showed up in an amazing way this weekend.  People were everywhere and while we thought we saw our biggest crowd ever in the history of our church at our 10:00 AM service.  That number was shattered at our 11:30AM service.  We had rows of chairs in the lobby.  It was crazy.  Please pray that God will draw all of our guests back to Westbrook as we continue to preach Christ.    Thank you Jesus for letting your Resurrection power fall upon us!

Last night and then this morning Westbrook hosted a CLD Tier II seminar.  CLD stands for Christian Life Development and the Tier II seminars are for people who have completed the 100/200/300 & 400 classes.   Once people go through our initial process of growing in their life with Christ we then want to be sure that we give them continual opportunities to sharpen their lives even more.  Tier II sessions provide just that… continual sharpening.    Over the last 12 years we have hosted many of these such events with some of the greatest teachers and scholars around.  Let me tell you, anyone who says that Westbrook isn’t a deepening environment is missing something somewhere. Maybe it’s that their self proclaimed spiritual maturity has blinded them or maybe it’s that they have never come to a Tier II weekend.  Which ever it is… Westbrook desires that you grow and we provide avenues to do that.   I am just blown away every time we have one of these sessions and this one was no different.

Dr. Richard Knopp – Professor of Philosophy and Apologetics at Lincoln Christian College led a session on Developing a Biblical Worldview.  The seminar led the listener through all of the current worldviews and challenged us all to begin experiencing life with eyes of Christ.  The time passed so quickly.  Kudos to Pastor Rob Daniels for once again designing and hosting an amazing assembly of  growth.  If you are a part of the Westbrook family let me encourage you to complete the initial CLD process and do not miss a single Tier II weekend.

One of my favorite little blurbs in a weekly magazine that I get called the The Week is one that is entitled Only In America. Here’s one from the latest issue:

Two restaurants in a Rhode Island mall food court are in the fifth year of a legal battle over the right to sell rice. David Chu, the owner of Cathay Cathay, says he pays extra rent to be the mall’s sole provider of white rice, which he calls the backbone of Chinese food. But Yogi Sood of Gourmet India says his lease allows him to sell basmati rice – a long- grained strain of white rice- which he calls the “must ingredient” of Indian cuisine. Legal fees so far have totaled $250,000.

That’s not that much… an AIG executive could pay for it with his bonus!