As thankful as I am for the birth of Christ, the holiday surrounding his birth (to use the old SAT analogy format) is to me as a cheese grater is to a sponge. I hope my true feelings showed in this sermon from Tuckerfirst’s contemporary service this past Sunday.
P.S. Do you see how I utilized Rick Warren’s more relaxed “sitting down” public speaking technique? Check this post to compare.
Mensakarte for the student dining hall in Tübingen… Remaining value unknown.
Day pass for public transit in Tübingen on March 21, 2008.
Receipt for the Hostel in Frankfurt (75 Euro charged).
Receipt from Sonic with an incomplete prayer for the Germany Globalscope team written on it.
Receipt from the Jugendherberge Tübingen (87.70 Euro charged).
Primer Express (Tübingen coffee shop) “Loyalty Card” (I need 9 more purchases for a free drink).
My wallet is like a living scrapbook biography. A sticky, terribly disorganized biography. Needless to say, I am walking much lighter now – albeit with much less documentation about what I have done in the past year and a half.
Additional tasks in preparation for the turn of the year include sending in all of the donations and commitments that came in over Christmas. I mailed CMF just shy of $3,400 today. That is a good feeling. Tomorrow will be a day for writing lots of thank-you’s.
As the Christmas doldrums wear on like a bad high school reading assignment, Christmas Day itself finally gets around to setting in. There are several projects pending for support raising, most notably (1) a week-long trip to Germany in February for a team retreat and (2) a series of videos I will be creating for FUMC Lawrenceville. Also, I will be giving the sermon at Tuckerfirst this Sunday. Be there.
here are the tools you will need for today's project
As the Christmas doldrums set in, support raising comes to a slow halt until the busyness of the holiday season passes and church staff have the time outside of Christmas services and Sunday School parties to meet. Even Mighty Joe Espresso (accept no substitute) is empty, save for the one full-time campus minister reading a book in the corner.
That lone soul is me, and that book is Boundaries in Dating by Dr. Cloud & Dr. Townsend. I try to hide the cover of the book – white and pink with a huge lipstick applicator (not really sure of the terminology there) drawing a lipstick line up the middle. It is an image so unsettlingly feminine that it took two doctors to make a book cover look so girly that even a guy sitting alone in an empty building would feel uncomfortable holding it anywhere but with the front cover tightly down against the table surface.
It’s all part of the relationship coaching that has been required of me (and Shalynn) by CMF. This coaching is the final requirement of the PDP (may it soon die… and then rest in peace).
Meanwhile in the land of support raising, I will be travelling to Blue Ridge tomorrow to share the mission of Globalscope Germany with a Sunday School Christmas party, and I am in talks with some of the staff at FUMC Lawrenceville to see how I can get involved there. I am also cementing details about January’s week-long trip to Germany to visit the team and the support-raising dessert event on my return.
A man named Aesop once said that “Necessity is the mother of Invention.” This begs the question: who is the creep that knocked up Necessity and ditched her when the pregnancy test showed positive? Was it that louse Desperation? Or how about you, Running Out of Feasible Options? And don’t think we’ve forgotten about you, Fear of Failure.
Sadly, Necessity has become another tragic statistic in a growing epidemic of ideas that are the product of bad times. Poor little Invention will just have to make his own way in the world.
Such as the nature of the times are, I have been seeking to exercise some creativity in the way I am raising support. This December, I will be encouraging people to celebrate “A Very Halfway There” Christmas with me as we pass the 50% mark in monthly support. It’s a great spin on the slowdown of incoming support commitments. To spread the word, I will be sending out 100 postcards (pictured above) asking supporters to help me go even further by sharing Globalscope with other friends, churches, small groups, and Sunday School classes to help grow our network of supporters.
I have also been tossing around ideas of a dessert-based event in January. I will be travelling to Tübingen to assist in the renovations to the campus house in the middle of the month, and it would be great to have a video of the week’s work – or some other facet of the trip – to debut at a major support-raising event back here in the states.
But that is far away. I need more ideas for immediate action in reaching individuals that I have not yet reached or that I do not know.
Please, help baby Invention – and help me – by leaving your ideas in the comments.
Although I cannot post the pictures of the participants in the Hope/Fear photo project, I did take pictures of the walls where we posted the pieces of paper that people wrote their hopes and fears on. View them here: link.
Here are some of my favorite lines from the talk:
Paul, you jerk. Hope does disappoint us.
“Rosa sat so that Martin could walk. Martin walked so that Obama could run. Obama ran so that our children can fly.”
Hope is what you have when you have nothing else.
But maybe there is something more to be gotten out of the savior story than just the idea of relying on accepting Jesus Christ the supernatural being as our key to heaven…
The word “change” was only written by Christians.
We can travel to the farthest reaches of space and we can search the depths of the oceans, but the final frontier will always be man’s heart…
But the undisputed winner is:
And that placenta-covered, fleshy, 7-pound newborn was the light of man.
Join Stef, Chris, and Beth on a romping tour around the Globalscope Germany campus house as they review the upcoming renovations and major changes to appearance and layout. Translations are loose.
Made this yesterday for the team from Southwest Christian Church that is coming in January to spend a week working on renovations.
