Avoiding Evil

My friend has purchased a boat and trailer for a cheap price and somehow it has ended up over at my house in our barn. This wouldn’t be so bad except for the fact that the boat and trailer both are ancient. In fact it is quite possible that this boat was on Noah’s Ark because it is so dang old. Because of its age the trailer is really rusty and so we came to the conclusion that we needed to sand it down, prime it, and paint it. Easy job huh? HAHAHAHA! Yeah RIGHT! The thing is full of rust. Then as we go to take the tires off the trailer we only get one side off and the other side just happens to not want to come off at all. Then we get the bright idea to try the lights and they don’t work either! So now we have to not only sand the thing down, but we also have to rewire it as well. As I was lifting the trailer up tonight it slipped off of the stand it was sitting on and fell on my arm. I then turn and stub my toe on a big ole piece of concrete which actually ripped a big ole chunk of toe nail right off my foot. That was a bloody mess. All this to say that we started a project that at first looked small but has suddenly become so much bigger. Worst thought of all is that once we get the trailer done we then have to paint the boat…

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It has now been exactly 66 days 2 hours 1 minute and 30 seconds since my car was stolen from the Muny parking lot in June and I have yet to get my car back. It was stolen and wrecked and after that I had a four and a half week battle with the insurance company who investigated me the whole time. Then once the body shop received approval to fix my car it took them four weeks to finish it. When I went to pick it up after it was done I found a huge hole in the bumper, a paint chip in the door, and worst of all my headlight units just pulled right out of the front of the car! Needless to say I didn’t accept it in that poor condition. That was last week. I am hoping that it will be done tomorrow, but I wouldn’t doubt it if it took another week. This has been one heck of a summer.

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I have been working on SYATP stuff for our youth group and then I suddenly discovered that a Youth Minister in town that I always got together with and planned SYATP events with has left his church. This puts me in an interesting spot because I basically have to plan a SYATP Rally by myself for the whole community. Most of the churches in our area are without a youth minister, possibly all of the churches except for one or two. That is amazing to me… I feel kind of alone, and a little more responsible to reach the teens in our community because they don’t have much else. Hopefully there will be some new Youth Ministers come in to some of these other Churches that will be willing to work together… but for now I get to be the leader of the sinking ship. Good thing is that God is the captain and I think he knows what he is doing…

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RPM is our Wednesday night youth program at my church. This past Wednesday was awesome and I think God is showing us a little glimpse of what the future holds. It was a night filled with enthusiasm, energy, and excitement, which is something that has been lacking for a little over a year and a half now since some pretty nasty things happened in our church with the old YM. I am excited because of the amount of potential that these teenagers have and I simply hope that I can do my part in serving God to fulfill the purpose of the church and our group, “to make disciples.”

We went to the local newspaper office in town and picked up about 20 bundles of old newspapers for some games that we play on Wed. nights. This week the youth were to try and build a shack that could hold three people with only newspaper and tape. Once that game was over we had a huge paper fight and about 80 newspapers were ripped apart and thrown back and forth in our room. By the time it was over the entire youth room was covered, ankle deep, in newspaper. It was quite possibly the biggest mess I have ever seen… the poor janitor…

Pressed