New

Today marks the start of a new year: preschool begins at the Training Station and Carolyn starts her new teaching job.  She’s teaching three-year-olds three afternoons a week.  A new school year also means more time in the office and more interaction with preschool families.  It’s always exciting to enter a new season!

This morning I was hanging out with some of the preschool parents after school started.  One of them has a one-year-old daughter, and she took her first steps while she was there!  It was pretty cool.  It’s exciting to be there for something like that.  She kept walking and walking and walking–she’s enjoying her new skill!

Two other exciting things that mark the coming of a new year: One is that we’ll soon be back into a Bible book sermon series.  The first Sunday in October we’ll begin a seven-week series on Revelation.  I’m looking forward to that one!  The second new thing is a new community group that Carolyn and I are starting at our house.  It’s been a few months since we’ve been in a community group, and it will be so nice to get back into that.

Hopefully another new thing will be the resuscitation of this blog….

I love fall!

Published in: on September 9, 2009 at 10:08 am  Comments (2)  

Thursday

Yesterday was a pretty good Thursday, though kind of crazy (the Thursday before Easter always is).

The day started with breakfast at Denovo’s, which is where my small group meets.  It was our second meeting, and was great (as was the creamed chipped beef over biscuits with Tabasco sauce–and they are masters at keeping the coffee flowing!).  This is the kind of group where it’s good to keep a notebook handy, because they have a lot of good ideas.  I’m really enjoying our time together and the book we’re studying, The Creative Call.

After a hectic day of trying to get everything ready for Easter, I went to our community Maundy Thursday service at Buckingham Presbyterian Church in Berlin.  For two hours pastors from different churches shared brief sermonettes as we took Communion and sang.  It was very refreshing!

Published in: on April 10, 2009 at 12:15 pm  Leave a Comment  

Stuff That’s Been Going On

Lots going on lately.  A brief recap:

  • On Wednesday I was able to visit briefly with Carolyn’s kindergarten class.  Those kids are always so much fun!  She doesn’t have too many days left there–her last day is May 1.
  • On Thursday I started a new Bible study called The Creative Call.  I’m doing the study with some very creative people!  We met for breakfast at Denovo’s.  I’m looking forward to our meeting this week as we dive into the book The Creative Call, by Janice Elsheimer.
  • On Friday we held CPR training at CrossWay.  We encouraged all of the volunteers in our children’s ministry to come for CPR certification for adults, children, and infants.  There was a pretty decent turnout, and we’re working on scheduling another session for those who couldn’t make it.
  • On Saturday Carolyn and I went for the second week of our childbirth class.  It’s a good thing this was the second week instead of the first, because it was pretty intense!  We had to watch a video of a baby getting born.  The class ended at lunchtime, but we didn’t have much appetite.  I never thought I’d know so much about cervix dilation, the two sides of a placenta, or perineums (or it could be perinea–for some reason they never taught us the plural of perineum in school; probably just as well since I never knew such a thing as a perineum even existed until a week ago).  As if that wasn’t enough, we also did a whole unit on pain.  Scary stuff!  (Because it makes you wonder: why are we spending so much time talking about pain…?)  But the information in the class has been very helpful and our instructor is very good.  It’s also nice getting to know the other first-time-parents-to-be in the class.
  • On Sunday we finished our three-week series “TXT” at church.  Next week is a stand-alone message, then we launch the Easter series called “i am second.”  We went to Ledos for lunch with Carolyn’s parents and some friends from church–Pete, Flor, Dulce, and Bryan.  In our painting group that afternoon, I finished my first big painting on actual canvas!
Published in: on March 31, 2009 at 5:08 am  Leave a Comment  

Writing God’s Story

On Sunday at CrossWay Church we launched a six-week series called Life On Loan.  The series is about how our lives are not our own, but are instead on loan from God.  He has a plan and purpose for investing in us by loaning us everything we’ve got, including our lives.

This first message was called “Writing God’s Story.”  We read Ephesians 2:8-10 and James 2:14-20.  Then we talked about how God has created us in Christ to do good works.

We broke this truth down into three ideas:

(1) You have a story.

(2) God wants to write your story.

(3) God wants to write you into other people’s stories.

I need to give a shout out to the guys who wrote the book and small group curriculum that this series is based on.  The book is called Living A Life On Loan by Rick Rusaw and Eric Swanson.  Good stuff!

The podcast will be up soon.  (I got behind with podcasting the Christmas series, so I’ll just put it up as the next Christmas approaches.)

Published in: on January 13, 2009 at 1:37 pm  Leave a Comment  

I Think I Know Some of These Guys

Last night in our small group we were studying the ministry of Paul, Silas, and Timothy in Thessalonica.  As we were reading Acts 17:1-10, one of our readers read from the King James Version. 

In the New International Version, Acts 17:5 says that some Jews who were jealous of Paul “rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace.”  But you gotta love the KJV translation of this verse–instead of “bad characters” it calls them “certain lewd fellows of the baser sort.”

While I’m definitely not a big King James guy, there’s something to be said for turning a phrase like that.

Published in: on September 12, 2008 at 10:23 am  Leave a Comment  

Summer 2008

This summer is shaping up to be a very exciting one!  Our plans for the summer include exactly three things:

(1) Work hard.

(2) Play hard.

(3) Rest hard.

Work hard:

Okay, so Carolyn’s not planning to work too hard, although she probably will anyway because she doesn’t like doing nothing.  She’s helping out with Vacation Bible School at CrossWay, and she always helps out a lot with church stuff during the summer.  So even though she won’t be working at her job, she’ll probably work hard.

My work goals for the summer are pretty ambitious: I’m aiming to complete all my sermon outlines up to summer 2009, and complete sermon manuscripts through the end of 2008.  This will require lots of study and lots of writing, but it’s the target I’m aiming for.

The beginning of the summer will be an intense four-week series called “Play Ball!” that we’re doing with several other churches in June, culminating in a Shorebirds game.  The very next day we kick off Vacation Bible School.

Play hard:

We’ve got some pretty exciting plans for the summer!  They include:

  • A Nationals game at their new stadium.
  • A Yankees game in the Bronx.
  • Something special for our fourth wedding anniversary, perhaps a short getaway to Lancaster, PA.
  • A cookout with all the Hyde clan at my parents’ house.
  • A performance of In the Beginning at Sight & Sound in Strasburg, PA.
  • A couple weeks in Costa Rica.

Rest hard:

Whenever I’m not doing any of that stuff above, you can find me either lying on the beach at Assateague or on the couch with a good novel.

When September rolls around, we’ll get back to normal life.

Published in: on May 2, 2008 at 5:47 am  Comments (4)  

Small Group Bible Study

One of the five expectations we have of CrossWay members is participation in a small community of faith.  Along those lines, we started a new small group about a month ago.  We meet on Thursday nights in Whaleyville.

Last night we had a great discussion about Luke 15.  Each week we discuss the Bible passage that was the basis for the previous Sunday’s sermon.  It’s a great opportunity to take the message and really bring it down to a personal level.  It’s so beneficial that I wish we could do this two weeks before the message, so I could incorporate the insights and comments of other group members into the sermon!

Next week we’ll be talking about persistence in prayer, which is the theme of this Sunday’s message.

Published in: on February 1, 2008 at 12:18 pm  Comments (1)  
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.