Cause to Pause

Woodland Community Church in Bradenton, Fl is sending a team to minister to a Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. Derek Berg will be a part of that team as will his wife. As many details as they currently have can be located on Derek’s blog here.
Their trip leaves in less than a month.
If you have ever been blessed, encouraged or made to laugh by Derek, join me in supporting them in any way you can. Financially would be great, but in prayer (really, do it this time) would be more than appreciated as well. Whip out that fancy phone, put task reminders in there for

• every Wednesday beginning June 24, ending July 8
• once per day, beginning July 9, ending July 18.

Think about it-the guy is willfully leaving the gulf coast of Florida and going to Arizona and New Mexico in the middle of the summer! If that doesn’t demonstrate “following God’s leading” I don’t know what does. As Kerry Mackey said at the 2009 FLCITRT, we are ministers.

1. 10 Years of marriage. Today is the ten year anniversary for my wife and I. Heaven is probably hip deep in treasures stored up for her just for dealing with me.
We were married at the church where I work on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter so we celebrate on the day of (April 3), as well as Easter Weekend! (Note: There has since been a policy passed of “No weddings during Holy Week”. I’d recommend that policy.)
2. SecureSearch The new ACS update allows you to request a background check from within the database. Very cool process. Have your volunteer fill out the consent form. Go to their member record and hit “Request Background Check”. Now it becomes a part of their member record that is viewable ONLY to those people who have rights to the background tab. This allows you to do ALL SORTS of handy searches. Need an approved childcare worker? Run a search on everyone who has a background check. You can also run a search for a group of people and request background checks for the whole slew of them at one time.
Why did SecureSearch make the list? Because Cheryl Pegues who assisted in my set-up was friendly, knowledgable and sent a handwritten thank you note. Very personable. In today’s climate where everyone is forced to cut costs and “manufacture a culture of caring” it is great to work with someone for whom it comes naturally. It is really hard to fake sincerity.
3. FL.CITRT 2010. Keep an eye on the wiki at fl.citrt and especially the cool form that Derek Berg set up here. Derek took over the role of Grand PooBah from Jason Reynolds. He will be assisted by none other than Scott Goodger (that doesn’t mean others can’t help. It just means Scott is the only one that has been drafted so far. If you can lend a hand, they will take it!). Keep your eyes on the wiki and Derek and Scott’s blogs. (One request guys: No clowns. I don’t like clowns….)
4. Virtual Roundtable on usage of Facebook and Twitter among faith communities to further their work and mission. Dean Lisenby is floating the idea of offering this – hence the official title. Tweet him if you are interested.

My wife was signing into her gmail account this morning. Like many, she has a hotmail and a gmail account. Seems we Americans will accumulate anything given enough time. Anyway, as she was signing in she put the domain after her logon name. I said:
”If you ever want to know why you don’t have to add that in gmail like you do in hotmail, let me know.”
Her response:
”I don’t know when that would be. I mean, I am sure it is interesting, but I just don’t know when I would want to to know that.” We had a good laugh about it(maybe you had to be there), but it got me to thinking:
How often do we have information that really doesn’t matter? She got signed on, saw her email. Life is good. She really isn’t interested in saving six keystrokes to make her 5:30 am routine just that much more efficient. Especially when 98% of the time she doesn’t have to sign in anyway. She also isn’t interested in the tags, categories, filters and any of the other “features” in gmail. She is interested in what the PERSON on the OTHER END OF THE EMAIL said.

At the fl.citrt.org roundtable, one of the themes that popped up repeatedly was “people really don’t care about our technology-they only want to know how much we care about solving their problems”.

There are days when I have to put the “captain whiz bang” tech stuff aside and remember, it really is about the people at the other end of the network cable.