disturbing sight

This is the kind of thing nightmares are made of. The other day I step into our downstairs bathroom and flip on the light. I hear something hitting the exhaust fan and I look up and see a tail through the grills. I watch for a second and then the fan starts going crazy and a mouse drops down into the light fixture. It tries to get back up but is stopped by the fan. It tries to move around but keeps running into the light bulbs. So it just lays there twitching once in a while. I have no idea what to do so I get the kids and the camera. It starts moving around again and finally jumps into the fan. After a lot of weird noises and the sound of a motor grinding, the mouse disappeared into the ceiling. I have no idea what happened to him but I haven't smelled anything bad yet coming from up there. Maybe it will scare him to the neighbors house.

an evening at the park

Sarah had to work the other day and I had the kids for the evening. The weather was nice so we went to a park, had a picnic, played and fed the ducks. We had a real good time.

a special privilege

Last Sunday I had the special privilege of praying with Tanner to ask Jesus into his heart. He came into kids church because he was the only boy in his second service preschool class. Since he had already sat through first service, his teachers asked if he'd like to join us in kids church. When I asked for those who needed to ask Jesus into their heart to raise their hand Tanner's hand went up. Sarah and I have waited until he made the first move so that he would know what he was doing. I had him come up to the front and I asked him a few questions and we prayed. I thanked the other kids because they were just really quiet and well behaved while they allowed a dad to pray with his son.

praying for the play?

This year's Christmas play turned out well. I particularly like this picture from a rehearsal. Sam is supposed to be looking at things in a storefront window although it looks like he's praying. He's really probably eyeing the box of jellybeans that were hidden down there. There are more pictures on our kids ministry website at eklife.org.

the pouty princess

How's that for a face? She got into a little phase of big displays when she has her feelings hurt. Here she was upset that she couldn't have more sour cream. Her chili was already almost completely white because she had helped herself.

video calling

Ok, so I've had the ability to do this for some time and didn't even know it. My brother sent me this picture from Oklahoma of me and him talking to each other over the internet. It's pretty cool. I have a camera built into my laptop so I can carry my computer around and show live video. I told my mom that since I can't make it for Christmas this year they could just set me up on the coffee table on a computer. Then anytime I talked too much they could just mute me.

launch lights

We've been having a lot of fun lately on Wednesday nights with the lights. With the addition of a little (ok sometimes a lot) of fog, it makes for a pretty cool effect. It seem like everyone thinks the songs are funner. Even some of our older songs have new energy. It's just fun.

vacation 06

It was time to work in a vacation before the end of the year. We went to Tulsa Sunday night to visit my brother and his family. We got there in time to meet them at their church and went to service with them. We stayed until Tuesday morning and mostly sat and talked and relaxed. It was nice. We found a park for the kids to play in for a while. Sarah had to work Tuesday so we pulled into the driveway with just enough time for her to run in and change and head out the door. Tanner and I decided to make a pumpkin pie. I realized I bought the wrong crust so I went searching through a cookbook to find out how to make one myself so Tanner got the rolling pin and we made a pie from scratch (well with canned pumpkin of course). It turned out really good. The next few days we worked on the yard, closed up the pool (yeah I know I should have done that a couple months ago) and decided to start stripping wall paper off of our dining room and family room

king of the almost

We have a tree in our front yard that is great for leaf piles. One day it's full of leaves and the next day it just abandons all of them. We like to take that opportunity to get some good pictures of the kids. Lately we've noticed that we don't have that many pictures of Tanner and I'm beginning to see why. He is the king of the almost good picture. It seems really hard to get a picture of a 5 year old boy. He's either making a goofy face or has that fake smile thing. Anyway, here's a few examples of the dozens of attempts. I guess the true test of a picture is if it represents the person and these certainly do.

signs of the times

Here's a picture that gives just a glimpse into the schedule we've had lately. Actually though, this week has been much better.

tech kids

Why won't my 1 year old give me back my ipod?

trip recap

September 4-14 I joined 24 children’s pastors from across the nation to launch Character Connex (a public school assembly program) in Davao City, Philippines. We worked with Assembly of God missionaries Darrell & Sandy Blatchley at Family Circus Ministries to train the Filipino ministry team to be able to continue the program once we were gone. Character Connex is designed to build relationships with the schools through offering character based education assemblies.
While we were there our teams conducted assemblies in 32 schools, speaking to about 30,000 elementary students. We were also able to hand out Christian comic books with the church’s information on it to each student.Family Circus currently ministers to about 3,500 kids through 6 weekend services and are on the verge of explosive growth once they complete their new facility in late October. God is doing some amazing things there and is changing many lives.
One of the greatest blessings from the trip happened a couple days after I returned when I received an email from one of the Filipino members of my team. She was requesting prayer because the next day they had Character Connex assemblies at 10am and 3pm and hoped to remember everything we taught her. It is exciting to know that we are barely home and the ministry is continuing. We left them with 6 kits that have everything they need to do the assemblies from sound systems, microphones and video projectors to drama props and other supplies. Their goal is to be in every school each month.
It was an incredible experience for me and I am truly thankful that God allowed me to be a part. Thank you to those that prayed for the trip, you had a great role in making it a success.

back

Hurray! I'm back in the good ol' USA. I love America, the land of full size napkins, drinks larger than 12oz, water you can drink and vehicles that at least attempt to use lanes. Ok, I really enjoyed the trip but it is nice to get home. I have learned so many new things and currently I'm learning what jet lag is so, I will give more updates as my mind clears and can actually compose sentences. Thank you to everyone who prayed and was interested in the trip.
Here's the kids in their Davao shirts. Trevor's tongue is orange from a dried mango and Caelan is showing off her pearl necklace and bracelet (yeah, they're real). The kids enjoyed looking through all the things I brought home.

These are the planes I flew in on the trip. Wichita-Denver, Denver-Seattle, Seattle-Tokyo, Tokyo-Manila, Manila-Davao. 10 flights on 3 different airlines and I made it home with my luggage.

finding nemo

We had a great day today and tomorrow will be busy with school assemblies. We had a free day and I got to go scuba diving. It was a really cool experience and I found Nemo. He's now in the south pacific. I also found Dory close by. I'll tell you all about it later.

kids, a lot of kids

Wow! 50% of the population of Davao is under 16. I've seen a lot of those in the past few days. On Saturday we started the weekend services. Family Circus operates out of a very small building and they pack people into every tiny space possible.
There were 60 kids on this jeepney.


During the services 2 Dentists are extracting teeth in a back room. I sat through about 3 teeth being pulled out. The kids just sit there without a whimper and are given a snowcone to hold against their mouth as they are sent back into the service.
After Sunday's 1st service I road a jeepney taking kids home. This picture is dropping the kids off in their neighborhood. The church rents a lot of jeepneys that run the over 50 routes.
This is the house of one of our team members (Each team of 4 Americans also has 4 Filipinos. It's very humbling to think about how we are working as a team to help all these poor kids and his kids are are the poor kids. His house has 2 rooms, a downstairs and an upstairs. He coordinates all the routes for the services and his youngest son is named Darrel after the missionary.

That seems to be all the pictures this thing will let me upload at the moment so I will try again later. Tomorrow is a free day but we are scheduled from pretty early and most of the day. We are very tired but seeing all those kids this weekend singing to God and being so excited to be in church has given us new energy. Tuesday our team has 2 more assemblies and one of those is supposed to have 3,000 students. That will be exciting. I have to give this computer back and it's almost time to call in to the kids church so I'll update the next chance I get. Thank you all for your prayers.

pictures

Everywhere you go you ride in a jeepney and it's very crowded. The traffic here is incredible! There are no stop signs, traffic lights, rules to the road, no lanes but no one gets upset either. They're used to it. I feel like I'm about to die every time we drive down a road!

On our first day we went to an authentic Filipino buffet for lunch. This is my plate. Luckily I had a Filipino next to me in line who could tell me what things were. I passed up the fish heads, intestines and blood pudding. One really cool thing though is they had a dish that was my favorite growing up called ponsit (it's the noodles at the top of the plate).

This was our first school to do an assembly at. We ended up with about 500 kids. It was a lot of fun and the kids were so excited. The kids have some trouble with english so we've been trying to make things more simple in what we say. Today we will start having the Filipino team do more of the up front stuff. Our goal is to make sure they are well equiped to keep doing this once we leave. Many of the principles have already asked when we can return to do it again.

Well, it's Friday morning here and time to leave for our first assembly for today. I'll update more as I can. Today is very busy so I'm sure I won't be able to get on until tonight. One assembly today will have about 2,000.

our first day of assemblies

Pastor Tony asked me to update his blog today. He left his computer at home so we could use it at Kids Church and Launch, but that means he has to borrow a computer if he is going to get to email or update the blog. Here is part of an email he sent me late last night (which was Thursday afternoon for him!).

Hey guys!

Our first assembly went great. We were supposed to have 200 and we ended up having 600 but it went well. The kids are so excited to see Americans. They treat you like a rock star. One of our assemblies on Tuesday is planned to have 3,000. The drama worked best to just scrap the script. The local team we are working with are great. One woman works at an Assembly of God seminary 6hrs north of Manila and she has been a huge help. Tomorrow we will work on having them do a little of it and by Tuesday we hope to just assist them. Our next assembly isn't until 5.

We went to the mall a while ago and ate at McDonalds. I had a Big Mac. Brandon had fried chicken and rice - McDo. I didn't buy anything yet. There's a walkover to get across the street to the mall so we don't have to cross traffic. That's nice. There's a lot of beggars on the walkover though. That's hard. We seem to be far enough away from Tourist stuff that Americas are still a spectacle.

He is really having a good time and making some good friends. He told me he would be sending some pictures soon, but in the mean time you can click on the links at the side under "Philippines Trip Blogs" to see some pictures of other people on his team and to read more about what is going on. You may want to scroll down some and look through their last several posts. They are all updating their blogs every day. See if you can spot Pastor Tony in the background of any of the pictures. He is in several.


Be sure and make a comment to Pastor Tony and let him know you are reading and praying for him and his team!

We'll update more later!
Sarah

I'm here

Wow, I finally had a chance to stop for a minute before I go to bed. I had a hard time sleeping on the planes. I finally got to sleep about 3hrs on the flight from Tokyo to Manila, but that's it since I woke up monday morning. Anyway, it really seems like one long day of flying and aiports.

The Tokyo airport was really nice and the Manila airport was really interesting. We arrived here in Davao just after 6am this morning and went to the hotel. Then we went to McDonalds for breakfast, ran for a quick shower and started meetings and training. We start the school assemblies in the morning so I'm going to get some sleep and I'll update details when I can.

it begins

Well, here we go. I'm leaving in a few minutes for the airport. I''ve got a bunch of flying to do today. Wichita-Denver-Seattle-Tokyo-Manila-Davao City. I'll update as soon as I can.

trip basics

My missions trip to the Philippines is getting very close. I am planning to give updates during the trip to this blog so keep checking back over the next couple of weeks.

Here's the basic info and purpose of the trip:

A team of 25 children's pastors from around the country will meet in Seattle, WA on Monday Sept. 4 to leave for Davao City, Philippines. There we will work with Assembly of God Missionaries Darrell and Sandy Blatchley at Family Circus Ministries to launch Character Connex (a public school assembly program) in the country. The team will be doing assemblies in 37 schools, reaching over 27,000 students. We will be training the local team so that they can then continue the program once we are gone.

Family Circus currently ministers to approximately 3,500 kids each week in 6 weekend services. Through the Character Connex Program they hope to reach over 7,500 (1% of the 750,000 children in Davao) in the near future.

Character Connex is designed to build long term relationships with the schools. Our character based messages like "Kindness", "Responsibility" and more are then followed up with invitations to Family Circus. We will be leaving them with 6 complete kits for everything they would need to continue doing the assemblies; from the sound system and video projectors to props and game items.

planning

I'm getting excited about my missions trip. With VBS done it's kinda just slammed me that it's close. I'll be leaving for the Philippines in a few weeks. It's been fun to try to figure out some things about the trip. Like how I'll be flying over 17,000 miles round trip and that on the way back I'll see the sunrise twice in the same day. I think I'm going to drive Sarah crazy with all the "did you know" questions. Here's a picture of the flight path.

Marketplace

Wow! Were almost to the final week of getting ready for our biggest event of the year. We have tons of stuff lined up to be happening in the Marketplace with more activities, a larger sports area, more interaction and room to run. The drama team has been rehearsing, the setup crew is ready to roll, the teaching crew is prepared, the snack crew is gathering supplies, the 300 kids costumes are ready to go, the 200 adult costumes are hung and organized, the city has given us their blessing, the Police Dept. is ready to provide assistance, security measures are in place, ads and posters are out and registrations are coming in. I believe this event is actually going to happen.

birthday girl

Sunday was Caelan's birthday. We asked her several times over the last couple weeks what she wanted for her birthday. Each time she said she wanted to ride a bus. So, after church Sunday morning she got a spin around town in the church bus (thanks to our generous pastor who Caelan is less than an hour away from sharing a birthday). She had a good time.

pool time

Yea! We got our pool opened up and it makes for some good family time. Tanner is much more daring this year. Thanks to his cousins, he's jumping in and going under water etc. Caelan was a little slow about getting in but later did very well. She likes to swim rather than play. She swam 3 laps without stopping and then did a bunch more later. Trevor is just not interested yet. He doesn't mind too much if he's on mom's lap on a raft and it's not moving.

lift5

Our summer discipleship program for 5th graders kicked off great with a Fri-Sat retreat. I was very impressed with how they did in the prayer times and during worship. They had their first writing assignments in their prayer journals and that was awesome. We did some things to build teamwork and prepared them to be stretched this summer. Now, if you ask them about it you'll probably hear about the brown bag special or sardines or something. Whatever they say, it was a good start.