A Recommendation

I'm at my parents house for a couple of days - which is nice. Sometimes you just need a break. Here's something I've been meaning to share for some time. If you haven't check out Garfield Minus Garfield yet, you really have to. Here's the description posted on the site:

"Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It's a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb."

Ok, so first, let me just say that this thing isn't really nearly as serious as it sounds from this. It's actually really funny. In fact, Jim David (the creator of the original Garfield strip), has some really good things to say about it. Here's an example of one of my favorite strips:



Get the idea? Good! Now go read the rest!

I Want More Than My Lonely Nation...

...that's a quote from a Switchfoot song that we played in church last weekend. We're doing a series right now about community; about moving out of the isolation that our society and lifestyle creates and experiencing real, life-giving community in Christ. This is something I've been thinking quite a bit about, and I had another reminder this morning. On my way home from practice at the high school, I saw a couple riding their bikes, side by side. So far so good, right? When I pulled up beside them, though, I realized that they both had headphones in! They were physically together, but that was as far as it went. How often do we live like this? I know I do it. I spend my whole day around people, with people, but I'm not necessarily experiencing community. I mistake being surrounded by people for actually spending time with them, and then I come home at the end of the day and just want to be alone, because I "spent the whole day with people."

Only that's not the case.

I've been reminded of this several times recently, not only through Pastor Dave's messages the past two Sundays, but also through my own personal interactions with people. We need community. I need community. I've been in prayer about this as of late, on both individual and church levels. I know that others have been, as well. May God reveal direction, may God bring us out of our isolation and help us to find a way to live life in community with others. May we have more than our lonely nations.

It's All Relative

Today I saw gas for $3.46 a gallon. There were cars lined up around the block to get into the station, and even I got excited for a bit (though I didn't need gas) because of this low price! But then I started thinking about it... 6 months ago, or if not, certainly a year ago, people would have been (or rather were) absolutely outraged to see gas selling that high. It's all relative. Looking at the long term, gas prices are very high, but they're lower than they were last week, so we're excited. Most things in our lives are this way. Everything changes so quickly, we can barely keep up. We expect things to be new and different all the time. New clothes, new music, new cars, new houses. Nothing ever stays the same. I think this is one of the reasons that the church sometimes has trouble relating God's love and the love of Christ to the world: it's constant, it never changes. And yet, that's the very reason that we need it! In a world where nothing is guaranteed, and everything changes constantly, we know that God's love and Christ's sacrifice never change. They will be the same tomorrow, and the next day, and next week, and next year, and for all eternity. That's why we can take rest in that love, that's what makes it a refuge from the rest of the world. Why don't we realize that? Why don't we take comfort in it?

Jr. Music Camp Video

I've been waiting for this video to hit the web ever since camp ended in June. Kirkmont Jr. Music Camp 2008:

You Should Read This

I had intended to write something original this morning (and who knows, I may still do that yet today), but once I saw this on another blog, I just had to share it. So go read it.

How metrosexual is your worship leader?

Centerpointers take heart, I only scored an 8 :-P

Bootlegging

This is a busy time of year for me. Why, you ask? Because marching band season is officially in full swing! I was never a tremendous fan of marching band (or rather, marching in marching band!), but I did seven years between high school and college. Now that I've graduated, though, my focus has shifted to something that I enjoy a lot more: instructing marching drumlines. This year I'm doing two lines, an area high school (Big Walnut) and Otterbein. Otterbein starts so late that I'm not even really thinking about that one yet, but we're into our second week of camp at Big Walnut now, so I'm definitely tired.

On a completely different note: we played the song "You Said" at church on Sunday, and it reminded me that I had this video to share. This is from my last night leading worship at Otterbein Christian Fellowship this past spring. Someone randomly took video that night (which I ended up really appreciating... last night and all), and it actually came out pretty well, so I figured I'd post it up here as my first "bootleg." It's kind of choppy and the camera work is a little dizzying at times, but the audio's really pretty good, and I'm happy to have the documentation:-P Playing with me are my good friend Jeff Huenemann on bass and Jarrin Bradshaw (who you may recognize from the Brandon Abbott Trio) on drums. Enjoy!

Changes

I don't do this very often on this blog, but I'm going to go ahead and "talk shop" a little bit today. This past Sunday was a busy week at Centerpoint from a technical standpoint. Having worshiped outside for the last 4 weeks, it was a little bit of an adjustment to moving back into our regular facility. Beyond that, though, we're implementing a couple of changes right now (seemed smart to time them with moving back in, for consistency's sake). The biggest is that we've switched presentation softwares. Up to this point, we've used Sunday Plus, but we've felt for some time now that it just wasn't getting the job done. It's got some Vista issues, and we've had trouble getting video content to play back smoothly (which is major for us, because we use a lot of video in our services). The problem of course is that we're a little church with a very tight budget (primarily because of the facility we're currently occupying). So what did we do?

Enter openlp. With the recent explosion of high-quality, open source software (like Audacity and OpenOffice), I suppose it should have occured to me that there might be an open source worship presentation software sooner, but it didn't. In any case, I found it, and we used it for the first time this past Sunday. openlp is completely free and open source and includes the vast majority of the features found in Sunday Plus, MediaShout and others. The only major thing it's missing right now is text over video support, but the developers have suggested that it's coming in the next version. Exciting. I think this is a great example of folks in the church using their gifts and talents to help out others. I pulled a screenshot of the main operating window off of the openlp website:


The other change we made this week was significantly smaller, but still exciting. One of the first things that I got really excited about when we were designing our current worship space (really just a big warehouse we've converted) was the idea to have a completely modular stage made up of 4x4 foot panels. That way, we're able to change the shape, height, etc. of the stage quickly and easily. Since we moved into this room in October we've been using a stage for the band that was 32 feet across by 8 feet deep. In front of that was an additional 16x8 foot section for the pastor/interpreter/special musical stuff/etc. The drums were up on a short riser, but that was it. The band ended up basically in a straight line across the stage, and everything felt very spread out (especially after we went to in-ears and got rid of our stage wedges). Beyond that, we had trouble getting good coverage of the entire area with our (rather limited - four Source Fours with wide lenses) lighting system. So last week, Pastor Dave and I went to work on it. What we ended up was a new "base stage" that looks like this:


That took care of the lighting issues. Then we took the "extra" panels that we had just removed and started making platforms at different levels for the band members. It ended up looking pretty cool:



I'm really happy with what we came up with, and I definitely noticed the difference on Sunday. Everything just felt a little tighter with the band. It was good.