Let's MOVE

Today is the first day of Ciy MOVE in Myrtle Beach, SC and we brought 60+ students for a jammed pack week of connecting with God and with one another. We arrived here safe around 3pm (bad traffic) and then ate dinner at Fudruckers! We had our first session tonight and it's theme was on rediscovering who Jesus is. Afterward we had our Group Time together and it was by far the highlight of my day. We talked, laughed, and had most of all had fun together as a group.

The wireless internet cuts on and off every 5 seconds so it's incredibly annoying and frustrating. So if the internet holds up, I have asked a few students to be guest bloggers and will give you the updates of how our week is going throughout the week. So stay tuned tomorrow for our first student blog!

I can't wait to see how God is going to MOVE in our students this week and I'm excited for the relationships that are being formed as I type! Here are a few quick pictures that I snapped of what worship looked tonight!

It feels good when...

...you could wail a rubber spherical object at the head of an unsuspecting middle school kid and get paid for it! This past Friday night we had our first of three middle school game nights and it was a BLAST! We had a good group of students and parents play dodgeball, spoons, and relay races. I love these middle schoolers and I can't wait till they can throw dodgeballs like me! HAHA JK! I love my job!

It's In the Name

So as many of you know we own two lil miniature dachshunds and we named them after everyone's favorite Disney movie, "Lilo & Stitch." OK, so maybe it's far from a favorite out of the many classic Disney films but the names were a cute combination. Lilo (brown) is our little sweetheart of a girl and is almost three and Stitch (gray) just turned one on Mother's Day.



Well if you're familiar at all with the Disney movie, the character Stitch is this lil punk alien monster that reeks havoc on everything he touches, but at the same time cute and adorable and in the end is a great lil guy. Well we never thought that our lil guy would be just like this character. I'm not going list all the items that our Stitch has destroyed in the past, but last week he hit an all time high or low, whichever way you look at it, and he destroyed Tracy's new cell phone. The thing that really stinks about the whole situation is that since we got the phone less than a year ago, we are not eligible for an upgrade and don't have the finances to pay retail for any phone out there! So as of right now Tracy is dealing with a phone that barely works!




But not only did he destroy Trace's phone, last week while we were getting ready to grill out, Stitch had something in his mouth that looked a lil different. Come to find out as Tracy went to grab him that he had a Rabbit's head in his mouth.....I'm serious. It had to be one of the sickest things I've ever seen. You should've seen me chase him around our backyard with a broom in hand trying to knock the decapitated head out of his jaws. That was a fun-filled evening let me tell ya. All this to say that our lil punk is a monster just like the cartoon Stitch, but is so adorable that we love him anyways!

I Love Our Church!

Just a quick note - mad props to God and our community at Crosspointe to do something so huge together! I am so honored to be a part of community that has the faith to step into the impossible. Just in one week Crosspointe rasied over 400k to help the Haitian's Children's Home (a ministry we partner with and where we'll be leading 16 of our high schoolers to in August) to purchase the land that was promised to them years ago! To see the whole story check out Bow's Blog. This definitely has to be one of the top 3 things I've ever seen while doing ministry! God is AWESOME!

Promised Pictures late!

I know TWO WEEKS AGO I said I'd post some pictures of what we did around the house during the time my in-laws were in town. I just didn't figure I'd get so caught up in other things to forget about it. Just to recap we painted shutters, took down a tree, planted some plants in the back, made the mailbox look nice, and replaced the lights outside of the garage. In all it just looks better. So better late than never!

BEFORE (Take into account that this is the only before picture we have although it was when we were purchasing the house over a year ago and the grass still looked good....)



AFTER






Maybe one day we'll show you the dramatic difference we did painting the inside! I'll catch ya up with life stuff here soon!

There She Goes...

Sorry it's been a couple weeks since I last wrote, I had quite a busy two weeks. For starters I was entrenched with all this truck/car stuff, my in-laws were in town, had some good friends come visit, and mixed in all of that was senior recognition dinner and Catalyst.

With the in-laws in town we got a TON of stuff done around the house, it almost looks like a whole new place. We hedged all our extremely tall bushes, took down a tree that was blocking the front of our house, painted the door and shutters black (which totally make the house look 100x better), mulched, and planted some plants and bushes in the island in the back yard. Overall I was very happy with what we got accomplished and extremely thankful for their help. I will post pictures real soon!

Today is a bittersweet ending of a relationship between me and my truck. I sold her to a dealer in Garner tonight who has plans to sell it to some person in Winston Salem. They gave me a good offer and I wanted to get out from underneath it. Although I'm glad to not have the debt responsibility, I am sad to see her go :(

But I love my wife and my future kids a lot more than any truck, so in all it was the best decision. Here's her last picture under my ownership.

It's So Hard to Say Goodbye

So this past Sunday I spoke to my students about "Contentment" and how I still screw that up at age 25. These past few weeks I feel that God has really been preparing my heart for some things to come, but in order for me to fully be ready for it I have to let go of something I don't want to.

Many of you know that Tracy and I would one day like to have kids and our plan is about 5 years down the road to do so. One huge value to both of us is to have Tracy home with our child and become a full time stay at home mom. In order for that to happen it would take some smart financial planning and getting rid of any debt we owe. It's so easy to let your eyes get bigger than they should and with two incomes you could get a LOT of nice stuff. But when we actually started dreaming about how that would look like for Trace to stay home in five years we realized a major debt of our has to go.

Thanks to some wisdom from family, friends, and God we have made the decision to say goodbye to my toy that I have only had for 6 months, my stinkin' sweet truck! You can view the Cars.com listing of my truck HERE. If you know anyone who is looking for an awesome truck send them my way, please!

Once we get this sold we will knock out 1 of 2 things that has us in debt, now if we can only get our house in Jacksonville, FL sold, we'll be on our way to being debt free (except for our NC house).