orphan sunday 2010

This Sunday we recognized Orphan Sunday at our church. My friend, Carrie McLean, made the display above for our lobby. She is incredibly talented and I just loved her vision for this. I hope that many were inspired today to hear the cry of the orphan (or the 163 million orphans in the world per UNICEF) and take action. We used today to start the kick-off for Orphan Awareness month by putting together a burlap bag for every household that included an action/awareness calendar and a picture of an orphan. At the end of the month, everyone will return their bags filled with the money they collected over the month for each action day and that money will hopefully be enough to build a home for orphans in the Village of Hope that was created for displaced child soldiers in Uganda. My friend, Bethany, works with eXile International who is sponsoring many of these children and she has been able to use her counseling skills to help many of these children overcome their horrific past as a child soldier.

This is the video we showed today.

Orphan Sunday from Greg Buzek on Vimeo.

Would love to hear how you feel impacted to help an orphan.

trunk-or-treat

For Halloween, we went to our church's trunk-or-treat. This is the way to do it if you want to maximize your candy volume while minimizing your distance traveled. It is even better when you have two little ones who are still a bit shy and who don't have the patience to go very far.


Our nephew and neices...

"Calling all units, calling all units..." Fire Chief Jonas


Costumes down to a minimum`````

The boys enjoying their candy on the way home.

Now we can put the costumes away and get ready for Turkey Day!!

Step Into Africa

I have been absent from the blogging world for awhile on account of two reasons: 1. I have helped coordinate volunteers for the Step Into Africa exhibit that our church partnered with World Vision a couple of weeks ago and 2. Our computer had major viruses and we were unable to download anything on to our hard drive which meant no pictures!! So hopefully, I can now get back into the swing of things and will have more to blog about since I have been gone for so long. Below is our family standing in front of the exhibit or "the Village" as Asher likes to call it.

Asher and Jonas both loved for us to be at "the Village" which we were at about every day that the exhibit was open.

I highly recommend if you hear of World Vision being in your area with the Step Into Africa exhibit YOU MUST GO!! We had close to 2000 visitors go through the experience. You get to choose 1 of 4 African children's stories and how their lives are affected by the AIDS crisis. The AIDS crisis is the largest humanitarian crisis of our time. If you would like to learn more about this and take your own journey, go here.

Tent City

A Night for Tent City - Ministry Moment Video from David Woodard on Vimeo.

I am looking forward to a special evening tomorrow night when our church welcomes Phil Keaggy in concert along with a tribute to some of the residents of "Tent City" and special guests from The Temple. It's not every evening that Christians and Jews welcome homeless men and women to a concert. We're hoping that this is just a small glimpse into what the Kingdom should truly look like and how love is to be expressed here on earth. Today there was an interesting article from The Wall Street Journal about Tent City in our city and how the rest of the nation is responding to their homeless neighbors.

Barefoot Week

You may not have realized it but this week is Barefoot Week! This special week is sponsored by Soles4Souls. The U.S. government estimates that 300 million children around the world don't own a single pair of shoes, and yet Americans threw away the same number of shoes into landfills last year alone. Soles4Souls has a simple mission -- to collect new and "gently worn" shoes to donate to victims of natural disasters and those living in extreme poverty. Our church is going to participate in the 2nd Annual Barefoot Sunday this Sunday, June 7th. If you are looking for a way to donate your shoes, you can find a partipating location here.

Minister Announcement

This was quite a Sunday at our church. There has been a search for a new pulpit minister for quite awhile. We are so excited that David Rubio (one of our best friends and our church's current youth minister) is going to be one of the ministers. We also look forward to getting to know Josh Graves and have been very impressed by his credentials and his interview visit. Below is the video they showed today to give the big announcement.

Peace and Justice Ministry

Many of you know that a few of my friends from church and I have been trying for a year now to get this new ministry started at our church. We had our first meeting last Sunday and were pleasantly surprised by the turnout. We can't wait to see where God will lead us with this minsitry. Here is our video that introduced the ministry.