Here is my sermon from today on the Magi. Around the 23 minute mark I play the 2nd video on here, so that is why you can’t hear anything real well.
Here is my powerpoint presentation:
The second video:
Star of Bethlehem Clips
Friday morning after Thanksgiving, my buddy Kyle and I woke up early to go backpacking in the Sespe Wilderness. Our goal was to get to the Sespe hot springs which was about 8 miles from the trailhead parking. On our way to the trailhead we saw this…
So we tried to do this…
Those nice guys in the truck pulled us out, and we parked before the water hole, which was over 4 miles from the trailhead, making our hike in go from 8 miles to 12 miles. You can see on the map below, we were going to park at the “You are here point”, but instead we had to park where it says car. The X was our destination.
When we were about 3 miles away from camp, Kyle started feeling pretty exhausted. I offered to switch packs with him since his seemed heavier, and when I did I was shocked at how much extra weight he had been carrying around. He probably had 20 pounds more than me. The last 3 miles was all down hill, so hiking down that steep terrain with his heavy pack gave me a few more pains than I had expected.
We got to our spot, set up camp, ate, and then spent the next cold 14 hours in the tent. The next day we relaxed. We spent some time soaking in the warm hot springs, and just eating and napping the rest of the day.
Saturday night, Kyle did this…
I got a couple of free things from him that he was going to leave behind. Including a new compass, and some light eating utensils.
The hike out was rough, but not too bad, and Kyle handled it pretty well for how exhausted he was feeling. We took a lot of breaks and made it out in good time. Fortunately we saw some guys hiking out on the trail that agreed to wait for us to give us a ride back to our car.
All in all it was a pretty interesting trip.
Ron and I have made a bet on who will have the best grades by the end of the semester in the three classes we have together.
We are taking the grade percentages of all three classes, and then taking the average to determine who is the better student. So far I am in the lead.
The loser has to buy the winner a 12 pack of his beer of choice. I am pretty excited about this bet, as it is extra motivation to do well in class.
If you want to keep up with the fun, I have created a spreadsheet that will keep track of our grades, and our overall average grade.
This is just for people who requested to see my inclusion plan from my EDSP350 class. I posted a copy of it here. So feel free to take a look at it if you want to know what I did right, however I will warn you I think she was just impressed with the neatness, because after comparing it to some other people who didn’t get a perfect score, I couldn’t tell the difference.
However I will still fully take advantage of this opportunity to gloat.
Today during the chapel at Valley, I looked outside to see the rain pouring down a little harder than usual, and for a moment, I was taken back. Taken back to about a year ago, where it was a pretty consistent experience to see rain. Most nights that it rained we would try and find a place in doors, but there were still plenty of nights where we stuck outside in our tents during intense rain and thunderstorms.
I have this image being in my 6 foot by 3 foot tent, I am 6’2″, laying at angle so that my body can fit without my head touching one side of the tent and my feet touching the other. I would lay there sometimes for hours without sleeping, just completely trapped by the rain. I had about the same about of space as most people have in their closet, and for me that was my home, that was my place of safety, even though in reality it was rather vulnerable.
For some reason, I don’t have a lot of memories of being bored in those hours. There were certainly lots of times that I wanted to be asleep but couldn’t either because of water getting into my tent, or simply the noise of the heavy rain hitting my tent was simply too loud, but still boredom wouldn’t describe those times. As miserable as those nights were, and sometimes as scary as they were with lightning striking all around us, when I think back to them, I can’t help but me reminded of how alive I felt. Its ironic because had my tent been any smaller, I suppose it would have felt more like a vinyl coffin, than a tent.
Anyway now I get the comfort of sitting in a strong and secure building, looking out at the gallons of water falling to the ground, and thinking, “Out there, in the grass and the mud, that was once my home, and oh how I miss it”
Tonight a kid from our cabin had to pee really bad. Instead of looking for another toilet, since ours was being used, he decided to pee in the trash can. He of course thought this was hilarious, but as soon as I realized what was going on, I was a little upset. I asked him several times if he really just did that, because my mind could just not comprehend his thought process. There was an open toilet no more than 20 feet away just across the room. So I started yelling at him to pick up the trash can and take it out back. On his way out I told him that the back patio would be his new home for the night, since he didn’t mind peeing anywhere, I thought he wouldn’t mind sleeping outdoors as well. I was of course kidding, but he didn’t think so.
When I came back outside just a mere 30 seconds later, he was in tears, terrified that was to be his new home, and that I was going to call his parents over this. In all honesty I thought the whole incident was hilarious, I just didn’t want a trash can full of urine 6 feet from my bed all night, nor did I want to see this repeated. I calmed him down and brought him back inside. When we got back in our room, he made it clear that he was now terrified that this incident would cause him to be the laughing stock of camp. I tried to explain to him, that the story was funny, and he should just learn to laugh at himself.
Now this is where the story starts to get good. We all started sharing embarrassing stories from our past, and how we had to learn to just laugh at ourselves about it. So as we go around the room, finally a kid shares the following story. Apparently one day, he was in his dad’s living room, and he accidentally pooped his pants. However, instead of taking himself to the rest room, he managed to place this poop in a plastic grocery bag, and then instead of disposing of the poopy bag in a trash can, he quickly and conveniently hid it underneath the couch where it remained for 3 weeks!
Now as he is telling this story we all start laughing, because that is absolutely ridiculous. But here is where it gets really great. I look over at the kid telling us this story, and he is laughing so hard, that a wet spot starts to appear on the front of his shorts. That’s right, in the midst of him telling a funny story about pooping himself, he peed himself from laughing so hard.
This ladies and gentlemen, is why I do youth ministry.
He graduated high school right when WWII ended. All through high school he had planned on going off to war, everyone before him had, and so why wouldn’t he. God spared him from the war, and instead he found a girl, Virginia Eileen, and got married, Kind of. See in those days the law was that the girl had to be 18 to get married, but the guy had to be 21 or have a parents consent. Well both he and his future wife were 20, so he got his fake ID, and headed to Vegas. The rumor I have heard from other relatives was that they couldn’t make it to Vegas and ended up fornicating in the back of the car on the trip there. Pretty funny story if you ask me. They ended up getting married hours later, and have been together ever since. My grandpa would always joke that since he used a fake ID to get married, they weren’t legally wed, and therefore, he could leave her whenever he wanted. I don’t think he would have known what to do if he did.
They went on to have 2 boys, Dave and then Kent, the oldest of which was my dad. My grandpa enjoyed things like fishing, shooting, hunting, camping, smoking (which he did several times a day for 50+ years) sailing, just about everything that screams adventure. Since the war was over he joined the National guard, and during his service time one of his jobs was to ride an Indian motorcycle as security during different excursions. I suppose I get a lot of my sense for adventure from him.
When I was young, around 10 and 11 years old, my sister, Bethany, and I would drive or fly up to Redding and stay with my grandparents for a couple weeks. I really enjoyed those times, even though I often would end up board and just playing solitaire. Although my favorite things to do were to target practice with grandpa’s BB gun, and watch old Westerns with him at night. One of the summers we were up there, my grandpa got really sick, he went to the hospital, and we went home. God spared him from his ailment then, and he was back to shooting squirrels in his backyard in no time.
Some time later, he had a stroke, and while everyone was worried that this might be the end for my grandpa, it was not. However the stroke did change him, for the better I would say. The first thing it did was it convinced him to stop smoking. My uncle Kent says that when he was in the hospital from the stroke, someone reminded him that he smoked, he looked confused and said, “I smoke?”
My uncle says he responded by saying, “Yea you smoke, you should stop it.” And so he did. So in some way, he quit because he just kind of forgot about that habit. The stroke did something else too, see my grandpa was a cool old man, but he was a tough old brute too. And the stroke kind of softened him up. He went from showing little emotion, to saying how much he loved us, and getting almost giddy when we would visit or call. It also got him to slowly start asking serious questions about his life. Questions that I am sure he had thought about before, but had never admitted, at least not to his sons or grandchildren. Later or around the same time, I am not really certain, my grandpa was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He fought this cancer off and on several times over for the last 10 years or so, most of the time he was beating the awful disease. But in the last couple years the cancer was only getting worse, and the chemo wasn’t fighting it off anymore. Sometime around the summer of 2008, we knew his time with us would be short. But even with stage 4 cancer, he held on quite a bit longer.
Towards the end of my trip in 2009, I stayed with my grandpa for about a week. Most of the time we would just stay in and watch WWII movies, and he would share stories from his youth. I secretly recorded most of these stories, and still have them filed away for future reference. I got to talk to my grandpa a little bit that week about faith. He confessed to me that he thought he was just to bad for God, that he didn’t deserve any salvation. I tried to explain to him that was the whole point. Forgiveness wasn’t something he deserved, but instead something that we all needed. I shared with him a story of an ex-con I had met in Hawaii who eventually turned his life around and became a pastor. Before that his job was to break the bones of whoever he was told. I told him “If God could save him, I am pretty sure he can handle you.”
Weeks later after I got home, I called him to check in. He told me that my grandma and him were going to start going to church. I was pleasantly surprised.
Two weeks ago, after my grandpa went into hospice care, a witness was needed for the power of attorney documents to all be taken care of. My grandma got the neighbors, but they brought more than just a willingness to sign a legal document. They brought the gospel with them. They shared with my grandpa exactly what he needed to do to be right with God, and on that night he humbly accepted the salvation of Jesus Christ.
Tonight my grandfather went home to be with our creator. And while I am writing this through tears of sadness, I am extremely grateful that my Lord spared him from the war, spared him from his ailments, spared him from the stroke, and spared him from the cancer, just long enough so that his heart would finally soften to the point where he was ready to hear the gospel. If you ask anyone in my family they will probably tell you that he should have died years ago, I mean who gets to smoke for 50+ years and still live to be 80. There were so many other times he could have been taken, but the lord allowed him to live till tonight, just 2 weeks past his rebirth into the Kingdom of God.
Thank you lord for the grace you showed my grandfather, thank you for the grace you show all of us.
So I preached for the first time in front of adults at Westside Christian Church this morning. I think it went OK. I talked for longer than I planned, but I think it went over OK. Here is the link if you want to listen to it.
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