Patti and I are looking forward to meeting again tonight with our Soultuary group. Things seem to be going well and we just pray that it continues!

We had a great weekend – albeit a very busy one… but what else would you expect from us?!

On Saturday morning, we had a “fun” experience… There was this “Free-Cycle” event in town, where you could bring items that you might normally be getting rid of or sell at a tag-sale, and in donating those items, gain access to the “Hall O’Crap” as I called it… where you could rummage through other peoples donations and take whatever would fit in a plastic Wal*Mart bag. Needless to say, there wasn’t much there worth taking. In fact, the girls and I wound up volunteering to help with the setup, as we watched a pickup truck knock into a large table of shoes and then got asked to help move the table! As such, we gained access to the “Hall O’Crap” before it opened and man… was there some CRAP there! Dirty shoes, smelly clothes, used mattresses, even a used stick of deodorant – YUCK! I certainly hope that the event was a success in as much as that stuff got used and not thrown in the dump! I just wasn't willing to wait around long enough to find out.

Afterwards, we took a ride up to Mandy and Jonathan Dollarhides to drop off some home-schooling books and stuff. Man they live WAAAAY up north! I knew it was a bit of a drive, so I hit the trip-odometer on the way back… Dude, it was 41 miles! Ahhh, but they’re worth the trip!

Since I had been out to an Operations Team meeting late the night before and came home WIRED and stayed up STUPID LATE (like until 3AM – I’m such an idiot!) I was a bit tired. So I caught a brief nap. Then I grabbed some of the music stuff that Ryan Soria and I were going to work on later that afternoon. As I was working, I noticed that it was getting dark outside and I started to hear thunder in the distance. As I peeked out the window, I noticed that people were moving into the apartment next-door and that all their possessions were on a flatbed trailer, out in the open.

I trotted downstairs and out the front door, just as Ryan and Suzanne arrived. We all started helping the neighbors unload their truck and trailer. In fact we got the last few items in the house, just as it started to rain – AND MAN WHAT A DOWNPOUR! Their stuff would have been soaked!

See… that’s the kind of stuff I want to be doing. Helping people out. Being real. You know… meeting needs! And it doesn’t always have to require money – sometimes you can just give a little manpower or an old coat or a cup of water to one who is thirsty…

Anyway, I’ll spare you the details of our Pizza-Hut fiasco. But Ryan and I got to spend a lot of time together at the Pizza-Hut drive up window… Enough of that.

Ryan broke out his guitar, a few song books, a CD and we had at it for a while. Even though this was just more or less a “rehearsal” we found ourselves breaking out into spontaneous worship – making up songs on the spot and such. I so enjoy that so much! I hope God does too... aferall, that's one of the things we were created for!

Suzanne mentioned that Ben and Hannah Stacy were going to be heading over to their house later, but they had no plans. So we decided to invite them to our place so we could all just hang out.

Someone made a comment about another person’s head being shaped like “Sputnik” and that, of course, meant that we had to run over to Hollywood Video and rent “So I Married An Axe Murderer”, which is really stupid Mike Myers comedy… and keeping things in the Saturday Night Live actor’s vein we also grabbed one of my personal favorites “Little Nicky” with Adam Sandler. Theologically, you can’t get more wrong than “Little Nicky”, but I still love the film. However, when Adrian, one of the sons of the devil turns himself into a bat, only to have his head bitten off by none other than Ozzy Osbourne kind of illustrates that “No kingdom that stands against itself can stand”. OK, maybe that’s a stretch… But I still like the movie! Oh, here comes the mail... I can just smell it!



Ben just happened to have his guitar with him, so of course, we couldn’t let that go un-noticed! After watching, “Little Nicky” we broke out the guitars and started playing again. I think it was around 10:20PM or so and we decided we had better keep the noise down… Patti was tired and snuck off to bed, but the rest of us ate chips-n-salsa (yeah, I like the hot stuff! What's it to ya?!) and popcorn and watched “So I Married An Axe Murderer”, which wrapped up around midnight… Everyone ran for the door at that point and I headed off to bed!

Sherry Gregory, who runs the KIDS Church program (she is such an amazing woman and seemingly involved in everything successful) at Vineyard Nashville had asked us if we would do a “Funday Sunday” this week, which is a bunch of games and review, so we did that. But all that yelling and screaming resulted in me having almost no voice by the time things were over with… I went into the sanctuary and asked for prayer for my voice. This is getting ridiculous! It like the third week that I have had either very little or no voice whatsoever!

We then headed off to Pastor Jerry and Cindy Bryant’s new home for BBQ Tofu & Boca Burgers with the Operations Team members and their families! OK, OK, the non-vegetarians had chicken… We had a lovely time, but had to cut out early on account of four year old Reagan, who was just getting a bit cranky. I don’t care how hard you try; sometimes the world just revolves around that little “child – center of the universe”!

Jonathan and Mandy Dollarhide popped in Sunday evening and hung out with Patti and me, just talking and talking away. Maybe it was the Starbucks Java Chip ice cream that fueled things, but next thing you know it was like 11:30PM! Time just seemed to fly by… I really love those two! And man… they lead worship during service at Vineyard Nashville that morning (with Grant Norsworthy on bass and John Beamon on drums) – WOW! They are simply amazing. Seeing as three out of four of the musicians mentioned are a part of the Soultuary group, I can see them doing some music with us real soon! I really want to open things up and allow as many people to share their gifts as possible.

OK, so Monday is not a part of the weekend by anyone’s definition, but we had a great time last night at the Williamson County Fair! We always love “fair-food”, seeing all the booths, some more “fair-food”, letting the kids go on a couple of rides, a little more “fair-food”, well you get the point! In addition to all that, they had David Smith Jr, a.k.a. "The Bullet", a human cannonball stunt guy who was awesome. In fact, it wound up that we were able to stand just a few feet from the landing net with no one in front of us. I had never actually seen anything like it in person! They David was fired over a 50 foot ride and looked like he could land on top of us! He wasn’t wearing a helmet or anything, so we could see the expression on his face as he flew about 80’ feet in the air and somersaulted into the net in front of us!

They also had the Maximum Velocity Stunt Team, an Extreme BMX and In-Line Skate show which was totally rad! We had a front row center seat and were glued to the two bicycle riders and Hakeem Jimoh, the in-line skater who worked the ramps as well as Kevin Jones, an innovator in flat-land style ground work. I was simply amazed to see the level of performance, considering how small the setup was. It was like a nine foot vert ramp, a grind rail and a table top. But these guys were throwing down 540s and back flips, it was insane! Reagan actually sat still if that tells you anything!

Well anyway, that’s the last 36 hours or so… It’s Not All Backflips and Human Cannon Balls, but there were some!


Later-
Ray

¶ 8/09/2005 11:50:00 AM

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