Posts of the new youth Room coming soon. Brain is too tired right now to get anything done on the blog.

A Few Things to Consider When Planning an Event

1. Procrastination will kill you in event planning more than any other task.

2. Food is expensive. Over figure for that expense

3. Split the planning into easy bites. i.e. food, travel, projects. This makes it so much easier to delegate.

4. Delegate with intention. Make sure you know what you expect the end product to look like. They may say they understand, but giving them the expectations you have will ensure that they actually understand.

5. Realize that success isn't always just completion of the event. Sometimes you have to sacrifice completion for success.
For example, our ministry is going through a work week where we are hoping to renovate our youth room, nursery and playground. It's a big task, but my mind and heart have to stay in tune to the idea that this is to teach teens to take ownership for the issues in their world. If they catch that idea, but don't finish the work then we still achieve success in the changing of attitudes.

Blood Water Mission Project

For years we have been hearing about the overwhelming needs in the continent of Africa. But it's hard to hear numbers like "24 million people in Sub-Sahara Africa region alone are living with HIV" and be completely unable to connect with those kinds of figures.
For many, it seems impossible to make a difference in a problem that staggering, but now we have learned how to make make a big difference with an easy sacrifice. It's simple, $1 can save a life.

After doing a little research we wanted to get down to what the key needs are for the survival of common everyday people in Africa.
It's Simple Clean Blood and Clean Water. We then found out that the HIV and AIDS virus was actually making its way back into what little water supply many villages have by way of sewage making its way back into the water supply.
So how is this fixed?
We found out that for $3000 we could have a well built by a trusted organization that would provide water for an entire village. That's a minimum of 750 people.

In fact some formulas tell us that $1 will provide clean water for one person for an entire year!

ONE DOLLAR can provide water free of the HIV virus, water free of parasites and bacteria that cause AIDS patients and others undue suffering. It is also difficult to deny the equation: $1= clean water for 1 person for 1 year.

For the teens of The Refuge, we simply find it unacceptable to not do something about it.
We call it "Easy Big." It's a chance to do something that's of no real cost to us, to save a life today.

We're also not satisfied with just being involved with far away places. That's why the teenagers of "The Refuge" have committed to building a clean - safe public playground and a fully redesigned multi-purpose meeting area for teenagers that will be used to house spiritual services and soon a cutting-edge 12 step recovery program for kids 12 to 19 dealing with drinking, drugs, and other dependencies.

We have a passion for helping others and it's truly a rare occurrence to see teenagers think of anything so big and so outside of themselves. Can you imagine the typical teenager willing to give up a week of their summer to live in an old church building in order to rebuild a community area, and raise money for the desperate of a place that they have never seen? What if I also told you that they are planning on going out to Africa in two years for no other purpose, but to help people put their lives back together?
Would you help?
Would you give up a Starbucks if that coffee would provide clean water for 4 people for an entire year?

If you think you can help, join us in our journey.

Sincerely,

Tom Gibson

Our Base Church: North Pointe Baptist Church in Warren, MI www.northpointeonline.com
Our Partner Organization: Blood:Water Mission www.bloodwatermission.org

A list of Questions asked when interviewing a Youth Pastor.

Can you believe this?

1. What Bible translations do you prefer?

2. What is your view of Post or Pre millennialism?

3. What is going to happen to the nation of Israel in the end-times?

BANG HEAD HERE!!!!

Every time I think I'm not doing a very good job I can at least look at these questions and know that it could be worse.

I'm proud to be an American

Well its official, I wish I had HBO.
And here's why.


The Flight of the Chords = happy

Oh Joy of Joys!
I just read this on MacScoop.com

"Sources informed MacScoop that the development of the next iteration of iLife has reached the Golden Master phase. The consumer software suite could ship before the release of Leopard, which is now slated for October."

I was always planning on buying my iMac in October and now it seems that I'll have the newest OS in Leopard and now iLife.

After watching the most recent keynote address by Steve Jobs something I noticed was how often Jobs referred to a new feature as "cool."
How often do you hear products by Microsoft being described as cool?

To me, Microsoft has served me well (sometimes), but I can't wait to have the freedom to be creative, where the weakest link the process will be me and not the machine I'm working on.