Archive for June, 2009

VBS moment

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Just a wonderful VBS story. There was a little girl that I know through one of my daughters who came, and has a pretty difficult family life. She spends a lot of time by herself. One day, at the end of the program, she came to me and said, “Do you think that’s true?” And I said, “What, sweetie?” She said, “Do you think that it’s true that Jesus loves me?” And I said, “Yes, I absolutely know that’s true.” And she said, “Because that would be really great if it was true that He loves me.”

Two days later she came running up to me, so excited to tell me that she’d asked Jesus to live in her heart. I just had to share it. Isn’t it great to know that He loves us?

New album, new play, here we go…

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

The evil Dr. Doominator and his sidekick, Ms. Led

Dexter and Zelda use their “brain power!!”

Grant, Heather, Bradley, and Zelda teach the kids Jeremiah 29:11

My daughter, Rachel, gives clothing to a new mom of twins.

Pastor Agnes rejoices about new infant clothes!

Well, Adventure Week kicked off today, and with it the new play. It’s always an incredible time – so many people putting so much effort in, and the results are just fun. We started the week with record numbers of children, and stories of people who drove in from Chicago and Toledo and elsewhere and are crashing with relatives just so their kids can come. How fun is that?!

The theme this year is “God is Our Superhero”. We do a full VBS that is written by the church, and at the end of everyday we do 1/2 hour of a full length play. My playwrite partner, Terry Rippl, and I do the script, and I write the music.

This year we are at the school for God’s sidekicks, learning how He can use us in His plan, and fighting the forces of the evil Dr. Doominator who wants us to forget all about God! Bum-bum-BUM!!! I especially enjoyed figuring out how to get Dr. Doominator’s hair to go in green spikes, and STILL allow him to wash it out so he could go to work later in the day. HA! He’s a great sport, that one.

We’ve also been really busy working on the new album. I was down in Nashville for several days writing some new songs. I’m co-writing a lot more, and have to say, I love it! It’s a bit harder, but I think the songs are so much stronger in the end with more feedback. I’m really excited about the new songs, and can’t wait to get started on the tracking so you can hear them. Looking at an October release, and I’m sure you’ll hear more about that as it goes along. 🙂

Finally, one sweet story I forgot to put in the end of the Kenya blog – the pictures were on my last day, still in the camera. The girls and I visited Kijabe hospital, and met Chaplain Agnes there. She has a clothing ministry to the women who give birth there but have no clothes for their babies. We were bringing her the last clothes from our drive, about 300 baby outfits, which she didn’t know we were bringing. When she saw them, she got so excited, and said, “Do you know?! We just ran out of baby clothes yesterday, and we stood right here and prayed that the Lord would send us some clothes!! Isn’t He good?” To which we say, Amen. 🙂

Whew!

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

Well, we have hit the ground running, that’s for sure. We got home last Friday after 30.5 hours of travel. The kids were troopers, but it was enough to make even the grown-ups cry. After a massive traffic jam in Nairobi which made the 45 kilometer drive to the airport last 4.5 hours, we somehow still got on the flight – I guess it was because no one could get to the airport, so they delayed the flight. Two security checks and customs later, we were on our way to Amsterdam. Two more security checks and on to Detroit. Then customs, a security check, baggage claim, customs again, customs a third time for agriculture (darn those banana leaf animals!!), rechecking the baggage, and another security check, and we were off to Columbus. Home sweet home.

We’ve been fighting jet lag, getting the kids back in school and doing many presentations about our trip, getting Nathan back to work, getting me back to work at the church, releasing my new single to radio (yeah, it’s doing great!!) and working through the couple thousand emails we had stacked up. Great fun. 🙂

Tomorrow I head down to Nashville to begin hashing out the plans for the rest of the new album. Pray for us! We really want this new album to be exactly what God wants it to be.

I’ve added some pictures, and will be adding a video of our time soon, so check back!