What girls do when the Super Bowl is playing
via Pixelpipe
Tim Schmoyer // Husband to Dana, father to Hannah, youth pastor to many, blogger at http://www.studentministry.org
Tim Schmoyer // Husband to Dana, father to Hannah, youth pastor to many, blogger at http://www.studentministry.org
We've told immediate family, the youth group and church people. Now we have our first picture of our new baby and are excited to share him or her with everyone else. The due date is around Sept 29, which means there will be almost 14 months between Hannah and her little (currently 4 mm) sibling.
As more and more of us are playing Foursquare together, I figured it's probably about time to set some guidelines for when NOT to check-in. I appreciate that Foursquare doesn't really enforce much themselves -- I can check-in to a venue in Wyoming despite being in Minnesota -- so it's up to the community to develop some guidelines. After playing for over a month, here are the guidelines I recommend based on what I see as the spirit of the game: to earn points and badges by making your physical location known at venues where friends could join you to socialize.
Since the Vikings are in the NFC championship game tomorrow, I've had a couple parents and students ask me if we're canceling sr. high youth group because it conflicts with the game. Some are even a little upset that we're still having youth group. Since I think teens are already given way too many excuses to put spirituality behind everything else, I don't want our church to be part of enabling that. It's not that I'm anti-football or even that I don't think ministry can flex for current events. We cancel youth group for the Super Bowl, but for other games? It just doesn't feel right to me. God always comes first, especially before a football game. Our standards for teens spiritual growth are already so low! I'm sure we'll have a small crowd at youth group tomorrow night, which is fine with me. It's not important that we have a large group, it's important that we do the right thing for the right reasons and bring glory to God through it all. I'll be more than happy to focus on the students who are there.
"Would you cancel youth group so people can watch a non-Super Bowl game instead?"Got a variety of answers. See the screenshot below for a summary. Good input and a lot of different opinions.
Yeah... me... in Haiti... in only 3 weeks from now... WHAT?!
Dana and I were planning to be in Texas visiting her family for vacation from February 9-17. It was going to be a great time to introduce Hannah to all our friends in Texas, where we met, dated, got married, and spent the first 6 months of marriage. I was excited about it! I have the time off from church, airfare is purchased, everything is ready to go. And then earlier this week I got an email from a friend who asked me if I'd be interested in going to Haiti during that time. I talked with Dana about it and we were both kinda like, "Umm, no, we already have plans." I couldn't admit to this person that it was actually vacation, so I beat around the bush a bit. But as this week went on I was thinking, "Dude, Tim, how self-centered could you possibly be? You have a possible opportunity to go serve people who are in desperate need, and instead you're going to go on vacation?!" Matthew 25 kept coming to mind, "Whatever you do for the least of these, you do it for me." And James, "If anyone knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins." (That's the downside of memorizing scripture -- the Holy Spirit uses it to convict you.)This went on for about 20 minutes or longer. I got tired of saying BONK so we stopped. Hannah is so funny!
