Cloverfield

I went and saw Cloverfield today. I heard it described as Godzilla meets the Blair Witch Project. It was shot in a style like it was all videotaped by one of the actors. The guy behind the camera was hilarious. I thought the movie was more funny than scary, but it definitely had a lot of action. I loved it. But the ending was left me unsatisfied. I want some closure. But movies seem to be doing that lately, they leave holes in the plot and ending. I guess I like it because there is a lot of conversation and discussion about the things that the movie doesn't fill you in on.
For instance, I have no idea why the movie is even called Cloverfield. There wasn't a field or a clover in the movie. Well...I guess Central Park was in it for a minute. Is cloverfield another name for Central Park? Also, I wonder what the thing was and where did it come from? I took the guy I'm mentoring and we had a good conversation about some of things that we didn't see in the movie. I like being able to use my imagination a little bit and fill in the blanks, because my ideas are probably better than what the movie director would have been able to do anyways.
But, if you like action...this was a good movie. However, I pretty much like every movie I see, except for dramas and movies with Steven Segal or Jean Claude Van Damme.

I'm 31% likely to eat you in a blizzard

At least, that's according to this quiz.

31%

Tejeda

This morning I spoke to a Bible Study that meets at Tejeda Middle School. It's really awesome how they have it. I think it's run by mostly parents and students. But they had about 100 kids show up 40 minutes before school to participate in this Bible Club.
I spoke about loving your neighbor and really loving Jesus from Matthew 22 (the Greatest Commandment). These are 2 things I talk about often, but I've just been thinking about it so much lately. What does it really mean to love God with all my heart, mind and soul. If I'm loving Him with all my mind, then I probably won't start daydreaming through my prayers. If I love God with all my strength and soul, then why do I sometimes have a hard time finding time to spend time reading my Bible. I get too busy. But I know when I was "in love" with girls in the past, I thought about them a lot. But during my day, how often does God just pop into my head because I love Him so much. I still have a long ways to go in this and a lot of thinking to do about what loving God like this really would look like.
Then I talked about loving our neighbors as ourselves. Do I really love people like I love myself? Not if they cut me off in traffic. Not if they take too long in the grocery store line. There's a pastor in California who decided if he was going to love people as much as he loves himself, then that means that he is going to spend as much on others as he does on himself. He gives to the Children's Hunger Fund. I think that's amazing. If he's convicted to do that, then great. So far, I'm not at that point, and don't necessarily think I have to be, but I think it's admirable anyways. But I have started thinking about what can I do to show love to our world. We help with feeding hungry in Africa. We help with former prostitute teens in Thailand. I take our junior high students on service projects around San Antonio where people are hurting. I want to do more.
I just heard a term called "christianaphobia." I wrote a blog about it last month, and you can read that here. This is the fear of Christians. It's particularly happening in Europe and the West Coast of the US. Non-believers are afraid of Christians because they think we are angry all the time. We're always against people who aren't like us. The rest of the world sees us as a Christian nation, but we fight so much and are in war a lot, and it seems like we strive on that. I knew some homosexuals in San Francisco who hated Christians because of how they were treated. And because of that they didn't want to know God. It makes me sad, because this is the second greatest commandment, to love our neighbor. If we were truly loving our neighbors in a radical way, people wouldn't be afraid of us, they would be attracted to us. If we were loving in a radical way, we wouldn't be so concerned with what we didn't have or keeping up with the Joneses. We would be more concerned about helping injustices in our world.
I went into things a little bit more in depth here than I did this morning at Tejeda, because I've been thinking about these things a lot the last few months. And so, since this morning I talked about these things a little bit, I've been going through everything in my head about how I can follow these 2 greatest commandments.

Cool Youth Videos in the News

I saw these 2 news article videos on yahoo yesterday that have to do with youth doing some amazing stuff. The first one is a contest for students to make a movie about things they care about. Some of the videos have to do with rights for disabled, people living with Aids, to helping the poor. It's cool to see that young people can make a difference, and can use their talents, such as making movies, to make that impact.

Contest Encourages Youth to Film their issues
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/ver/251.7/popup/index.php?cl=6312295

The second video is a weekly segment called "Youth who Rock." It has to do with a young person who is doing big things. This one is about an 18 year old senior who has started a business that has 300 employees already. It's a website that has college reporters all across the country who report on things that young people are interested about. Right now their big thing is the election, because it can have a lot of impact on the young people in their future. It's amazing the kind of things that kids can do when they are allowed to.

Youth who Rock
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/ver/251.7/popup/index.php?cl=6308716

Cool Idea

This is a cool video, and could possibly be a fun idea for a youth event.

Impact Sunday Morning

I think this was an above average Sunday. We started off with a game called Top Monkey. The object was to become the Top Monkey. It was kind of a cross between Simon Says and Paper, Rock, Scissors. Kenny, a 6th grader, ended up winning the game.
Gideon led worship, and he did a great job. I love it when he leads worship. We started out with Undignified, and that always gets the kids going and jumping around. The next 2 were a little slower, and the kids were right with him, and it seemed that they were in a great place for worship.
That was great because our lesson was about worship. It was about having your whole life as an act of worship, not just the songs we sing on Sundays or Wednesdays. We talked about how there are alot of different ways to worship, and just because somebody does it differently that we do or we are comfortable with doesn't mean that it's wrong. For example, Church of Christ don't worship using instruments. That doesn't mean they are wrong in how they worship, it's just different. However, worship has to be done in spirit and truth based on John 4. This means worship is wrong if it's not done in the truth of Jesus Christ.
We broke up into small groups to further discuss it, and as far as my group of 6th grade boys went, it was a great morning. We had good discussion and I think they got the point of the lesson.

Top 5 Super Bowl Commercials

Here are my Top 5 Super Bowl Commercials

1. Amp-"Push It"
Anytime there's a fat guy with jumper cables attached to his nipples and dancing, that commercial is going to win with me.




2. Pepsi-"Justin Timberlake"
2 Reasons. 1. Justin Timberlake gets knocked in the woo hoo. 2. It's got the guy from SNL dressed up like some girl, that was very disturbing.





3. Bud Light-"Fire Breather"
I thought it was hilarious when he starts sneezing and blowing everything on fire.






4. Bud Light-"Will Ferrel Commercial"
I just love Will Ferrel, and I can't wait to see Semi-Pro



5. Diet Pepsi Max-"What is Love"
Based on Night at the Roxbury song. It would have just been an ok commercial if Chris Kattan didn't show up in the end.




Honorable Mentions go to the Doritos commercial that had a guy dressed up in a mouse suit who tackles the guy eating the Cheese Doritos. The Bud Light commercial that had the Dalmation train the horse to pull the carriage to the theme of Rocky. The peanuts commercial that had the girl with unibrow.

Paintball

Last Saturday we took the jr. high boys small groups to play paintball. We invited all the dads to come as well. We had a great time. Altogether, there were 24 of us. 16 kids and 8 adults. I was a big target, and seemed to be one that people were going after. I was killed pretty quick in every game. The first game I took one right on the top of the ol' noggin. That one hurt. After that I got hit in the heart, the leg, the stomach, the face, and the chest. On the last game, Clarence nailed me on top of my head again. That one hurt too. I have a welt of my chest and by my bellybutton (which I don't even remember getting shot there). And I got a couple of bumps on my head.
I ended up shooting mostly adults, until the last game where it was kids versus adults. The kids won both games, but I got to shoot Jacob, Chase and Jesse. I think everybody had a great time. We're planning on going back in March or April. The only bad thing that happened was when Evan got shot in the face, and it went through his mask. It scared him a little bit because it went into his mouth. He lifted his mask up for half a second, which is a BIG, BIG-time No-No. They told him he couldn't play for the rest of the day because of that. And this happened in our second game. I felt super-bad for him.
Here are a couple of pictures from the day.

New York Giants

So, Pastor John has been saying for weeks that there's no use in watching the Super Bowl because everybody already knows who is going to win. He was implying that the Patriots were going to win because they had the perfect season.
I hate the Patriots. Tom Brady was awesome all year and was the reason I did so well in my fantasy football league, but I hate the Patriots as a team. Just like I hate the Yankees, but I like Jeter. So, I'm so happy that the Giants came together and won tonight, in one of the most exciting Super Bowls ever (next to the Jaguars/Titans in 2000).
It's crazy how insane people get over this game. I was excited when Eli escaped the sack and threw a 30 yard pass to complete the first down. I was yelling at the t.v. at different times, scaring Parker. And I didn't even care. I got so excited about this game, and I realized that I rarely get this excited about God. I don't know what it is. I've experienced God in some great times of worship, and I still didn't yell and get as excited as I did tonight in a game between 2 teams I really don't even care about. I don't know WHAT needs to change, but I know something definitely has to change in my priorities.

I'm a Big Loser

Hopefully anyways. I've entered a contest with a bunch of other youth pastors across the US to see if we can lose more weight in 3 months than the president of youth specialties, Marko. I've already lost about 65 pounds, but I hope I can lose about 30 more by Beach Blast. So, don't offer me cookies or anything for at least 3 months. If you see me eating things that aren't good, call me on it. I'm going to try to work hard, and see if I can beat the other youth pastors.
Also, I just found out this morning that I'm going to have a story published in a new youth ministry book by Kurt Johnson, the junior high pastor at Saddleback in Orange County. It's actually not a new book, just a revised edition of a book called Controlled Chaos. I thought that was a pretty cool thing though.