The “C” Word

Mother’s always have a way of making everything better.  Everyone in the home could be sick, even mom, but she is always the one taking care of everyone else and somehow mom would never give any notion that she was sick.  As a kid when i puking my guts out my mom was the one to stay up with me all night and feeding me crackers and lime gatorade (which I cannot drink to this day). 

A month ago my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and with the mention of the “C” word our family and close friends were dealt a big thrust.  Everyone knows someone that has been affected by some sort of cancer, but never do you think that it will impact someone really close to you. Immediately when we found out the news our family was swarmed with unbelievable support and there is n doubt in my mind that the thousands of prayers that have been prayed the past few weeks have given my mom and our family so much peace and confidence for what was about to happen next.

Surgery
Yesterday (4/21) my mom entered into one of the biggest undertakings of her life (probably even more so than childbirth).  With all of our family by her side we watched as they wheeled her away to have a mastectomy.  It was an emotional time as we waited for two hours to hear the report on the surgery.  For two hours we paced from our seats to the 100″ flat-screen that displayed her surgical progress (a very sweet thing).  About two hours later the surgeon came down with the report.

The report was awesome!  When we heard that the surgery went well and that she was ‘ok’ I felt a huge weight lift off!

Support:
One of the biggest things that Kinetic says our church stands for is caring about people and that church isn’t about the place or building but about the people.  All throughout the bible I see Jesus as a man, I see him as the divine, but a lot of the times i see him as a man who is so compassionate.  I cannot comprehend the amount of support that our family has received the past few weeks.  The phone calls, the cards, the food, the visits, the hugs and cries, the laughs, and even the silence.  The day of the surgery my mom had a huge physical team that is in tune with the spiritual surrounding her all day.

I just want to say a special thanks to all of my friends, Cindi Wood, Pat Silver, Jenna, Jeff Johnson (Zach), Chip Sloan, Reg and Deco Alexander, and the many more of you who showed up to the hospital, who is providing food, who called, and who prayed. 

In Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth he calls on them to 1. Praise the God of compassion and comfort, and 2. to remember that he comforted them in their times of trouble not for their on gain, but so they could in return care, comfort, and show compassion towards other people.  This is a muti-faceted two verses packed with so much.

I am so thankful to be surrounded by people who embody everything and more that these verses are about and I speak on behalf of my mom that she is also thankful for that and morphine!

Thursday
We have to wait until Thursday what the next step is.  There are still a lot of unknowns and still lots of need for prayer.  I will keep everyone updated.

May we lift our hearts to the God of compassion and comfort.

 

Stats
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention 186,772 women were diagnosed in 2004 with Breast Cancer 

 

The Call (Part 1)

There are only a few times in our life where we will be expected to rise up, take a stand, and be the only ones around to lead in a HUGE way.  Everyone leads in some form or another; whether you lead your household as a husband, you are in charge of the checkbook, you pick the place to eat after church on Sunday, or you could lead an entire company.

The question I need to ask myself and the question you need to ask yourself when that rare time comes when all eyes are on you to rise to the occasion and lead is: “Will I do it?”

At the end of the book of Deuteronomy Moses dies, one the greatest leaders or call time.  God promised Moses that the Israelites would reach a place of rest, the promised land, but due to some prideful issues Moses did not get to go into the promised land

The Situation:
601,730 men (not counting women and children, so probably about 2 mill.) are looking for a leader and looking for someone to lead them to the place that God had promised them.  Moses is dead.  The Israelites only knew Moses as the leader, and so whoever is to fill his shoes would have to be a strong leader.  The task is huge! [this was the count about 6mos. prior to the change in leadership]

Each of us has a unique situation and great situation that God has placed us in.  

The Call
Joshua 1:2 “…now then,  you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land that I am about to give them–the Israelites” 

Joshua, one of Moses’ right hand guys, the second string quarterback, the back-up singer is about to come rock out.  God tells Joshua very clearly what is about to happen and where he is going.  The call is clear.

Joshua walked with Yahweh, and so it is not a surprise that Yahweh promised to walk with him.

Many of us are facing a great challenge and have been give a call to lead.  So I leave you with the promise that God gave to Joshua…”Be strong and courageous because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their forefathers to give them”

There is no maybe you will lead them, but you will lead them.  The task is great, but so is the call.  Joshua isn’t the lone  leader, but he has put himself under the leadership of someone far greater than he is.  So should we.

Rise to the occasion, Stand up, Be Confident.
~Justin 

 

 

Stepping onto the Stage

So much of my life has been in pursuit of having the stage as my main platform.  As a kid I loved and longed for the feeling of being in front of people.  I wonder has it changed today?Why the stage? What I have noticed is that so much goes into stepping onto the stage.

Stageworthiness:
To be stageworthy we have to have a talent or gift that takes us from the spectator to the performer and from the audience to the stage.  This is a gray area for a lot of people.  What i may consider stageworthy may be different than yours.

Preparation:
I am a huge American Idol fan and I often stop to wonder how long the contestants spend in rehearsal time for a 1 min 30 sec. song. In seminary they tell us that for every minute you preach it should take an hour of preparation. Run the math. It’s in practice and preparation time that we find out who we are. We have to remain diligent, work hard, and persevere. Preparation time is KEY!

Guts:
Every artist, musician, or speaker goes through different types of emotion in the days and moments leading up to stepping on the stage, but everyone will tell you it takes guts. It takes extreme guts to open yourself up for attack, to be critiqued by the way you look, or how big your sweat rings are under your arms, how long you speak. The vulnerability takes guts

A Stage:
You have to have a stage…duh!! To step onto a stage there has to be a stage to step onto. The past few months the Warehouse @ our church offices has been slowly converting into a mini-concert venue where we have large group for the student ministry and various other meetings. One thing that was lacking was a stage. Every other week guys would throw the stage from the church on the production truck and we would set it up for the Gathering. After the first time I realized that a stage was important, but the set-up was killer. I also noticed the stage we had was too high.

All of this headache just for a stage?

A couple of weeks ago 4 guys came together to build a stage. I just wanted to take some time to say how awesome these guys are.

Jeff Himes: Jeff came to me and said that he had enough wood from scraps on his jobs to build the stage and he would bring it by the office. Literally two days later we had enough wood to build the stage.

Tim O’Brien: I met Tim only about a month ago and I heard that he had his hands in some construction through the construction ministry at Hickory Grove. Tim came on board, put the church differences aside, and helped build the stage.

Craig M.: Craig is awesome!!  Craig has a great talent, plus doing construction is his job.  Craig has served a lot with the student ministry, but he is the man at building stuff!

Todd Watson: Todd has enough tools to re-build the World Trade Center Towers.  I randomly called him up and pitched the job to him and the next day he came over to look at the space and helped build the stage.

Without these guys there would be no stage, there would be no stepping onto a stage.  Sure a stage isn’t everything, i understand that, but these guys are amazing!!  I am blessed to know such great guys!

Thanks guys!

We Get Our Stuff Back!!

Through all of this Kinetic billboard stuff and the church’s stuff being stolen it can be forgotten that nearly 90% of everything my band, Severely Yours/One Way, owns was stolen along with our church trailer. The equipment that was stolen was somewhere around $20,000 worth of stuff that we have accumulated and worked extremely hard for since I was sixteen years old.

I went through a variety of emotions the first few days following the robbery.  At first I felt extremely responsible because I used the van and trailer for a winter conference that I took the students on, then I felt mad, then I felt bad for the guy/girls who took our stuff, and then I moved to a feeling of peace.  

It’s odd to think of moving towards a place of peace in such chaos, but God took me there.  I went to a place of realization that the stuff that was taken was not ours.  God provided and blessed us with gear, merch, and everything we owned to do what He has called us to do. When you are stripped of everything on the surface what lies inside is exposed.

Being completely exposed is scary.  Very scary.

While being exposed we were unsure if our insurance was going to cover our gear, and we didn’t find out until today that the insurance (thank God Lane owns a home) was going to cover the majority of our stuff.  Let me just say that I AM SO PUMPED!!  I am pumped because the uncertainty is beginning to come to an end, we get new gear (maybe even better stuff), and I am pumped because we aren’t finished!!

This painful, time-consuming process, I hope, is drawing to a close.

Invisible

Each Sunday is different.  Some Sunday’s are pretty relaxed and chill, but there are other Sunday’s (like today) where it is complete ‘Pandemonium’.  Jenna and I agreed to go with one of the youth, Alex, to her school today because they were showing the documentary ‘Invisible Children‘.  The pandemonium that broke out today was one of internal disturbance.  

It’s so easy to get caught up in short-ranged vision and just focus on what is closely surrounding us.  I wonder what it must be like to go through life and feel invisible; to feel hopeless.  

I was driving home tonight and heard the voice of a teenage girl on the radio say, “I was raped last night…”.  The girl proceeded to tell some guy on a radio show her story of being raped. The next caller was a teenaged guy who is addicted to meth.  Then the commercial voice came on and this is where I began to feel really disturbed, “the views and opinions given are not from a licensed counselor…”

My heart broke listening to these youth who feel so completely invisible and hopeless that the only place they have to turn is some guy on the radio who is not even a counselor.  This disturbs me and haunts me.  We need to stand and fight and take back the youth of America.  Why is Christianity so tainted that somehow the church has become the last place on earth where someone would seek out love and support?  Why has the trend in Christianity been to push away instead of embrace? 

I pray that God gives me strength and vision to reach the hopeless, broken, and invisible youth of Charlotte.  May I continue to be haunted and disturbed, and may the hopeless know the One True Hope; Jesus.

 

Stealing From God…Ballsy

A few weeks ago 75% of everything that our church owns was stolen along with 85% of everything that my band owns.

This past week we launched a billboard campaign and it has caught a lot of attention and buzz across the city of Charlotte.  WCNC and FOX news ran spots on it last night. (click here for the full story) 

This past month has been led to whirlwind of emotions from feeling angry, complacent, hopeful, bitter, excited…  The hope of getting our stuff back and getting justice to those who did this has shifted to a love and prayer that through this they see Jesus and his love.

A Time Traveler

  

As a kid I dreamt of having a time machine to travel through time.  This is a little strange I know, but you know you wished you had one as well! My fascination and obsession with history led me to want to travel BACK in time to see great battles unfold before my eyes, to see MLK give his inspiring speeches, to see Billy Graham at Madison Square Garden, and to see all the animals fight for their spot on the Ark.

So I go to college and majored in history and now I am in seminary where the majority of what I study is history.  So all of this fits.  However, my fascination with history has led me to spend a great deal of time using my brain to go back in-time.  It’s really easy to go back into the past and marvel at your accomplishments and dread your mistakes, but what if we could have a time machine.  The closest I have seen to a time machine is on my mac.  

What if we could have a time machine that did not take us into the past, but into the future? 

In 86 days I am getting married!! I cannot wait!  I look back over the time that we have been engaged and honestly a lot of it is a blur because we have done so much planning and have spent so much time investing in getting married.  Both Jenna and I are counting down the 86 days left to go. If I could take my time machine and go anywhere in the future I would take it straight to June 28. 

If you had a time machine where would you get it to take you?  What events would you want to bypass?  What hurts would you want to avoid?  What person would you not want to see? 

If you are a Christian you hold onto the inheritance that God has promised us, one that will never perish spoil or fade. A promise that we will spend an eternity in the presence and Glory of God.

God is not limited by time, he is not bound to man’s time constraints. God took us through our past, is walking with us today, and will be there in our future.

Rhythm Winter Conference 08

Yo Yo: I have not written a post in a while…oh well…

The student ministry went to the mountains of NC for our winter conference this past weekend and we had an amazing time! We partnered with Sharon Baptist Church in Charlotte and spent two nights at the Blowing Rock Conference Center and hit the slopes at Sugar Mountain. During our sessions the students were challenged to get into rhythm with God.

This was our first big event and it was a huge connecting time for the group. God is doing some amazing things and we have a great group of students and the reverberation is pulsing!

I am already looking forward to next year! We are going to have so many students we are going to have to rent out the entire conference center.

for more info.
reverb myspace
check us on on facebook

Trip Memories:
-me losing my keys
-James Eaton driving all the way back to get them for me!
-Jenna losing her wallet
-Nate Himes inviting Mason Helms on the trip after coming to our church one time! AMAZING!!!
-waking up sore after boarding
-mafia in the van ride-students rockin’ it out on the slopes like pros
-a breaking mirror
-getting more in rhythm with God
-breaking it down on stage
-Jenna saying that she woke up during the middle of the night with Leah scatching her back! hahahaha!
-the smell of Axe (Garret, Nathan, Torey, and Brandon??!!)
-man i have an awesome fiance
-feeling blessed to be a student minister of such a great group
-the parent’s are awesome-it was awesome hearing things like, “this was the funnest trip ever”, and “our group is a lot closer now”
-i’m glad we had a trailer!
-we have great leaders

Enjoy the pictures! This is a brief snapshot of the weekend — i will be uploading videos and the conference video soon! check back!

Catch the Reverb,

~Justin

A Stress Free Life

A stress free life would be awesome huh?  I seriously have no idea what that feels like.  I hear some people who say we need to have a certain level of stress and then I hear others who say we should have a stress free life because that’s what God wants. 

This post isn’t going to be long because I seriously feel that I have ZERO time to write, but writing is a certain stress reliever. The past few weeks have seriously been the most stressful days of my life and the next week I feel will be the craziest.  I am not looking for a pity party or anything.  

I have been talking my stress out with Jenna and she keeps saying “you can get through it”, “you can do it” and when I let those words sink in I feel the weight begin to lift off.

The modern day Christian culture and evangelism pushes a form of Christianity that says that we are always supposed to be smiling like Joel Osteen, and live completely stress free, and somehow this is all magically related to our wealth and prosperity.

 But when I read the scriptures I see and get a glimpse of a God who says “come to me and I will give you rest”, it’s like a parent who opens up their arms and lap for their kid who is hurting to just come and sit and find rest and comfort.  

I don’t have 10 steps to a stress free life and I know their are things that I can work on to help manage stress.  But I know one thing I need to do is to let the voice of God that says “you can do it”, “you will get through it” sink in and lift the weight. 

~Justin 

206 days until I am married…YES! 

Are We There YET?

Are we there yet? That is the question most every parent, student minister, and driver hates to hear especially if you do not know if you are almost “there” yet or not.On a recent trip to Boone, NC with a good friend of mine, Justin Thrasher, we had to take a bit of an unexpected detour.

The average trip to Boone is usually an easy two hour drive up the boring stretch of 321. I have made the drive way too many times in the past 6 years! You know you are getting close when you hit the bottom of the mountain and the altitude begins to rise pretty fast. There is a lot of construction happening on the mountain stretch of 321 and on this particular day I felt like I was in a rush because I was ready to be with Jenna and see some friends that I haven’t seen in a while.So of course we hit traffic and it wasn’t JUST traffic it was a complete standstill except for the occasional movement to close the gaps from the cars who turned around.

As Thrasher and I inched our way up the mountain we noticed cars turning down this one steep dirt road, and my years of driving to Boone I never saw anyone entering or exiting this road, but they were going somewhere!So like any guy would do we look at each other at the same time and say “let’s go for it!” So we did, we went for it! We went for a detour down a road that we had never been on before and had no clue where it was going to take us. ADVENTURE! 

Below is a time lapse of the detour we took…
 

Life and ministry is this way a lot of times: We head into certain things, certain callings with everything planned out. How we are getting there, How long it is going to take, and sometimes we leave no room for flexibility or a detour.

I had fun on this detour even in the midst of questioning if the road we randomly took was going to get us anywhere close to where we needed to be. We should take some time to evaluate where we are at, where we are headed, and ask ourselves “are we there yet?”. What was interesting was we were behind the same car for most of the detour and somehow we thought this car new where they were going…we were wrong… It took a phone call, yahoo, and photographic memory to get us on the right road. So, 1 hr 15 min later we arrived there…

with that…
Have fun on the detours of life, the random off-the-path endeavors, travel the roads you never would have ever dreamed of traveling, and know that when you get “there” it will be amazing!

rock on–
~Justin