FlowerDusters,

We lost a blog reader today.

Chris’ grandpa, who was an active reader of this blog (which always made me smile) passed away this Sunday afternoon.

Please pray for his family, who has already gone through some tough times recently, and that he can find a way to financially make the trip to KC for the funeral.

Chris is selling his amp on Craigslist (Fender Hot Rod Deville 2×12 - USA version) as one way to help.  So if you need an amp in amazing condition or know someone who does, there you go.  It appears the amp has been sold.  Supposedly the guy will pick it up tomorrow. Let’s hope so.

Thanks for your prayers and support.

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i am not naturally a morning person, but when i wake up, i’m up and alert (typically).  sometimes i use sleep aids like lunesta or in really bad seasons, clonazepam, to help me sleep.

with the lunesta, i know i will wake up exactly 7 hours after i took the pill.

last night i took a lunesta at 9:10 pm, knowing i needed to be awake by 4:30 am in order to be out at our dickson campus by 8 am.  since it had been a while since i’d had a lunesta, i set two alarms.  however, 4:10 rolled around and i’ve been wide awake for the last twenty minutes.

since a lot of you are church staff members or volunteers, i was wondering…what time do you wake up on sunday to do your church thang?

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as you know, i have lived in the south. in texas. the red river kind of south. not the south-south.

in the red river south, we have our own breed of rednecks. but alas, i am learning the south-south has yet another breed of rednecks altogether.

(by the way, i love rednecks. this is by no means an anti-redneck post. the ceiling of my car is coming unglued, i have a gravel driveway, and i shot my first rifle at the tender age of nine, so obviously i am somewhat born of this breed as well).

now, my friend shaun has talked about his redneck neighbor before. and his redneck neighbor even has a blog. one day, i hope to meet redneck neighbor. but until then, i have my own redneck neighbor to deal with, and i have a question to propose to y’all.

here’s the skinny.

my redneck neighbor’s driveway is next to my driveway. i see it when i leave. when i come home. when i go on my deck. when i take out the trash.

my redneck neighbor has a little planter wall. on this planter wall are several cans of budweiser…some askew, some crushed, some full of cigarette butts, and all piled up into a replica of pike’s peak.

[at one point, he had creatively made a budweiser-duct tape-sticks-cigarette butts effigy using a button with obama's face on it for the head. it was like a little budweiser obama stick figure. which was held up by a rusted folger's coffee can. this has now disappeared, leaving me a little disappointed.]

i am all about respecting other people’s property, but when his strewn bud cans and cigarette butts are in my line of sight, oh, forty-seven times a day, the OCD in me comes out and desperately wants to clean up this budweiser-duct tape-sticks-cigarette butts mountain the next time i take out the trash.

[using heavy duty yellow rubber gloves and a gallon of purell, of course.]

so my question to you is this…would cleaning up this nasty redneck trash pile be rude of me? or helpful to him? because you see, i of course am only doing this to love my neighbor. right?

ahem. right?

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i need your story. more importantly, others need your story.

they need to know they’re not alone.

so…i need your video.

nothing fancy. you and your iSight and YouTube or vimeo.

i am putting together some clips of church leaders who have burned out, think they might be, or have recovered for a small workshop i am teaching. what do you feel? what are the pressures you experience? do you miss your family? your relationship with christ?

or, are you a spouse of a church leader and you’re afraid your husband or wife is burning out? please share, too…

videos will be shown and only your first name will be used.

please shoot me an email or leave me a comment if you think you could sum up your story in about a minute’s time. i’d need these by next friday.

i would really appreciate it.

thanks!

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i had been out of church for a good part of five years, involved in many things i shouldn’t have been involved in. my best friend and i had just moved from dallas to kansas city and i started crushing on a hot guitar player named chris. his band was playing at a church so we decided to go.

something happened in that church. i thought it was a panic attack but it ended up being god blowing my face off in a very clear way, calling me back. i hid in the back of the room behind a partition, trying to keep my heart rate under 250 and prevent myself from hyperventilating.

a very spunky girl with bright red hair came up and out of nowhere, asked if she could pray for me. just what i needed. another religious crazy person. at 21, i had vowed to keep anyone religious far from my heart. however, i obliged. she prayed for things nobody would have known about, including my future involvement in ministry.

over the course of a few months, she suckered me into volunteering in that church’s youth ministry. a year later, i was hired on full time, and now, almost five years after that church-induced panic attack, i’ve been in full time vocational ministry.

in that time, we’ve both gotten married to the loves of our lives (she was my maid of honor) and have moved miles away from our families. me, only to nashville but her to south africa, where she and her husband feed babies and buy food and love the least and the dying.

she lives and breathes in life and death all the time, and she had a post today i thought everyone should read.

go say hi to my friend kristi. give her a hug. she is in the trenches and more faithful to being obedient than probably anyone else i have ever met.

visit kristi’s blog here.

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