Tag: People

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Blogging: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

Today I had a pastor point out to me the dangers of blogging, especially when there is little to no context given behind certain posts. He brought to my attention a couple of posts I had written several months back and revealed to me a little bit about the attitude it seems I was portraying, or maybe the underlying messages I was giving off hidden beneath my words. I am fortunate this pastor wants to talk about it in a couple of weeks when I get back from California.

To be honest before I even speak with this pastor, I went back and read two of the posts he referenced to me and I have to say, they were pretty bad. I allowed some things that were happening in my life, along with some discontentment to mold my thinking and corrupt my heart towards God’s most precious creation, people. I also allowed those things to produce a critical attitude of views and practices within the church just because I choose to do differently. I am always promoting the church working together and being ONE, putting aside petty differences to see the lost brought to Christ, and while I was shouting from the roof tops that the church should be acting in this manner, I was being hypocritcal. I personally find this humbling, but in a sad way humerous, since my pastor just asked me to preach on October 19th with a theme of loving the hypocrite. I guess I should be asking how people are able to love me, it may just make the perfect message. On top of the areas where I personally strayed, there were some things that had no context or understanding for the reader and so it was easily misunderstood by the reader. Blogs can be very good and healthy, but when things like this happen, it makes them bad and really ugly in many ways.

To those who have read my blog, if you read this post, I apologize if I wrote some things that were misunderstood, but also some things that were completely wrong from my end. I desire to live a transparent life and in doing so, your going to catch me mess up and sin, but I am thankful for people such as this pastor who will step into my life and point me in a healthier and more productive direction for my life. My desire is to shine Jesus to the world, and if there is anything in my life that dulls that light, I want to get rid of it. I deleted the posts that were brought up to save any additional issues in the future after I am able to grow from this experience. I am very aware of one thing; I am 27 years old and though I would like to think I have some things figured out, I know that I am far from it! I am thankful for men, such as this pastor, who do not mind getting their hands dirty and helping a yound man such as I, because God knows I need it.

So today, I am thankful for grace, people who know how to love a hypocrite, and people who want to see me become all that God wants me to be. Its good to have people in my life who are living Christianity out. I look forward to growing from here in the next several weeks.

Humbly,

Nick

Join the Conversation: Have you ever said or did anything where you looked back months later and regreted or changed and thought “How Stupid of Me?”

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A Love Letter From God

My friend Hank Murphy sang this song at our CSRA See You At the Pole Event last night.

I like what he told the students…”Just listen to this love letter from God to You…”

I love this song, its called “How He Loves Us.” – I found this video on You Tube with it being performed.
(In my opinion Hank and his band did a better job…just my opinion 🙂 )

Here are some of the words that are my favorite parts of the song:

“He is jealous for me
Love’s like a hurricane, I am a tree
Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy
When all of a sudden, I am unaware of these afflictions eclipsed by glory
and I realize just how beautiful You are and how great your affections are for me.”

“So we are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes
If grace is an ocean we’re all sinking
So heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss
and my heart turns violently inside of my chest
I don’t have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way”
That he loves us,”

So sit back and listen to this love letter from God to you…

Join the Conversation: What is God’s Love Letter Telling You?

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A Night For Africa

This is an event hosted by The 410 Bridge. You need to be there!
Its going to be awesome!!!

Click HERE or the button above to order your tickets.

Lanny Donoho asked me personally via Twitter (ok maybe I wasn’t the only one he asked) to post this, you can see his blog HERE and his Twitter HERE.

See you there!

Nick

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Sharing Life Through Difficult Times

I was contacted a couple of months ago by Samantha, an editor, writer, and representative for Bluefish TV, about contributing to their new website, The Small Group Exchange. I was really blown away & honored that they would be asking me (a nobody) to write something for such a well known ministry resource company.

My article, Sharing Life Through Difficult Times,  went live today. The article focuses on how huge of an impact our small groups had during the devistation caused by Hurrican Katrina. The other day, after Hurricane Ike, I posted a little bit about my former churches involvement surrounding Hurricane Katrina and posted two videos to show a little bit of what we did and what we saw. You can check those videos and that post out HERE.

Go read my new article on the Small Group Exchange and come back here and let me know what you think.

Join the Conversation: How have small groups impacted your life or your church?

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Hurricane Katrina Relief Effort Video Footage

With Hurrican Ike leering on the coast of Texas I am reminded of Hurricane Katrina. I wrote in another post how Katrina not only changed the people’s lives who were effected by the hurricane, but it changed my life as well. Here is video footage from 2 of our 4 Relief Trips that our church took in the days and weeks after Katrina. Please note, this first video is 18 minutes long, but was used as a sermon filler to show the church members what people in that area was facing and how we needed resources and assistance as our church was going to adopt a neighborhood called Eagle Pointe. There is a lot of footage of the damage to homes and property as well as some personal interviews by some of the residents of the community we adopted. It has some rough spots that are very shaky, but I had to use the video available to me. This was the first video I had ever edited and made into a movie, so bear with it, it is worth the watch.

Our church was one of the first relief assistance teams on the scene. A couple of days after Katrina hit Biloxi, MS we loaded an RV up with water and as much food as possible, and 6 of us went to offer whatever help we could offer, this is what we saw and what we heard from some of the people…

Update: You may have to hit play and then pause to let it load some, the file is big.
Can’t see the video? CLICK HERE

This video footage is from trip #2 of our adoption of the Eagle Point Community. We were larger than the Red Cross; we had over 40 volunteers, two half-ton trucks, a semi-truck, two RV’s and a 15 passenger van full of volunteers and supplies for the people of Biloxi. We provided them with basic necessities and a hot meal. The first video literally took me all night to create. The next morning several local news agencies used it for their local news stories, one used it to partner with us with a program called, “A Time to Care” along with the US Army. A service rep with Purpose Driven, who happened to be in Rick Warren’s small group got the first video in his hands, he showed it to his executive leadership team, and they donated our remaining Purpose Driven Life Books to the relief effort, and credited our account for the entire balance (very cool!). We handed the books out to everyone as well as Bibles. With no power it is a perfect opportunity for people to read, and as the church lived out the Gospel, many people were interested in what God had to say to them through His Word.  I never knew that video would make it so far around the nation. Video 2 was made possible because of video 1.


Can’t see the video? CLICK HERE

This was truly living out the Gospel.