Sunday Night Sundae Fight

As a way to welcome our 8th Graders to our Sunday Night High School Festivities, on June 7th at 6:30, we will be having our first ever Sunday Night Sundae Fight, and yes it is exactly as it sounds. It is our messy night for the year, so come in old clothes and wear bathing suits underneath as water games are immediately following the fight. This is the last event graduating Seniors can attend and the first event incoming Freshmen can come to. It is going to be a kick in the pants so come on out!

Jr. High

Good times, you always know Jr. High was successful when you play with a rubber chicken, a rubber fish and I tell stories about being a chubby Jr. Higher and getting poked while running windsprints. We talked about why bad things happen to good people and used James 1:12 as a reference as well as Jeremiah 29:11. Here's a few of our girls after youth...




Happy Youthing

Trying

I love my phone, it has enabled me to do my work from almost anywhere and now I can post on my blog from it too. This is just a trial run but we will see how it goes!



Oh yeah, I can add pictures from here too! That's Diana Dobrinin and Michael Isaak.
Happy Youthing

Daddyhood

Being a father is an interesting thing, it makes you appreciate the things that God does for you. I don’t know why but last night I was looking at my son and a small smirk came across his face, now this isn’t the first time he has smiled, nor will it be the last but it was him and me, all alone and he smiled just for his dad. What an exciting thing to have happen, I will see Cooper smile thousands of times in his life but this smile stuck out to me as a gift. Maybe it was the long day I had had before, maybe it was just me admiring my son, but he looked me in the eyes, and grinned.

Now I don’t know about you, but if God loves us to the extent that the bible tells us he does then I would imagine that God gets more joy out of us being content in him than I do from my son. 1 John 4:7-12 says this, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”

We need to take a step back froour lives and grin at God, smile at him, love Him, show our appreciation for the goodness he provides in our lives, make your smile a gift to God.

On a totally different note fused with an awkward transition, Summer Calendars will be out next week with all of our really cool activities and dates, so keep an eye out. Happy Youthing.

Sufjan and Manny

I want to start this by saying I am getting the least amount of sleep I have ever gotten in my entire life. I love my child, but I came to the harsh reality this morning that I wont get a good nights sleep for the next 15 years or so. It is a season of life for me where it is easy to think that things can be put on the back burner because I am a new Dad, and to an extent priorities do need to be shuffled, but that doesn’t mean I can drop the ball, nor will I. I sit here listening to Sufjan Steven’s Come On Feel the Illinois with visions of Dodgers fans eating their words for years of scorn aimed at Barry Bonds. Their precious golden ticket to the playoffs relaxing in his mansion for an extended vacation as his team sweats it out while losing to the Nationals. I think to myself, life is good, life is fair, life is just.
Beyond that I just finished reading my brother-in-law’s blog (Isaiah 53:10 in the blogs I follow) and I am continually blown away by his passion and zeal. In a week where I have just come off of two fundraisers and I am tired, it was good to be reminded of the fact that we have only merely tasted, smelled, and grazed shoulders with our Lord God and we need to be continually striving after Him.

I love Men's Recreational Sports

I know, it sounds odd, and according to my father-in-law the only thing I have left to offer the sporting world is my genes, but regardless I will continue to play mens rec league anything until I am 90! We just got done with a rec basketball league, that was fun at times and painful at times (mostly because being the tallest guy on our team, 6'1", I had to play center against guys who are 6-7 inches taller than me.) But that league is over and it is time for me to transition my thoughts to slow pitch softball.

Now I wish this league was in Selma, but it is in Merced every Tuesday night, and the main reason I agreed to this was so my mama could see her Grandson on a regular basis this summer. But, the resurrection of the greatest softball team to ever play is upon us, the Thundercats are under new management, a new banner, and have new pitching (They finally replaced me, I guess I wasn't striking out enough guys... in SLOW PITCH!)

But needless to say, Thundercats... HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Leprechauns and Mission Trips

It is true, I have a child now and due to that you may notice a more fathering tone in my column this week (But probably not). This has been a great month for me as a whole, and frankly I have never been fond of March, maybe it is because I despise Leprechauns and pots of gold but I was pleasantly surprised at the nice weather, the arrival of my son, and of course the NCAA basketball tournament more commonly known as March Madness (Go UNC!). But down to the nitty gritty.

We got stuff coming up and it is coming up soon! The deadline for deposits for the mission trip are this Sunday because what better way to celebrate Easter than charge you 100 dollars. So for all of those interested in going on the Mission Trip please get me your deposit by this Sunday. In that same breath we have a missions meeting scheduled for Sunday, that is not happening, because it is Easter and I know you would rather be going on Easter Egg hunts in your Sunday Best than sitting in a meeting with me, so we are going to reschedule that meeting for April 19 right after second service in the Youth House.

Carlos O’Brien is May 2nd, make sure you buy your tickets when they go on sale next week, it is going to be a blast, and coincidentally, even though I don’t like Leprechauns, we are celebrating their existence at this fundraiser…weird. Other than that check the weekly bulletin for any changes in schedule like no Youth this Wednesday or Sunday because of Easter Vacation

This is my Baby

Cooper Edwin Anderson
7 lbs. 10 oz. 21 inches

Your City

So when I was in High School and in Jr. High I was all about the school I went to. You know you have a certain amount of pride. I was always on sports teams and stuff and so you get to wear your jersey… you have your school’s logo on your back and there is a sense of pride that goes along with that, especially when you get to high school. I brought my letterman’s jacket with me tonight and this was my high school, I was an Atwater High School Falcon. I bled blue and white for 4 years, if I went to a football game there I would sit on our teams side. I have friends that I graduated with who are now teachers and coaches at Atwater. When I graduated I coached water polo there for two years, I loved everything about my high school.

When I was a senior in high school my friend and I led the student section at all of the games, specifically basketball. Now we really enjoyed doing this at the basketball games because you could yell at the other team’s fans and make fun of them and what not. We wanted to assert our dominance over the other school, because we were Atwater High, we stood for our school and we would stop at nothing to preserve our precious name, to promote our school at all costs, because we loved our school and who we were.

Now Jesus said in Matthew 28, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in[a] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

Just like my love of Atwater high school your desire should be to make disciples of those that are around you and near you, you should love your city, you should love the people in your city so much that you would want to make it hard for people in your city to go to hell. I mean that is our goal as Christians right, to make it hard for people to go to hell?

Sickypoo and MMS

Well as most of you know, my wife is about to pop, I mean in a few days we will be waking up to the joyous sounds of a baby crying at 3:00 AM. So mentally I have been preparing myself, making sure the house is clean so when Sarah does pop we will be ready to go, packing our bags, making sure the nursery is perfect, all that stuff that first time Dads are supposed to do. And everything was going great, there were even a couple days I got a nap in and was hoping Sarah would go into labor that night because I was ready. Surprise surprise, that didnt happen, as a matter of fact, because God has a sense of humor last night I woke up sweating to a 102 degree temperature, fun right. SO i slept all day until noon then decided I needed to get some work done today so I came into the office where I got the best news of today (Not hard to do considering how deathly ill I am).

iPhone is coming out with it's 3.0 update! Now I understand that I am a really big nerd for being excited about this update, but now I will be able to send picture messages to my friends, something that I have sorely missed since I dove into the world of Super Phone. Granted, the 3.0 update isn't great enough to cure my sickness, it has still been a bright spot in a rather horrible day.

Just wanted to share that with you. Peace and Grace.