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All ready for the Kids Paint Art! event tonight! I figured out last time we needed two examples since the canvases are so small. It will be fun! ☺️#jellyfishpainting #kidspaintingclass #westernhillscc

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Lion of Judah box with the story of Daniel and the Lion's Den! #handmadegifts #danielandthelionsden #biblestory #lions #pegdolls #pegpeople #paintedbox #sundayschool

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Trinity Box with the story of The Burning Bush! #paintedbox #sundayschool #acrylicpainting #handpainted #burningbush #moses #turquoise #handmadegifts #sheep #goat🐐

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"Tree of Life" box lid #treeoflife #trinity #tree #handpainted #acrylicpainting #paintedbox #sundayschool

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Salt of the Earth necklaces for our 3 baptism candidates. It was the perfect day. December 4, 2016. @westernhbc #baptismsunday #saltoftheearth #sundayschool #whbc

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Bible bad guys! Goliath and King Eglon. #kingeglon #goliath #judges3 #1samuel17 #pegdolls #pegpeople #biblestory #sundayschool

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The classroom set so far. I want to do all the Bible eventually. The rack is a nail polish shelf.

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Crossing the Red, well the Israelites do at least, bad guy Pharaoh and company don't quite make it.

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The lighting was pretty yellow for this, so I tried using a filter to brighten it up but it didn't do that great of a job. Miriam's dress is pink and I used real for her apron. Jochebed (Moses' mom) is wearing a pink dress and a plum colored hood with blue rain drop accents. Moses is wrapped in a blue/teal blanket. Our Egyptians princess is wearing a white dress, metallic gold necklace and bracelets with various colors for the stones on the jewelry.

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I’ve not posted in a while, so I thought I’d share some updated on the Kids News format I’ve been using for my Sunday School class.  I’m trying my best to write it out, but I know it’ll take some work to get it into something consumable for people not currently living in my brain.  First off, my kids designed the News Logo we have and I just made it publisher.  Pretty easy to save it off as a .PNG file and now we have a fun promo symbol.   Class format: 9:30am Greeting, hangout and lately we’ve been making placemats for Kairos Ministry 9:40am Music time. We have a lot of musically inclined kids so since we only have one class right now, I’ve been asking our church’s music minister to lead the kids in 3-4 songs a week and it’s been very fun. Time line gets messy here: 9:50am Prayer requests and prayer time.  We have a class notebook with everyone’s requests/praises and keep track of when God answers our requests. It’s neat watching the kids go from “I wish...” to “I want to pray that...” Press Conference: Kids run to their cubbies and pull out their news reporter notebooks and their press hats.  I tell the story, most of the time I just stand up and tell the story or pull out a story Bible to show illustrations of what’s going on in the story.  We are reporting our way through the Old Testament right now.  Other times, I’ll pull out the rice tray and act out the stories with the peg dolls-this is usually when we have a younger crowd.   After I tell the story,  The kids ask me questions, based off the 5W’s and 1H format and I write the answers on little cheap whiteboards I have on the wall so the kids don’t have to stress about spelling.  This is their “article.” Photo Op After the story, the kids pull out the rice trays and go to town recreating the scenes of the stories.  They have peg dolls, popsicle sticks, toy animals/trees and colored rice to work with.  I brought in my HP wireless printer into the classroom and the kids take pictures or pose to let me take a picture of their “reporting” the scene and print it off.  The kids glue the picture into their article and write a headline.  

They seem to enjoy it.  :)

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Philosophy of (this) Children’s Minister

Jesus says in Matthew 7:16 that you know people by their fruit.  I think we can measure the effectiveness of a ministry by their fruit too.  The fruit of my ministry SHOULD be fully committed disciples of Christ.  If I do my job correctly 0% of my kids will drop out of church when they grow up.  People tell me that there’s always more going on than I know..our job is to plant seeds and harvest, but God is the one who grows them.  YES. I completely agree with that, BUT I think we have a habit of giving ourselves a “Ehh that’s good enough” get-out-of-jail-free card.  I honestly believe If I don’t give my full effort to the task that God gave me and give those kids every single tool I know of to follow after God and carry out His Kingdom work, I will be held accountable for that. 

Colossians 3:17 says “whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

James 2:17 says “ In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

James 3:1 says “ Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.”

If I TRULY have faith that God is going to grow the seeds of faith in my kids, I’m going to dig the correct holes in the right soils, I’m going to water, I’m going to fertilize, I’m going to weed, etc.

So on to my philosophy that I promised. God doesn’t promise that He will bring any of my kids back next week.  

Proverbs 27:1 says  “ Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring. “

Every. Single. Time. I see my kids are a blessing and an honor.  Make use of all the time you have with them.  Kids can’t drive, they can’t control when their parents will randomly check out of this whole God scene. This means two basic things for me:

I don’t care if I have 1 kid or 80 kids in my classes, I am excited to see them.  I want to hear from them and I want to pray with them.  They should be treated as honored guests.  God is honoring me with an opportunity to connect with one of his precious ones and I take that seriously. 

Nothing I do should be a time-killer.  When I was in the 6th-7th grade, my parents literally stopped taking me to church.  During that time, because I had–scripture memorized, I knew worship songs/hymns, I knew how to pray, I knew how to journal– I still grew as a christian.  I share that fact with my kids so they know that my class might be a little more intense than other churches.  It’s because I want them to be equipped.  Our songs are scripture songs and worship because my music minister agrees with me about how important this is.  My kids are learning how to read the Bible for themselves.  We pray as a class.  We hide God’s Word in our heart. We take on service projects to use their gifts. My goal is by the time my kids get to 5th grade, they should have at least the basic tools necessary to follow God for the rest of their life.

Hopefully everything I do comes back to that. I know I’m going to fail and mess up. Nothing I do is going to be perfect.  But as I strive to be more and more like Jesus, who is perfect, I hope my ministry looks more like this.  My prayer is that my kids get the fire of the Holy Spirit burning in their bellies. I want them to continue to pray fervently for the broken world they see around them as they do in my class.  I hope they hear the stories of the brave and fiery Jesus with His many rag-tag followers in both the Old and New Testament and are inspired to join that Kingdom work.  I pray that my ministry will disciple them in what that actually looks like.  God help me.

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My classroom for the WHBC Kids News curriculum we started this week.

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Spiritual Discipline of Serving

The sermon I gave to the Western Hills Baptist Church congregation 8/14/16

When I was 10 years old, my grandpa had to get hip replacement surgery.  I remember before the surgery a few friends of theirs came to visit at the hospital-their pastor came to pray for my grandpa before the surgery took place.  People were very kind.  Even after the surgery, people came to the house to visit. My 8-year-old sister took it upon herself to inform people who came to visit that we were very fond of tater tot casserole and we did not eat anything with onions in it.  More people than I realized existed came through my grandparents house. People came from their church to encourage grandpa, someone brought their walker they weren’t using, and we got a LOT of tater tot casserole. :) But as the immediate emergency excitement died down, there was one guy that kept coming around.  This man, Mr. Ben would come over nearly everyday to just do what he could to help out. He mowed the grass, he weeded grandma’s flower beds, he added an extra 5 inches height to the bottom of my grandpa’s recliner so it’d be easier for him to get in and out of it.  

Growing up in the church, I’ve witnessed many events like this-in the lady’s bible study on Joy this summer I heard even more stories like that.

We as a church have been working through a series on Spiritual Disciplines.  Pastor Chris has introduced his passion for spiritual growth and development and has been challenging us to consciously, deliberately submit--or RE-submit as the case may be--different areas of our lives back to God.  Pastor Chris has already covered some really good disciplines like celebration, prayer, and giving. Today, you might have guessed from my first story, we are talking about “SERVING.”

I will say when I first heard I’d be speaking on the discipline of service, I was very tempted to use this as a way to hit you all with a bible to guilt all of you into volunteering in the children’s department...but I’m not going to do that. Not today anyways.  We are not talking about service in general, but specifically we are looking at it as a spiritual discipline. Now just to be clear, there is service that is not part of developing your discipline.  The occasional serving every now and then when someone asks you to help out, that’s just being part of a church family.  What we want to explore is this idea of intentionally serving in order that we mature as believers and grow closer to God.

I have been reading a book by Donald Whitney called the “Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life.”  It is one of those weird books where you kind of love everything he says but cringe at his bluntness.  One of his first observations about service was that the discipline of service is in exact opposition to two of the strongest human faults-pride and laziness. Service requires us to humble ourselves and serve others with no expectation that we will get anything in return or appreciation for it. I loved that observation.  I don’t know if this resonates with you, but to be honest I think for a long time I associated service with a sense of obligation.  Serve one another -- you HAVE to--serve one another --GOOD christians LIKE to serve-- serve one another--because people will get mad if you don’t.  

This burn-out, grudging bitter service IS not what Paul was talking about in Ephesians 2:8-10 where he said:

Go ahead and open your bibles to Isaiah 6, verse one.  For my students, Isaiah is in the Old Testament; it’s past Psalms in between Song of Songs and Jeremiah. I think this will be a good place to start.

And at this point in my Sunday School class I would say “okay what just happened?” What just happened is we read probably one of my favorite Worship services in the Bible outside of Revelation.  Isaiah met God.  He saw Him and worship Him and was overwhelmed by Him.  Then Isaiah repented of his sins.  Woe is me! He said.  Then the Lord forgave him, cleansed him of his sin and Isaiah’s immediate and I’d say joyful reaction to God asking for someone to do some work was “ME, SEND ME!”

Now, I know it’s been a few weeks, but hopefully you guys still remember this diagram pastor Chris drew for us  “WORSHIP” “CONNECT” “SERVE.” Not only are these the things, put simply, that facilitate spiritual growth as stand alone ideas, they should overlap.  

This story captures exactly what happens in the between of Worship and Serve.  This is the place we need to start.   True service has to come from a heart of worship.  If you have not met with God-do not pass go, do not collect your 200 dollars.  

Moving on, the next thing we should probably talk about is that developing a servant heart is rarely an accident.  Even as an outpouring of worship, we need to plan and be deliberate.  Take a look at Joshua 24:15.

Joshua is giving his retirement speech and is giving a charge to the country he had been working with his entire life.

Serving God is always a CHOICE.  There are plenty of other things you could be doing, and it is ridiculously easy to stop serving.  It does not matter how old you are or how long you have been a child of God, you can slip out of the habit.  Over and over again God says to His people, “hey, what’s your plan?  What are you doing?  You can not be passive about this, you need to make a choice.” Throughout the Bible there is a sense that you make a commitment to serve God, you’re probably going to do a vow renewal to Him at some point.  

So why do we serve? Are we serving God to get forgiven? No, we saw God forgive Isaiah before anyone even started talking about service. Are we serving because we want other people to help us when we need them? I sure hope not.  

To consider our motivation for serving, let’s read John 13, verses 12-17:

If you have not heard this story in a while, I encourage you this afternoon to re-read the whole thing.  Jesus had just a few hours to sort of wrap up all His teachings to the disciples before He was arrested and crucified.  One of the MOST important things he needed to share with them was this picture of service. Serving, like every other spiritual discipline we should consider ultimately brings us back to Christ.  Not only did Christ model this for us-he flat out told us this is what he wants us to do.  Then he kept going and humbled himself even to death for us on the cross.

Ephesians 5, verse 1 and 2 say this:

As we draw closer to God, it is very clear that our goal as believers is to look more and more like Jesus.  One of the titles given to Jesus from that prophet Isaiah is the Suffering Servant. Be imitators of Christ.  We can speculate a little bit on why that is important to God.  I mean Lucifer fell because he wanted to be glorified higher than God and was kicked out of heaven.  He is now prince of this world and his world definitely celebrates arrogance and belittling those beneath them.  Last Sunday my mom’s pastor Randy Frazee at Oak Hills Church said “If you’re disappointed in what the elephant and the donkey have to offer this year-try the lamb.”  The world NEEDS something else.  The world NEEDS more Christians that look like Jesus.  There is nothing more counter-cultural than being a humble servant by choice.

But even if that does not resonate with you, ultimately it doesn’t matter WHY God expects us to serve.  If someone saves you and loves you so completely that he died for you, if he left a letter behind asking you to take up underwater basket weaving in his honor-you would! Just as a tribute to the guy who rescued you.  

Paul says it this way in Romans 12:1-2:

There are plenty of other ideas about service that I just don’t have time to thoroughly share with you today, but I’ll give you a couple highlights really quick.  

If you want to start serving, out of a worshipful heart, just START somewhere. The most obvious place would be here at church.  Western Hills is a good place to overlap CONNECT and SERVE.  Obviously I’d love to have you in the children’s department but there are a LOT of little jobs that need doing and there is enough to do that even if you’re only here once a year-there’s something you could sign up to do. That is a good way to systematically add service to your life as a discipline.

Beyond the church doors ask the Holy Spirit to show you one thing a week you can do for someone to grow your humility.  Back the the story of my Grandpa’s surgery.  People from every walk of life helped in the best ways they could. Remember that guy Mr. Ben? Did I mention he was in his 70′s when I met him? NO ONE has an excuse.  Literally anyone and everyone can find something they can do to serve -can you babysit someone’s kids?  Can you mow someone’s lawn while they are sick?  Is there someone you can make tater tot casserole for? Can you open the door for someone as you’re walking into a restaurant?   Can you use your skills to make things to be distributed to the needy?  If you haven’t found an opportunity to serve, please come talk to me.  

As you are growing into your spiritual discipline of service-pray that God will guide you in your spiritual gifts.  Service most of the time does not require any particular gifting, but I have found it will get a lot easier if you can find something that makes your spirit sing. This is a topic for a whole other sermon, but I wanted to mention it.  I have listed a couple scriptures you can look up later if you are interested in that aspect of serving.

Romans 12:6-8

1 Corinthians 12:1-10

1 Peter 4:10-11

Always bring service back to God. Do not neglect prayer, worship and bible reading as you serve.  Service is a wonderful discipline- ONLY if God is your source and your inspiration.  

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Kara

This is isn’t children’s ministry related but this is my only blog so I’ll just post here.  

Today is August 1st.  Kara Holifield’s 27th birthday.  It’s also the 4th anniversary of her death.  She died of cancer.  Not a lot of people in my life now even knew her. So much has changed.

The day I met Kara, she was a sophomore helping me along with the rest of the freshmen move into their dorms.  She helped me get my wifi to work and was friendly with my mom and sister so they felt like people were going to look after me.  I’m terrible with names so I knew her for a solid 2 weeks before I could get even her name down.  

She noticed I was having trouble leaving my room.  Sleep-in Saturdays, to my great dismay, turned into Chick-fil-a Saturdays.  It was the only restaurant I was willing to go to since I had a coupon.  She laughed at my grumpiness and told me stories about other people she loved.  She laughed at my stories and was delighted when I told her my secret snarky thoughts.  Kara knew I was a catty person and she loved to help me laugh at myself.  

Kara wanted to be a high school teacher.  She was getting a degree in Electrical Engineering Technologies so that she could teach high school students in math and in some kind of weird technology elective class they had in her high school in El Paso.  Her mission in life was driven by the people she loved.  She had a heart specifically for the “losers and the loners.”  Those weird kids who struggled with suicidal thoughts because they couldn’t find their place in a school focused on academia.  They thought they were dumb because they were hands-on learners with very little interest in books.  These young men and women needed a teacher that could show them a future where they could use their hands and their minds to develop technology without it feeling so much like “school.”  Kara strove to be the very best teacher she could be.  

I still get frustrated when I try to write about Kara.  She was a lovely person and it’s easy to make her sound like a saint.  She’d LOVE it if I let everyone remember her as a saint actually, but it would be doing a disservice to our friendship.  Our mentor Connie, another loved one I’ve lost to cancer, used to say that she was shocked, but loved how blunt we were to one another.  We told it like it was, and never held our punches because we knew how much love was behind our words.  I had the privilege of being the first to inform Kara that she is utterly tone deaf and would make a terrible choir member.  She was the one to tell me I needed to stop giving fashion advice ever again because I have terrible taste in clothes.  I told her she needed to stop falling in love with her project friends.  She told me when I needed to end my toxic relationship.  

Kara was moody and often selfish.  She pretended to be an extrovert because she was terrified of being lonely.  She was very smart but tended to give herself way too much slack on schoolwork.  Kara was incredibly human.  She was real and she was my friend.  Then she died.  If cancer hadn’t taken her, I have no doubts that she and I would have had multiple fights.  She would have gotten more comfortable with her need to be alone sometimes.  She would have grown up to be a healthy, annoying, wonderful, loving, lazy, thoughtful, and ambitious high school educator.  

Every August 1, I spend a day in ambivalence.  I want to celebrate her birthday.  Celebrate her life.  I also want to grieve her death-day.  Grieve her death and be angry at the cancer that ended her life too soon.  She was a Christian and I know she’s in Heaven.  That is a comfort.  I know that a lot of people believe God took her home early because her work was done.  I don’t know if I agree with that or not.  I mean...I KNEW what wonderful plans she had.  She had a lot of work left she wanted to do.  I just have to trust that the work she’s doing in the presence of God is infinitely more valuable than what she hoped to do here.  As I wrestle with the weird reality of this day, I feel the fullness of the grief and joy of who she was-I hear that wonderful Kara laugh in my memory and I know she wouldn’t know what to say anymore than I do.  

Kara, I love you and I miss you.  And as your friend I need you to know that. 

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Fat King Eglon

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Top is Abraham, Sarah and Isaac. I wish I could figure out what to do about their hair, it looks kind of weird. Bottom row is Pharoah and his guard. I will probably make one more guard.

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Joseph and his coat of many colors! I had so much fun, I just made up the design as I went along. I messed up a bunch with the gold lines, but it's supposed to be a coat, so the lines can be a little wiggly.