delve and flight of the conchords

first of all, thank you jason, renae, jeremy and rebecca for the new Zion website. its wonderful. and i ask you readers to please go to the site and click the "donations" tab to learn of the easy ways to donate to Zion. damages are up past $3 million, and thats about a million over what our insurance plan was for. so i ask that you donate.

i know. we're talking about the greens.

money. money. money.

money is such an interesting thing. but its harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is to fit a camel through the eye of a needle...right?

there is this photo that rebecca took of a stained glass window in the church Zion. it is the only window in the whole church that did not suffer major damage in the fire. its beautiful. its a treasure. interestingly enough, it is also the only window that we (the congregation) was going to remove in order to add on our $1.1 million addition that was supposed to begin Sunday, the day after the fire. it was to be the doorway. when i heard this, i instantly had a thought run through my mind that God didnt want us to add on. of course, with the fire, its pretty safe to say that He didnt want us to because He made it so that we cant. but this window, was just so ironic. such a symbol. and ive been thinking about that.

so today i worked late. and i just got home a little while ago. when i got home a letter was in the mail from mike and kim, they are full time leaders for the college ministry, the navigators. and this is what their letter said:

(talking about their daughter, abigail during Sunday school class) As part of her weekly routine, the classroom teachers gvve each child a penny, and the children practice putting the penny into a little offering bank, We love this! When we first heard of this, we joked that everyone should practice this! You know...give folks in the congregation money and have us literally practice giving it back to God. After all, God gives us all we have and tells us to invest it in eternity, and "If you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?" Luke 16:11 Then, after thinking about it a little more, and remember a similar experience from out home church in Cincinnati, we though, "Why not?" So, last semester, Mike spoke at Nav-Night to drive home this principal to the body of Navigator students at UNL. After recounting the parable of the talents from Matthew 25, and reminding us that we are simply stewards of God's resources here to invest in eternity, and that we will have to give an account, Mike proceeded to randomly distribute envelopes of money to each student (varying in sums from $6 - $100) with the assignment of radically impacting God's Kingdom with what they've just received. After all, if we won't invest money given to us for that very purpose, do any of us really thing we'll do it with out own hard-earned dollars?

then in the letter they have included letters and emails they have received of the recipients to report back on how they have invested their money. there are probably 20 accounts and a lot more not even included. and as i read these tonight, i wept. i wept with the beauty of this picture and all these people receiving good gifts from (ultimately) One who knows how to give good gifts:

Hello! I received $6 to incest in the Kingdom of God when Mike spoke at Nav Nite a few weeks ago. On Good Friday, I taught a class of 7 3rd and 4th grade girls. I used my $6 to purchase small, cheap New Testaments to give to each one of these girls. During the course of the day, we looked up several verses in the small NTs, and know a couple of the girls had never looked up a Bible verse by themselves before. They were very excited when they found out they got to take the little NTs home with them!

I received $25 at that nav night and decided to spend it on a firl in my youth group. She is a senior in high school. I bought her a new easy to read Bible and a short devotional book. We have been meeting every Monday to read the Bible together, and it has been really good, hard, but good!

I am emailing you to let you know what I did with my money that I got from the Navigators. I didnt know what to do with it for the longest time, but I finally decided to decorate a bathroom stall on my floor in Smith Hall with Christ-centered stuff. I found a bible magazine (which I didn't even know existed until I went shopping today), and I cut a bunch of articles out of it, glued them to some card stock, and stuck them up in the bathroom. I only decorated one stall, because I want to see how long the articles stay up, but if they stay, Ill be decorating more stalls! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to steward the $6 that I received from you. I have been and will continue to pray for God's blessing on the articles that I hung up.

Just wanted to let you know the money ($55) entrusted to me was used to buy flowers for someone struggling, to give 12 small gifts of encouragements, to send flowers for an unbeliever, to provide supper with a jr. high girl from church , and to help an underprivileged kid who has been attending church go to Bible camp. Thank you. It was very good lesson and definitely made me think. sometimes while in class I would think of ideas of how I could use the money and jot them down. It was definitely something that was on my mind often the past month. something that occurred to me during that time was how I felt more responsible for the $55 and how I didn't see it as my own - that is how I should be looking at all 'my' money. I stuggle with that. I also struggle with maybe having good intentions, but then keep saving an saving so that I end up giving the amount I was thinking I would. Thanks you again for practical lesson. I appreciate how you went out on a limb. We see that it was a risk and that is impacting in itself. I will definitely remember that Nav night for a long time.

So, I was given $25 dollars to invest for the kingdom. I have been meeting with a Sophomore guy named MoWax, and he is a pretty young believer, and we have been spending time in Matthew 5 lately. We had been reading out of my bible, so I knew what to do! I bought him a Bible, and then last night I gave it to him. I was excited to give it to him, because i knew he would like it...so I went and saw him w/two other guys from my soph. bible study and hew as very excited, he told them "me and joe have been going through our bible verses and I was kind of struggling with understanding them, and then he printed off this version, and it was just speaking my language and I could finally understand, you know it was like when you are studying something and then you finally get it!" Im excited to continue to meet with him, especially now that he as a bible of his own to enjoy.

I used my six dollars from the March 2nd Nav night to help buy one of my freshman girls the Topical Memory System - that was something she really wanted to delve into and memorize.

With the $100 that was given to me I used it for an outreach on my floor. I took Mikes pizza idea but only changed it to ice cream. Ladies signed up for free Cold Stone and all they had to do to get it was to ask or answer a question about Jesus. To my suprise there were 23 girls that signed up! So last Wednesday we got our Cold Stone and talked about Jesus. They had great questions - it was good to see where some of them are at spiritually and what questions they are struggling with, such as the validity of the Bible. Kara facilitated a lot of the discussion and Im so glad that she was there. At the end she got to share the gospel by drawing out the bridge. It was cool to watch the girls as she was explaining it. Some of them you could tell didn't want to hear it, but others were listening very closely and taking it all in. Along with the ice cream I gave out free books ("50 Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die" by John Piper) This was a great time to do this because Easter was coming up and got them thinking about what it really means. God really blew me away with this outreach ...just to know that some of them got to see an illustration of the gospel maybe for the first time is amazing! Thank you so much for giving us the money to do this. It was a great lesson on stewardship and I will never forget it! Hopefully, I will have the opportunity to follow up on some of the girls to talk more one one.

I recieved $25 dollars form the nav night. my roommate and I went out to eat at Ruby Tuesdays. I also wanted to involve someone else so I sent two deserts to two different damson tables. I asked out server if she would be willing to do do this and deliver the desserts and she then acted interested in why i was doing this. so i explained to her that it was money that I received from the navigators at UNL and she also told the two tables that received the desserts. My roommate does not regularly attend church so we had a good talk about her faith.

I attended nav night where money was given and we were told to used it advance his kingdom. last Saturday, I bought my friend breakfast in bed. I went downtown and bought $12 worth of smoothies and dough nuts. She had a difficult week and i wanted to surprise her.

I used the money I received to take out a girl Jamie, who is a non believer out for supper and was able to have a really nice conversation. Jamie is kind of shy and hasn't made very many friends this past year. I just wanted to offer my friendship to her and be a person that she could talk to if she needed. During super I tried to just ask her questions about herself and she ended up telling me personal stuff about a bad relationship she had and how it has affected her this year. I was glad she felt she trusted me to tell me something that personal. I had a really good time with her and hope to pursue the friendship further.

you get the idea. and i get the idea that maybe God did not want us to spend $1.1 million on an addition. if a few dollars can do all of the above, think how much $1.1 million can do! we get so caught up in our stuff i think. and even if we pride ourselves on tithing, we still get our hands all over the greens after we tithe to decide what we think we should do with it. build a building. a building to serve people yes, a building to keep us, the congregation trapped in, yes. but it is also a very expensive building. and im realizing that there are a lot of beautiful people (aka missionaries) out there in the world that are doing a whole bunch to spread the news of God's love and they have some pretty skimpy churches. (and cheap additions to churches.) maybe im wrong on this point, so apologies if i offend you. if it makes you feel better you can call me a hypocrite....because im about to buy a house. how am i any different, you might ask? i dont know, but i would begin with the fact that my (future) house seems like a better way to invest God's money than to pay a stranger rent year after year. and my house is not going to be anything fancy. simple and small and practical. and my house will be Gods to do what he will with it. and if He wants to burn it down, He knows whats best for His own things. and His own people. until then, you will all be welcome. bring some instruments. and your horse.

so back to regular programming:


this is hilarious! a new tv show! pretty clean too. i think this will be right up there with the office.

flight of the conchords
(go to the website to watch the first episode)