Just for fun

We're still waiting on the video to get up, but here are some great photos from our recent gig. Have you ever seen NSync's video for Bye, Bye, Bye? Well, here's our version!

Can you tell who's in the lineup? When the curtain opened our fans were so loud we couldn't even hear the music! I'm not kidding. At this point we are all thinking "How are we going to do this with no music?!"

That's me singing to the fans.


One of the more dramatic moments.

Did you figure everyone out yet? For the Jewell folks out there, that's Dr. Calvin Permenter (Cal), me, Jeff Buscher (campus minister), Josh (a student), and Dr. Brad Chance (JBrad)

JBrad stole the show!

Festival of Shelters

Tonight I will be participating in a Festival of Shelters at Cherith Brook. The Festival is based on the traditional Jewish festival of Sukkot.

From CB:

The Festival of Shelters comes to us from Leviticus 23:42 where the People of God are instructed to build simple shelters and to live in them for seven days remembering a lifetime of days spent homeless, wandering the wilderness, in search of food and water, hoping for a promised place. The Festival also became a harvest celebration where the people remembered what it was like to be hungry and thirsty and to show gratitude for God’s provision of food.

WHY DO WE DO IT?
Our Festival of Shelters is intended to be a challenge to resist and celebration of rejoicing:
· We who have plenty are reminded that we have all experienced need and, that it is God who provides our needs;
· We are challenged to move away from greed and pride of wealth and accumulation;
· And to remember and that the stranger, the wanderer, the homeless and the hungry are specially loved and cared for by God.

We'll start with a celebration and blessing of the homeless tonight, and then I will head out with a small group of people to spend the night on the streets with some of our homeless friends in the Old NE. I did NOT take off work on Monday, so I will also be seeing what it's like to go to work after a night on the streets. I am excited about this eye opening experience. I'll let you know how it goes.

Camera download

I cleaned out the memory card on my camera today, so here are some photos of all kinds of things!

Allison, Wes & Lucy came to see us in May, and never made it onto the blog... We had a great time with them, especially Lucy! All the animals still miss her.

Twister doesn't get much blog love these days, so I thought I'd put him on here. See him sniffing around the tomatoes plants? He likes to sneak one off the vine when we're not looking for a quick snack!

The Ladies are doing well and giving us lots of eggs. We recently froze a bunch of pumpkin puree from the garden, and gave the Ladies one of their favorite treats - pumpkin scraps.

Benton is always looking for a new place to nap. Here you can see he is cozy in a paper grocery bag.

We attended the KC Ethnic Enrichment Festival again this fall. We learned that this is the biggest festival of this kind in the US. Of all the BIG cities out there with so many people represented, KC celebrates this with more energy than any other. Hope to see you there in the future!

This guy spent a few weeks gathering his dinner in the garden this summer. We've had lots of spiders, but this is by far the biggest. You can see how big it is by noticing the fly and the big bumble bee caught in the web next to it. I was extra careful when I inched in for this shot!

We threw a Baby Celebration for the new additions to our community. Here's Trinity with the two moms! Annen is already here, and Baby Sweeten is on the way soon.

Trinity and I went on a day trip to Weston, MO with Merci.

Here's a photo from Badseed Urban Farm that we took on the Urban Farms Tour this summer.

Some of the more colorful produce from the garden.

I dug these boulders out of one of the new garden beds this spring. You can see how big it is compared to the shovel. I about broke my back pulling it out of there. In fact, there is another one as big as this still in the ground that I gave up on.

Jim & Andrew & Christina also made the trek from ATL to visit us. Here we are at the Nelson.