Merry Christmas!!!

Thought this was pretty interesting. Just goes to show you where we've "progressed" as a country. We need to get back to what CHRISTmas is really about!!!

Annual Dinner/Quiz Awards

We were blessed to have over 50 people attend our annual dinner and Bible Quiz Awards night. We had a lot of fun and Kim did a wonderful job with the Mexican dinner that we served. Pictured on the right were six of the top seven quizzers. They are from left to right: Abby Sunde, Emily Harder, Dan Chojnacki, Andrew Skinner, Morgan Thompson, and Brittney Zettler. Brittney finished the year as our top quizzer and Morgan finished in second place and was the rookie of the year. Please be praying for our quiz ministry as we are contemplating major changes that would hopefully make us much better and more competitive nationally. As always with new things, it’s a little scary, but I believe that it will turn out to be a very good thing for our league.

Family Vacation in the U.P.

We had a great time getting away over Memorial weekend. Here are some pics of the trip!

New Posts Coming Soon!!! (really they are!)

Hey everybody, I've been really slacking on getting things updated as of late. Look for new posts coming soon!

First Night in Tomahawk!!!

We had an awesome time in Tomahawk on the 6th as we kicked off our club there. 15 teens and five adults came out to help us get things started. The exciting thing is that there were five different churches represented St. Paul Lutheran, Grace Lutheran, St. Mary's Catholic, Vineyard, and Northland Bible Church! That was our goal when we started to get as many churches united as possible and God blessed us with a great start to that! Vineyard has let us use their youth building which as you can see in the pictures is top notch. We started out with the ever popular "Full Contact Spoons". There was rug burns, blood, and for the first time a broken finger! It definitely lived up to it's name this night. The teens all loved it and I'm proud to say that in the group that I was in I dominated Tim Nelson to take first place!!! (Make sure to check out his picture below, the red eye makes him look REALLY intense!) Next we played the game "6". This game you get into a circle and everyone has a piece of paper and there is one dice and one pen. Everyone takes turns rolling the dice and when it lands on 6 you start writing from 1 - 100. Whenever someone else rolls a 6, they rip the pen out of your hand and write as fast as they can. It was a riot, although I only rolled one 6 and got up to 10 before the pen was ripped out of my hand! My lesson was titled "God's Pruning Job" and was based out of John 15. I talked to the teens about times in their lives when they feel God has allowed them to go through tough times. Times when they might have thought that He left them. I encouraged them to rely on God even more during the tough times and realize that He is always there, even when we face trials.

I was so encouraged by the excitement and turnout. It was a great start to what I feel will be an awesome ministry in Tomahawk. Thank you for your prayers and if you are in Tomahawk, come on out and see what's going on!

Christmas Party in Rhinelander

We had a blast on the 17th at our Christmas party. It included the festive sounds of classic Christmas songs such as "Feliz Navidad"! We had a great time with the gift exchange. My "gifts" were a headless Bob the Builder toy that played the most annoying music and the arms and legs moved. I also got a pair of Ponch Poncherello sunglasses (nice little reference for all the old folks out there!!!). It was a great time and my lesson was on the true meaning of Christmas and how we need to tell others about that as well.

Junk Food Night

Yesterday we had our "Junk Food Night" in Rhinelander. Things started out with "bobbing for worms in chocolate pudding". It's a relay race where you have to run up and dive into a bowl of chocolate pudding covering gummy worms. Then you grab it and spit it out into another bowl. I'm not going to brag or anything, but MY TEAM WON!!! After that game we played "Junk Food Relay". It's the same as the food torture relay, but with more edible food. It was a great night once again and a neat development is in our worship. I was joined by Ben Guzik and Eric Kirby and the worship felt much more alive! It was great!!! The topic of the message was trusting in God no matter what the circumstances. I really feel that a lot of Christians and some churches believe that when things are going great that you are in God's will. But what happens when things go bad? Does that mean that you aren't in His will anymore? Sometimes that is the case, but more often than not it is God's way of shaping and molding us into the people that He wants us to be. Or He might use trials to develop the character trait that we are the most lacking in. Whatever the case may be, I wanted the teens to know that God is ALWAYS in control and that He has a plan for all of us. The sooner we trust in Him to get us through the hard times and give Him the glory in the good times, the quicker we will see what He has in store for us. Even better than that we have someone to go to when things are falling apart all around us. Someone that we know has us in the palm of His hand and won't give us any more than what we can handle!