The Inside Out

As if I wasn’t already excited enough about the final season of LOST starting this week, I just finished reading Chris Seay’s book, The Gospel According to LOST. I always saw some relationship between the story lines of the television show and faith, but this book made me think about them in so much more depth! Chris is an awesome story teller and weaves our favorite characters from the show into our beloved stories from the Bible and I love that. Our culture needs things like LOST to engage them. And when we apply them to the Gospel, it just encourages understanding of stories in the Bible. I think churches need to use pop-culture more and be more applicable to this world…and our culture is into things like tv, movies, and music. People can understand God more if we use things that they already understand and it ends in a win-win when church and culture collide! (see Pop Goes the Church by Tim Stevens) Thank goodness there are people like Chris Seay who aren’t afraid to use things like a seriously cool television show to get people into the Word of God. I think that’s awesome.

Quick PS: It only took me 3 days to read this book so if you get on it, you can finish it before the last season starts on Tuesday! GET ON IT!

 

 

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255

I am so damaged by the scene from Haiti. It’s almost like that island is too small for so much damage and loss of life. I hope I am not the only one who didn’t realize how really horrible it was in Haiti, even before the earthquake. It’s like my eyes have been opened to another place that I really didn’t “see” before. I hope I am not the only one changed by this event. And I hope the aftershock of this horrible tragedy is that the whole world gets a reality check. And I hope that when we look back on this awful event all we see is amazing human stories of how one side of an island could go from poverty and destruction, all the way to new life, extreme rejuvenation and return to be so much better than it was before. God really has put us here, in such a time as this, to change this world. And this is an opportunity to do that.

Pray for Haiti.

Give to Haiti.

And let the aftershocks of what happened there stay in your heart and change the way we see places that need our help.

Today we have had an absolute blast with a VERY great idea for kids…or any family’s looking to be more thankful for this Thanksgiving season. For the full instructions go here: http://www.incourage.me/2009/11/give-thanks-a-family-project.html Each little pocket holds a page to write what each of us was thankful for each day that we count down till thanksgiving. My kids are so excited! I told them that they could pick one thing to be thankful for each day and we should try to not pick the same thing. Then, just like two adults they discussed who would get to pick Jesus today and who get to pick God (Noah did say he would have picked me, but God should come first.).

This is the finished project! The kids did so much of the work on this which makes it such a great project! They painted the board, decorated the whole thing with leaves and glued everything down! All I did was make the cards to fit in each pouch and cut out the letters on my wishblade! And all of it was under $16! All the fall stuff is on sale for almost 75% off at Michaels if you live in the Columbia area. I got the extra thick cardboard for $6 and that was the most expensive part. The little card holders are actually tiny gift bags that come 16 to a pack (so if you wanted just one color it would have been cheaper!). Seriously cheap fun and my kids are already beginning to think about what they are really thankful for…what could be better?