like a fire

I have seen some really awful stuff in my days here on the youth planet, but nothing has been worse than seeing people bore others with the Gospel. Especailly when it involves that little program Powerpoint. This really is a study of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. I have always tried to keep myself from performing these faux paus, but I have fallen victim to some of the problems. If you don’t understand what I am talking about yet, let me be explicit. If you use a different transition every slide, more than oneor two fonts in a presentation, more than 20 - 30 words on a single slide, more than 20 slides, etc. then you probably conform more to the ugly side of presentation. I’m not saying that you can’t sometimes break these unwritten rules, but generally speaking, you can’t.

Presentation Zen is a site dedicated to helping others present in an attractive way. It has great advice to the lay person and the professional and is a great place to just get ideas. The link is to a tip sheet of things to do and not to do. If you use any presntation software at all, you should check out this site. I would guarantee that you will get something out of this site, but I don’t really have anything to back up that guarantee, so I won’t.

Garr Reynolds/Presentations

Tracy speaks: An excerpt about Thirteen::.

This article about a movie from the perspective of a thriteen year old girl is staggering. Walt Mueller says, “viewing Thirteen is like having full access to a stack of teenage diaries and a hidden camera focused on the day-to-day comings and goings of young people.” WHy would you want to do that, you might ask? Well the premise of the story of Thirteen is that teens feel like no on eunderstands them and no one is listening. That pretty much sums up our world’s attitude toward the unlovely and unlovable. It also states the need for youth ministry more than any piece of scripture I have ever found.

What is it like being thirteen? Certainly it is different for all, but it is a time of change and innocence lost. Most of all, it is a time when teens start comparing themselves with others to see if they measure up or not. This places extreme pressure on them to fit in and be recognized. This desire can overcome everything they understand as right or wrong.

In youth ministry, we have to be able to respond to this desire and I think the better we are at responding to it, the more healthy or ministries will be.

A friend of mine saw this and I thought I misunderstood it until I visited the site. Apparently a protestant youth group in Germany is offering a calendar with pictures based off the more “erotic” events in the Bible. The site is quoted as saying, “There’s a whole range of biblical Scriptures simply bursting with eroticism,” said Stefan Wiest, the 32-year-old photographer who took the titillating pictures. What are these erotic stories, you might be wondering. Well, it’s not from the Song of Solomon as I expected. It is from supposedly erotic stories such as Delilah cutting Samson’s hair. That’s erotic? I don’t doubt that it could be, but I think they are reading a lot into the Bible. Another picture shows Eve offering an apple to Adam. Is that erotic? I don’t know what to think of this. One of the women who poses in garters and stockings said, “We wanted to represent the Bible in a different way and to interest young people.” That’s certainly true. I think the whole affair is summed up in one other statement though. They say, “Anyway, it doesn’t say anywhere in the Bible that you are forbidden to show yourself nude.” While this is true, there are other statements like “don’t cause your brother to stumble” that I might add to their thinking.

Link to Story at MSNBC.com
www.bibelkalender.de

I recently was at a retreat that hosted Keith Kneeshaw as a guest speaker. I was really blessed by his talks and especially with his ideas on who God calls fools. In Proverbs God says just as a dog returns to its own vomit, so a fool repeats folly. “So basically there are three kinds of people.” Keith told us. There is the person who never learns or the fool that returns to the things they do that are foolish. There are those of us who “live and learn.” These are the people who live life, see mistakes and then change their behavior to correct mistakes. But the remakable few are those who learn and live. They don’t have to make mistakes and then learn from them. They are told what is right and trust that it is right and learn that way of life. In doing this they learn before they live out those mistakes and effectually head them off.

What a great concept. Learn the way to do something first, then do it.

Blingo Launches New Search Engine…Well, Kind Of

This is the craziest thing I have seen in a while but apparently Blingo is a search engine that pays off. Everytime you search you get a chance to win somthing. What you might ask? Anything from Itunes gift certificates to a Sony PSP or an Apple Ipod. Check it out and become my friend. That doesn’t mean you really are my friend, it just means that I get what you win too. How can you resist?

my friends link