Wendi and I decided to give our Christmas presents to each other early so that we can use them over Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Earlier this week I got my gift which is the Flip Ultra HD video camera.  I have recorded a few videos of the kids already, but am excited to get a lot more recorded.

So, what is on your wish list for Christmas?

This is what went down at Collision last night:

• Some of our middle school students led our worship time tonight.  They did a great job leading us in worship!
• Worship Set: My Savior My God, Mighty to Save, Glory to God Forever
• Main Text: Matthew 6:25-34
• Tonight we did something different by giving our students a blank sheet of paper and asked them to draw a picture for each point of the message.  It was a good way to change things up for our students, and I was able to see a lot of our students artwork after the message.
• Main Thought: To beat worry we need to give God our time, our faith, and our focus.

This is what I learned from my week off from Facebook.

The Good:

Feeling like I needed to check it every two minutes. I know you all do the same thing.  Wanting to check your facebook status every 30 minutes.  I have one friend who calls facebook internet crack and I think they may be right!

I didn’t miss all the requests. I get a number of requests everyday asking me to play this game, to take this quiz, or to take on this cause.  I usually just ignore most of those requests, so it was nice to not have to waste my time hitting ignore last week.

The Bad:

I missed big events in peoples lives. I have some friends who had a baby last week.  They posted all the details and the pictures on facebook.  I didn’t find out any of the details till someone mentioned they had seen the pictures on facebook.

I missed peoples birthdays. I always try to keep up with peoples birthdays, wish them a happy birthday on their wall, and pray for them on their birthday.  If your birthday was last week I’m sorry I missed it.

I send a lot of messages to people on facebook. I sometimes use facebook as an extra email address, so it was hard for me to not know if one of my friends had sent me a message and were waiting for a reply.

I keep up with a lot of our students in our student ministry. I always try to comment on students status updates, pictures, send them messages, or even chat with them over facebook.  I missed out on what was going on in their lives last week, and that was hard for me.

I enjoyed my time off from facebook, but have to say that this was the hardest to take time off from.

This is what I learned from my week off from twitter:

The Good:

I didn’t miss being marketed to. If you’ve been on twitter long enough you’ve picked up some followers who are only trying to market their product/service/etc.  I didn’t miss wasting my time reading all that stuff.

People don’t really care what little things I’m doing throughout the day. I realized that some of the things that I tweet during the day isn’t that interesting.  I don’t know why anyone would care where I’m going to eat, how cold it is outside, etc.  I will be cutting back on my twittering because of this, but mostly because of the next reason.

I was able to have fun with my family rather than tweeting what my family is doing. I found myself too caught up in telling people what I’m doing with my family and not enough time being with my family.  Someone recently told me, “Wherever you are be all there.”  I’m planning on trying to be all there more for my family

The Bad:

Breaking news about things that are going on in the world. There were some things that went on last week that I would have known about sooner because of twitter.

I missed out on some things that my friends were doing. I had some friends who had messaged me or mentioned me in a post and I missed what they had said.  I have some friends on twitter who I talk to regularly only on twitter.  So, I missed out on some hangout time with some friends in ministry.

I really did like my time off from twitter this past week, and I was able to learn a lot!

Last week I decided to take a week off from twitter, facebook, and blogging.  Every once in a while I have taken a day off from everything, but I have never taken a whole week off.  I was able to learn a lot about myself during this time off, and was able to focus on some really important projects I have coming up.  Anyway, over the next few days I will share the good and bad that I experienced by giving up on social media for a week.

This is what went down at Collision last night:

• Our high school student band led our worship time tonight.  They did a great job leading us in worship!
• Worship Set: Unchanging, Holy is the Lord, Lead me to the Cross, Everything Falls, Amazing Grace
  
• Some of our high school students shared about what they learned from their fall retreat last weekend.  It was great to hear how God spoke to them through their retreat speaker.
• Main Text: Matthew 14:22-33
• Pat did a great job sharing with our students about the importance of how God wants to use us to reach the marginalized people in our community.  He challenged our students to be willing to get uncomfortable, step out of the boat, and be open to whatever God leads them to do.

Here is the latest installment of the Fun Theory.

What else could we make more fun?

For all the band geeks out there…