Kyle's Random

A few weeks ago we had a staff team building day at Pastor & Michele’s house.  Check out the brownies:

I came across this in the boys bathroom up in the Children’s area of the church campus the other day.  I thought it was so funny that I had to share it.

Really, I’m speechless.

Really love the new iPhone app for Facebook – especially because you can view pages and add them to the home page.

That reminds me.  If you haven’t already, you can become a “fan of” Faith Promise.

I recently started reading a book called Holiness by J. C. Ryle.  As soon as I heard of the book (I saw it mentioned in another blog’s comments), I knew that it was something I needed to read.

There were a couple of reasons in particular that it interested me:

1. With the nationwide push for churches to be cool and relevant, holiness seems to be often overlooked.
2. I really desire holiness in my life, but honestly, I fall so short of it even with my best intentions.

I’m only a few chapters into the book, but nearly every paragraph contains a powerful nugget of truth.  I’ll share a few of my favorite quotes just in case you’re interested.

Here’s one of my favorite lines: “A true Christian is one who has not only peace of conscience, but war within.  He may be known by his warfare as well as by his peace.”

Contrasting justification and sanctification: “Justification is a finished and complete work, and a man is perfectly justified the moment he believes.  Sanctification is an imperfect work, comparatively, and will never be perfected until we reach heaven.”

“Holiness is the habit of being of one mind with God… agreeing in [His] judgment, hating what He hates, loving what He loves, and measuring everything in this world by the standard of His Word.”

“I do not say for a moment that holiness shuts out the presence of indwelling sin.  No, far from it.  It is the greatest misery… that the old man is clogging all his movements and, as it were, trying to draw him back at every step he takes (Rom. 7:21).”

“In short, to talk of men being saved from the guilt of sin, without being at the same time saved from its dominion in their hearts, is to contradict the witness of all Scripture.”

Not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I personally hate websites that feature background music.  Don’t get me wrong – I love music.  There’s just an appropriate place for it, and it’s not on your website.

Here’s a scenario: you’ve finally gotten the kids to bed and you’re enjoying the quiet evening, browsing the Internet, when… BAM!  Your silence is shattered, and it sends you flying for the volume control.

At home is bad enough, but the office is even worse.  Especially if you have a shared office environment (like I do).

This very thing happened to me on Monday.  I was going to pick up dinner for Aaron Goin and his wife who have a newborn, and I was checking a local restaurant’s website for their phone number and menu.  I was looking things over and pretty much settled on chicken fajitas and the Pollo Supremo when suddenly and without warning… the office filled with mariachi music.

The good news is that everybody liked the song (the guy’s laughter is contagious), and we’ve adopted it as the Office of Awesome theme song.  We’ve started a tradition of playing it each day at 4 pm.

If you want to hear it, swing by the Office at 4 pm sometime, or you can listen to it here.

The Faith Promise Communications Team (Heather Burson & I) have been plotting and scheming about revamping the church letterhead, envelopes, and stuff for several months now, but it’s only been in the past few days that we’ve settled on a set of designs.  I personally think they’re awesome and a major upgrade, but I’m a little bit biased.

We should be finalizing the order by the end of this week, and there’s a chance that we might get some of it back in the next couple of weeks.

I love this kind of stuff!

Here’s a short video of my son and I doing a little wrestling.  Don’t miss his finishing move at the end.

These look interesting, but I’m afraid I would go insane after wearing these for more than 5 minutes.

Yeah, I start to wig out when my feet are crowded.

Today we launched our first Internet Campus with iPhone streaming, and it went great.  Josh was kind enough to get me some screen captures on his iPod Touch, and you can see them below.

The Faith Promise Internet Campus continues to make progress, and thanks to the help of Brad Roberts and the folks at Light Cast Media, we’ll be testing out streaming on the iPhone this Sunday at 10 & 11:45 am.  This is a brand new technology, and I’m glad we get to jump on board so early in the process.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can test things out by going to http://faithpromise.org/icampus.  If you go there on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you should just see a iPhone specific countdown page.  From there, you’ll be able to select whether you want the stream with or without sign language.  (Yes, you’ll be able to stream the sign language video on your iPhone.)  Even without an iPhone, you can see what it looks like here.

If everything goes well, in addition to the iPhone stream, we will also see substantial improvements with both our audio and video quality.  Matt James has helped me to set up a better encoding process, and Phil Bledsoe helped me to work out some kinks in the audio – providing the iCampus with a better range of sound.

What a blessing to work with such a great team!  Pray with me that our iCampus will continue to make an impact in the lives of people online.