The story of Joshua is amazing. God raised him up as an amazing leader among the people of Israel. Time after time, God spoke and Joshua followed. It didn't matter how crazy the command seemed, Joshua simply listened. By Joshua 10, there are several stories of God speaking to Joshua and working miracles through his leadership. It all leads up to this point where the king of Jerusalem (King Adoni-zedek...unfortunate name) rallies support to destroy an ally of Israel - the Gibeonites.After a long day of killing the armies that were attacking them, Joshua flips the script here and asks God a...

Mary and I had an unscripted moment of life that was so precious.I lifted her up while we were listening to "Better Together" by Jack Johnson in the dining room. We danced all around and laughed and she gave me kisses and we spun around in circles.Lord, help me to never forget these precious moments with my beautiful princess. I love being daddy. I love my little girl.

We just spent the morning at the theater. We loaded all of our sound, lighting, video and miscellaneous gear in today. We are so blessed by the fact that the theater has allowed us to store ALL of our stuff right there on property. This means that we will not have to use the trailer every week to load in and out. This is huge.One of the realities of church planting is that we will be carried on the backs of amazing people who will give of their time and energy to pull this off. The more that we can do to cut down on our set up and tear down time, the less we have to ask of our people and the...

The other day I was putting Max to bed and he kept on looking at the closet. He had such a peaceful, yet serious, look on his face. I asked him what he was thinking and this is what he said:Max: Daddy...I saw Jesus yesterday.Dad: You did...Where was he?M: Over there (pointing above the closet)D: What was he doing?M: Floating and watching me sleep.D: Jesus was watching you sleep and protecting you?M: Yep.D: Well if you see Jesus again will you tell him I said hi, cuz I've always wanted to see him!M: Yep.That's how the conversation went. I truly believe that Max saw Jesus that day. Even if he...

We got a one year lease agreement signed on our condo today! I am so happy to have this worked out...what a relief. The best part is that the family that is renting is also interested in buying. They are from out of state, so they want to rent for a while to see if they like the area. Praise God!!!

This is simply a teaser to let you know that later on this week I will be posting a link to our new website. I've been working on it with our graphic designer, Luke Bolin. You're not going to want to miss it...stay tuned 🙂

This is a huge week for us personally and as a church.I am in Orlando for one day to meet with a family about our condo. I will fly back to Charlotte and jump right into getting everything ready for our move into the theater on Sunday. We will be at the theater every morning this week before they open getting our plan together on how we will set up and tear down each week. Huge thanks to Doug Burns (audio), Kyle Russelburg (lighting) and Justin Leedy (video) for their help in designing the portable systems we will use week in and week out.I'm excited to jump in head first to this process!...

We had yet another great gathering this morning at The Branch Christian Academy. This was our final meeting at the school before moving into our new home, The Starlight Theater. I am so grateful for Pastor Derek Turner and all those at The Branch that have been so overwhelmingly supportive of us coming to town.I was blown away when I heard that Pastor Derek had offered to let us use their school for FREE to get our church started. When I finally met him a couple of weeks ago, he simply told me "I wish we had someone give me a place for free to meet when we first started. We figured it would...

I am excited about tomorrow morning at Hope. We are trying something new as Mike and I will be tag-teaming the message. I am going to be talking about unity and Mike will come up to carry on into the unity of communion. Tomorrow is a big day for us. We are getting to the point that we really need to start solidly identifying our team members that will be helping us each week to accomplish all that needs to be done.I find it so interesting that it is quite impossible to pull this off without the help of so many people. We need help with nursery, children's ministry, setting up all of our...

So Max and I drove right into a ditch today.We were driving our "new" riding lawn mower (circa 1985) that a friend of ours gave us and I got a little too close to the ditch on the corner of our yard. Sure enough, there we go, Max and Dad right into the ditch. Max effectively freaked out for a moment and then we had a HUGE laugh together over my amazing ability to create memories :-)I may not be the most handy man in the world, but boy do I love cutting the grass with my boy on my lap!