Okay, I am officially rooting for the writer’s in Hollywood to get what they are asking for. The Office stopped production earlier this week. (gasp!) BTW, did you know Toby was a writer? I had no idea.

Here’s a quick overview on why the WGA is striking. Worth a look…

Deanna was MC’ing this moment at our church as students were getting up and sharing… she was barely able to hold it together as Autumn started to share.  I wanted to stand up and say “that’s my girl!” for all to hear, but I was too choked up myself!  A very proud moment for both of us…

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You can tell that this week is busy… there haven’t been too many blog posts. (smile) I’ve actually been joking around to some of my closest friends that after this weekend is over, I’ll be looking forward to “settling down” for the busyness of the holidays. October, going into the first couple weeks of November, have been pretty much non-stop activity at our house. Lots of traveling and youth activities filled the calendar. The family’s looking forward to a little bit of downtime after the youth-led service this weekend.

Youth-led Sunday is a service that I, and I know several others, look forward to every year. God does so many amazing things through the students of Destiny. I just love it when they get the chance to shine!

Here’s a treat for the faithful blog readers… I am posting a couple more of the videos that I edited this week specifically for the youth-led service. Here they are, for your preliminary viewing pleasure… First, the 2006-2007 Year in Review…

Second, the “Thank You” video, dedicated to our wonderful Team Elevate Volunteers; we have the best team in the world…

The Transformed Youth Convention video was already posted here, in another blog posted earlier this week.

Wow! How do you put it into words when your favorite youth convention – that you’ve already hyped up in years past as “the best” – overrides any other past experience and somehow goes to the next level in “awesomeness”?!

Seventeen of us went to the Transformed Youth Convention this weekend and seventeen of us came back completely fired up and ready to take over the world! God did some major re-working in a lot of our lives this weekend. I heard several amazing testimonies in our group gatherings, experienced God in crazy, loud, and exuberantly passionate worship times, and cried tears of joy with students as God ministered directly to us at the altar. Wow! What more can I say? I really don’t have the words… that seems to be happening a lot lately. (smile)

On a side note, pics from the Transformed Convention have been posted to our brand new Facebook Group. If you don’t have a Facebook account (it’s a social networking site), now is the time to join! It’s a great place (further removed from the negative ad content found on sites like MySpace) to connect with friends. You can also view our trip pics and get an embeddable slideshow for your personal web site or blog at Picasa. Here’s the video highlights on YouTube:

Sunday night was great, too. When the worship started, four of our teens picked up the flags and went at it – three of them were young men! Whoa! Then, Pastor Tani asks an “on fire student who just came back from convention” to lead in the opening prayer after the first song. There was a little hesitation, but then every student present (6 or 7 of them – two already on the worship team) walked up to the stage at the same time and proceeded to pray over the service. By that time, Deanna and I, and it looked like a lot of others in the place, were tearing up. They went back and worshipped on the stage, at the congas, and with the flags for the rest of the worship service.

Our Catalyst Discipleship time continued, too, with the second part of the “Starving Jesus” documentary. We were dealing with some audio issues so we had to watch the video ninja-movie-style (the audio wasn’t lined up with the video), but it didn’t detract from the powerful message.

All of this leads up to next week’s Youth-led Sunday morning service. I hope all of you will be there. We’ve been working on getting ready for a couple months now and God has really been doing a lot of transformation on us in the meanwhile. I’m really expecting God to use our students in a life-changing way this weekend. You definitely will not want to miss this!

I’m a fan of Jay Baker’s ministry at the Revolution Church and had been following the story as he dealt with, his mother, Tammy Faye’s death. Here’s a snippet and a video from the e-mail I received today:

I wanted to share with you a little about my mothers’ memorial service. It went extremely well despite the protesters that showed up. Many people came to pay tribute to her legacy. The memorial consisted of some great stories as well as some of her favorite songs sung by the church choir. In addition, I sung the Social Distortion song “When The Angels Sing” along with our very own Rev. Vince Anderson on piano and Revolution Charlotte pastor John Hughes on guitar. This song has special meaning to me as it was the first song I listened to after getting news of my mothers’ passing. It was a very emotional day for everyone with just as many laughs as there were tears; many thanks go out to my sister who orchestrated the whole thing. Jeremy Simmons, director of One Punk Under God, put together a montage for the memorial which we would like to share with all that could not attend.