For real this time.

We got an e-mail confirmation as well as a phone confirmation from real live people that our paperwork is finally passed through Pittsburgh. What does that mean?

It means that Corban will be coming home July 13th!!!!!!! It's real this time.

My new Big Red Ball

This won't be deep or philisophical. I'm just a silly excited youth worker.

The other day I was at K-mart buying supplies for a youth softball game. As I was walking down the toy aisles I saw a rack of weird rubber balls. Usually this is something I walk right by....but for some reason I stopped and grabbed one. I liked it. So I bought it. It's my new BIG RED BALL.

(picture at right slightly resembles my new ball but mine might be slightly smaller)

Tonight for the first time I got to use my BIG RED BALL at our Recreation program. HOLY COW!! This thing rocks!

So we used it instead our normal ball to play kickball. (to clarify normal ball is a playground ball like the won pictured to the left)The red ball was amazing. It's a little squishy.....and it's big.....so everyone could catch it. Girls who normally duck out of the way of a regular ball were catching it without any problems. One of the great the things about it though is that the air stem (where you would inflate it) weights the ball a little to one side. So when you roll it, it doesn't roll smoothly or straight. It kind of wobbles. This is also cool when kicked because it doesn't fly totally straight either. It's like a screwball.

I'm always a little worried about kids getting hurt. With our regular playground ball, it's never full inflated which takes some of the punch off the ball. However from first hand experience it's not fun to get hit with. Tonight a really big adult volunteer kicked the BIG RED BALL full force into my head from 7-8 feet away. I felt it, but it didn't knock me down or out. Everyone was worried, but it was great.

So at the end of the night someone threw the ball into the air and I bounced it off my head....the another kid bounced it off his head. A new game was born with my BIG RED BALL. Instantly a group of people wanted in on the action. We then tried to see how many times we could hit it off our heads. The ball is so flexible that no one was worried about headaches or whatever.

All in all this quite possibly the best $2.50 I've spent this week! I love my BIG RED BALL!

ROB BELL coming to Pittsburgh!!

Rob Bell is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Church and is featured in the first series of spiritual short films called NOOMA. He recently completed his first book titled Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Rob and his wife, Kristen, have two boys and live in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (I swiped that little bio from Zondervan's site....I added the links though)

If you haven't seen a Nooma video, or Rob live, you're missing out. Rob has an ability to take ideas and present them in simple amazing ways. He's wicked smart.

Rob is on a mini speaking tour this summer. He's coming to Pittsburgh. As of right now it's not looking like I"ll be able to get down to see him, but here's the info

Another year.....but not another number

So yesterday was my birthday. No big deal. Please don't congratulate me or anything. It's not necessary.

HOWEVER I realized yesterday afternoon that I turned my hockey jersey number! Yesterday I turned 31 which is my hockey number. I'm stoked. I know it's not a big deal, to most people, but to me it's a really cool deal. For a whole year, I'm REALLY 31!!!!!!!!

Contradiction

I just had a funny phone call. I'm still shaking my head.

The lady I talked is from a church about 1/2 hour away from here. Her church is putting on a special day in September. ANYWAY....as the conversation moved along she asked if we would be interested in providing something for the "service" after the childrens hour. I asked what exactly she was looking for.

Her answer is paraphrased as closely as my mind will allow me.
"Well, this is being put on by our church. We are using this as an outreach into the community. But we really don't want to give them a strong message. So, we're really just looking for some music. No real sermon or short message, just really some music that people will like. It's an outreach, but we don't want to make anyone feel very uncomfortable."

So funny. What is the church doing these days? What is our roll? Are we in the business of making people feel good about themselves? We want to reach out to people, but we don't want to really challenge their thinking or make them grow any. No, we'll make them believe that everything is fine, and I won't shake your world up, if you don't shake mine up either. What have we come to?

Get this Album!!!!

The other day we were driving somewhere.....doesn't matter....we turned on NPR. They were having an interview with a 17 yr. old girl named Sonya Kitchell, who has an album out. I was blown away by her maturity. Then she picked up her guitar and started playing. WOW. I turned to Marjorie and said, "we need to get this."

As soon as we got home I e-bayed it. (what else?) We got the CD the other day in the mail. It's all I've listened to since then. Phenominal. Sonya has a very diverse writing style. Blues, jazz roots, rock, lots of folk.

Don't walk, run to the closest CD store and buy this album. Actually, if you have a Starbucks around your house, next time you go get a coffee, look for it, they sell her album there too!

Cutest Kid in the World!!!!!

ENJOY!!! Just click for bigger pic.


























The cute picture I'm not putting up is him sitting on a little training potty. Everyone deserves some privacy!!!!!

Prayer update

Thought it might be important to update you all. We know lots of people are praying for us and for our son. We know that you're updating your churches, small groups, youth groups, etc.

Our agency finally got a real live human being on the phone at Immigration this week. Here's the scoop.

Immigration is opening an investigation on our case. They will be checking with the US Embassy in Addis Ababa. Their manual says the our sons birth certificate shouldn't have our names on it. However that may or may not be the case. They are also asking the Embassy to do another translation of some of the original documents. We're not sure what this will all actually mean. We're looking at around a month or so. More waiting. But theoretically at the end of this process we will know either what we need to do, or that he has finally been approved and is coming home.

Pray this process moves quickly, and that Marjorie and I stay sain while continuing to wait.

We got new pictures earlier this week.........I'll post some later.

SABRES are done

I'm a big hockey fan. I don't really have a favorite team. I just love the game. For the past couple months I've been listening to sports talk radio out of Buffalo. The more I listened, the more I started rooting for the Sabres.

They're just a cool team right now. Young, talented, and very selfless.

I'm sitting here in my office this morning trying hard to do work that has to be done by tomorrow morning.....and I'm a little bummed. I was really hoping they'd at least make the Stanley Cup Finals. That's too bad.

What's getting under my skin a little is not that Carolina isn't a talented team. They are. They played really well. BUT they couldn't sell out game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals! How can you not sell that game out? Buffalo sold out all 3 of their games in 12 minutes! GAME 7 I guess it's just hard when a team like that wins because they seem to take a little away from the purity of the game.

OK gotta get to work.