Life from Kessle Lane

Famous last words….words to remember and learn from….

Normal is boring.

Thats what Steph and I said after what we thought would be then end of a whirlwind couple of months. After all, my last update here was December 19,2009. Thats just about when the excitement started and what an end to what could be called the best and worst year of our lives.

After the 19th, Christmas seemed to just absolutely fly by. New Years came and went just as fast. Out with the old year in with the new. Last year at this time, Steph had a job but knew the end was in site. This year, she had no job still and seemingly no prospects.
Last year at this time I was learning about our the departure of our close friend and youth minister Matt Brewer leaving and no idea what I wanted to do or what was in store for me. I finally gave in to God and aswered the call to be in youth ministry praying and hoping that I finally had the answer to God’s plan for my life. This really went in to high gear around the time of Freeze Out at LMBC. The leadership had voted to make me intern youth minister. A non paid staff position but still a youth leadership position that would help me out in my future plans for youth ministry. My day job and future with my current employer became shaky because of the economy but I held on hoping the answer would come.

The end of 2009 and beginning of 2010 changed all of that for Steph and I.

It started out as expected. Steph and I continued to work with the youth in their production of Damascus Road, (which Steph wrote and I am incredibly proud of her) working toward the presentation date of Jan. 29. With Steph out of work she had plenty of time to work on it.
We got a letter that stated her unemployment was going into its final stage of benefits. Our help that God had provided for a year, was about to come to an end. We held strong knowing God would provide as He did all year. Whenever we had a need, He provided.

“Stand by we are clear for LAUNCH!”

All through 2009, I was hoping that God would show me where He wanted me to be. I had looked at several websites almost daily looking for youth minister positions all over the southeast. I applied at many and never heard from just about all of them….except one. Right after the first of the year, a church in TN, responded and asked me for more information. I quickly replied and a few days later, I had a rather lengthy phone call from their pastor asking me even MORE questions. 2 days later, we had another even more lengthy phone call and set up a time for a video conference with their search committee. The ball was rolling and I could see God all in this. The video conference was set up for the following Wednesday night.
Around this same time, Steph got the first interview that she had been given, in over a year. The very first one. God not only gave her the interview, but the position as well. She went straight out of the interview to her desk and went to work the very same day. She was back in the law field as a legal assistant / paralegal for a great Christian attorney in Douglasville.

Enter confusion…..Ok God, what are You doing here? You give me what appears to be a great youth pastor position in a rural church in TN and exactly what I have asked for in my prayers, but now You also answer Steph’s prayer? Boy God, when you say ask and you shall receive, You really mean that.

A lot of prayer went up those few days. What do you want us to do? Steph had a spark in her eye that I had not seen for a long time. Someone other than me, other than her family, valued her. She had a great job. Finally after a lot of prayer, we bowed out of the TN position praying that we made the right choice that God wanted us to make. God is not the God of confusion and he would not answer prayer in a confusion manner.

So Steph was back and work. I was getting more and more opportunities to teach and work with the youth. Damascus Road practice was in full swing and we knew that we had made the right choice.

Around the last week in January, Damascus Road was presented and it was absolutely amazing. The kids raise over $1600 for their summer mission trips. They put a lot of work into it but also had a lot of fun. We got to really grow closer to some of the kids and got to know a couple that we had not known at all. It was a huge success in every aspect possible.

So with Steph back at work, Damascus Road behind us, we thought life would return to some normalcy. Steph had even made the comment Normal is boring when I said well things will go back to normal now.

Boy were we ever wrong!

The day after Damascus Road was over, I get a call that no husband ever wants to get. “I’ve been in an accident.” No “I’m fine” or “its just a little fender bender” but “I’ve been in an accident.” Steph and another car had crossed paths at a bad intersection near our home. I found out where she was and my Ford got me there as fast as humanly possible even though it seemed like forever.

Once I was there, Steph was no where to be found. “Where’s my wife?” I yelled several times only to find out she was still in our Ridgeline. She was so sore from the impact she couldnt move. A wonderful nurse had asked her to stay in the vehicle until I arrived. She was concious and uncut. Airbags were everywhere and everything in the truck except Steph was scattered. The truck did not appear to be that bad but the other car was crushed. He had struck her on the right front corner in a car much bigger than our Honda. God definately had His angels around her that night because it could have been much worse than a few hours in an emergency room. She was sore and bruised. She could barely walk and had a brace on her wrist but I took her home that night.
Following 2 days of being really sore, she was back at work. She moved slow for a few days but she is a trooper and loved her new job. Our Honda was gone. Insurance said it was too expensive to repair due to airbag deployment. The truck we loved for four years and our first major purchase together, was gone. We now had the task of finding a new car that we could afford and that was safe.
The prayers went up for Steph and she got better every day. Last night, another prayer was answered. Not only did God provide us with a truck, (sorry Steph, I know, its a JEEP) but He gave us a car we could pay for without having a car payment.
What seemed like an incredible year gone bad, turned out to be all a part of God’s plan. We had asked for help for a year with our finances. Not only did God answer them in His time in His way, but greater than we expected. Steph has a great job. I still have my job. Now we have a car with just a few more miles than our Honda, but we don’t have a huge debt and a huge car payment looming over us.
God is still in the business of answering prayers. Prayers are not answered in our time or in our way, but in God’s timing and in God’s way. I told this to mom one time and she likes to remind me of it a lot.

I really can’t wait to see what He is going to do in 2010!

Dear God, thank You for answered prayers. We prayed for a year for Your help and You provided. I prayed on the way to the accident for 10 minutes, that seemed like an eternity, for Steph to be ok and You took care of her. We both prayed that You would show us the car You would provide and You did. Your faithfulness is incredible and is exactly as Your Word says.

Keith

Disciple Now 2009 has come and gone and what a weekend it was. Steph and I hosted the Jr. And Sr. High School girls and I ran the technical end of the worship services. I have not been this tired doing something I enjoyed this much in a long time…

However, it didn’t seem like it was going to start out that way at all…

Friday I had a plan. I had taken the day off from work so that I could get up, help Steph finish straightening up the house, do the slides for both nights on my Mac laptop, get up to church early and do lighting design and get ready to worship. Yea that was the plan and the world saw to throw that out the window almost immediately.
Sure I got up early enough to put the plan in motion and was actually helping to straighten the house, AS PLANNED, when the day crashed. I got a call from the office that the office email was not working. I went downstairs and made several attempts to restore service but without any success. I called our IT support and had them on the phone working on this issue for hours. To make a long story short, our domain hosting account was set up on a domain name we no longer used or even kept up with and it had expired. As of this email, it is still down until IT support can restore email in the morning. The good news is we found the problem. The bad news is that it took my plans and laughed at them.
Around lunch, I started to get out my laptop to do the slides with. Only one problem, no mouse or power supply. 2 things you really have to have to work on a laptop. After a feeble search, I gave up and went with desktop plan. So for the next hour, I worked on the slides for tonight to run on the desktop in the loft at church. Around 2 pm, after a lot of frustration, I grabbed the thumb drive with the slides on it and headed to LMBC.
Once at LMBC, it didnt get any better. I uploaded the slides and began to do lighting design. Only one problem. The lights were not communicating with the board. I reset the board, breakers and lights with once again, no success. I worked with them getting more and more frustrated all the time. Finally I realized that I was the one trying to fix everything and I couldn’t do that.

I walked away…

I went into one of the Sunday school rooms off to the side. “God I can’t fix this. Nothing is going right. Help me!”

Wrong prayer. Instead of show me the way, use me, take this from me, I said basically help me look good and solve this problem. I didnt realize that you could even pray a wrong prayer and maybe it wasn’t the wrong prayer, just the wrong WAY to pray.

I gave up and did the speaker slides for the evening just to take my mind off of it, or so I thought. I went over and over in my head what could be wrong while doing the speaker notes. Greg came up at 3:30 and said “Come on, go to the zone, walk away” which I did. The leaders for the night met for a short worship and communion. Danny and Derrick led worship for the leaders and it was EXACTLY what I needed. I needed to take my focus off of the details that I WAS TRYING TO FIX and let God run the show. We had about a 30 minute worship service and communion and I walked out of there giving all the technical problems to God.

Funny thing about God, it’s His church, His building and guess what else….it was His lights that weren’t working.

We got back to the loft and Greg and I began checking the lights. We found one light with WAAAAAY too many cords going to it. Once we removed some of the length of cords, BAM! The lights came ALIVE! It was like it was too far away from the power source. Like I was that night from God. I had lost my power source, just like I had lost it for my laptop and I had let too many technical details make me lose sight of the purpose of the weekend. Once I realized this, I CAME ALIVE just like those lights.

The band Unlucky Tree led worship. These guys really rocked the place like it hasn’t been in a while. It was loud and a lot of bass with cranked up guitars and very loud drumbeats. The kids, and I, loved it! They ripped the roof off the place and then toned it down and led us right into the very presence of God Himself.

The theme for the weekend was about being “Infested” and how we need to be “Infectious” with the Love of God. Steve brought a great message on Friday night but Friday night couldn’t come close to Saturday night.

By Saturday afternoon, I had found my power supply for the laptop and had the scripts ready to roll using my Mac laptop for better video quality (Friday night we had one video completely lock up, man do I love my Macs!) All of the technical problems had gone away once I gave it to God. The band stepped up the worship service and really knocked it out of the park. They played a version of Amazing Grace like it was on steroids mixed with I Am Free that really started us off with a bang. Two of their original songs really brought us into worship once again.

Steve’s message for the night was on 3 types of people:
Dead
Defeated
Dangerous
It really hit close to home with me. I struggle daily with how much I want to be used by God and how much I want to be in youth ministry but I am stuck in my dead end go now where not even close to legitimate job that I am in. I fall head over heels in the defeated category hanging on to my problems and sin. He then talked about being dangerous. He used the example of Lazerous and how the Jews wanted to kill him after Jesus had brought him back from the dead. Because of him many Jews were following Jesus. That is what Christ wants us all to be. Someone who is focused on Him and lives for him daily. Someone who will be faced with attacks all the time because they do so much for the kingdom that the world wants to take them out. As he put it, people don’t shoot missles at cruise ships, they shoot them at battleships. I don’t want to be a cruise ship, I want to be a battleship. I want to be DANGEROUS….
Today, was the final day of DNow with Unlucky Tree leading the 11 AM service in worship and Greg teaching about Infested.
Today we got to see the results of the weekend when one of the youth, came forward and gave her life to Christ.
And that made THE ENTIRE WEEKEND all worth it…

Dear God,
Thank you for this great weekend that we had just being with our youth and worshiping you God. I love it when I get so caught up in worship that I forget what I am doing in the booth. I love it that I can be in the back of the room, singing right along with the band, tears flowing down, raising one hand in praise to You, and using the other to advance the slides so others can worship also. You gave me this opportunity and I am so blessed in all that You have done for me. As long as You give me breath, I will serve You. Just please don’t let us do the pepper or coke games again…..the end result was pretty gross….

Keith