Recent Happenings...

Lately, I have been blessed with many opportunities to use my media skills. In addition to taking pictures for friends' engagements, weddings, and Christmas cards, I got to head up a big video project for the church, make a wedding slideshow, and I've been given several opportunities to speak to youth about how Godly themes show up in some of my favorite movies.

Last Wednesday night was the 8th annual Palm Valley Church Student Film Festival. Basically, many of the kids put together silly videos and we showed them on the big screen in the auditorium and gave out awards. Since Darius (our youth pastor) knows that I enjoy doing that sort of thing, he asked me to write a script and put together a video starring as many youth mentors as possible.

Now - I warned him ahead of time that if he put me in charge of a project like that, it was going to be very ambitious. But he's always good with giving people his vote of confidence and watching them run with it. SO, I wrote a spoof of David and Goliath and spent a couple of weeks wrangling up other leaders, making fake armor out of cardboard and tin foil, shooting and editing. The goal was to make everyone looks as ridiculous as possible and I believe we succeeded. The kids laughed really hard and the people who actually volunteered to act seemed to enjoy making fools out of themselves out in the public park where we video taped the whole thing...so all in all, I'd say it was a success.

I was also pleasantly surprised when my friend Anna Crawford, who let me take her engagement photos a few weeks back, called and asked if I would put together a video slideshow for her wedding. This is one thing I feel I'm particularly good at, so it was fun getting to work on that at the end of the week. I always feel bad when I can't attend people's weddings because they're far away - so I'm glad that I at least contributed a few signifiant items to her special day. =^)

Finally, I have several speaking engagements coming up. James and I were asked to deliver the main message at all 4 youth services the weekend of December 5th and 6th. Their Christmas series is going to be similar to their summer series in that we're pulling "God-themes" out of movies. James and I chose to base our talk on the newer version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas with Jim Carrey. I looove this movie and have enjoyed looking at it from a different perspective. The planning is coming along...but James and I think very differently so working together has been slow-going. I'm sure it will be great, we just need to continue developing our main idea. Right now we're talking about how to "Grow your Heart" (since the Grinch's heart grew three sizes after he realized the true meaning of Christmas).

I was also invited back to speak at InterVarsity at SIU on December 10th. For a long time I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to make it out there since we were already planning on doing a lot of traveling around the holidays. But knowing that we're leaving the country for the next 3 years and I don't know when I'll see these people next really motivated me to make it happen. Since that night is their final meeting before Christmas break, they said they would be willing to let me do a very similar message to the one I'm delivering at Palm Valley the weekend before. So that's a relief - only planning one and a half related messages instead of two completely different ones.

I suppose all that James and I have been doing for our youth group has kind of stuck out because we were named the Youth Mentors of the month at yesterday's meeting. =^D Feels good to know that all of our effort is appreciated, though that's not our main motivation. It's all for God's glory and the kid's benefit, not ours.