Photoshoppin’ from William Hartz on Vimeo.

Teddy Bear Riot from William Hartz on Vimeo.

Ok, ok… here we go.

It’s actually been a really busy couple of weeks. I’ve had a lot of projects I’ve been working on – things I was kind of put in charge of – while our youth pastors were on summer vacation. I was doing a lot of teachings, preparing upcoming things, taking care of personal things…. the list goes on.

One of the things I’ve been working on is an upcoming series we’re doing in The Sanctuary called Life Hurts. God Heals. It’s made by Simply Youth Ministry and I’ve always heard really good things about it.

It’s a curriculum designed to help teenagers, or I suppose it would apply to anyone, confront and deal with the hurt and pain and disappointment that we all face in life and to find hope, healing, and life that only God can offer. Janelle originally bought the series a few months back and we’ve been sitting on it until now. Sarah and I started prepping things back in August, working on schedules, coming up with some overall ideas for things, etc. We decided that we wanted to start up some special LHGH small groups for the series (secretly hoping that some would continue in meeting after the series end as a way to help strengthen our small group program which has been struggling some. I’ve been trying to find potential leaders and host homes for the groups, being turned down by many. There are one or two beacons of hope remaining and I hope they follow through.

Nevertheless, LHGH has been taking up a lot of my time. The series starts in a few weeks – September 21 and will continue until early November. One of the last steps in my prep, as Jenn is taking more of it over now that she is back from vacation, is to get the promo cards printed. I’ve had them ready for about a week now, but needed some approval and double-checks on certain things for them. I’m actually about to send them out right now, as soon as I finish this post. And then, once I hear back from the remaining potential small group leaders, we should be all good to go. I’m excited about the series.

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The other thing that has been keeping me busy is work in the Liberty Center. I can’t give a time frame, but it seems, from pieces I’ve been gathering that we’re are really (really this time) in the home stretch to move in. So much so that we have directives that the theater must be 100% good to go within a week or two. (!)

And so, and those following me on the Twitter should already know this, we ordered a new Mackie TT24 diginal mixer and I’ve spent two nights there installing in and trying to learn how it works. The “live mixing” part is pretty straight forward, but we’ve been toying with it’s advanced features… programming and saving presets, matrixes, etc. There’s still some basic setup of the theater we need to do, but that has to wait until we officially move out of Dwyer House and bring the equipment over. At that point, we’d have to spend every minute we can (until it’s all done) integrating all the equipment and finalizing everything. This also excites me, and I can’t wait to finally have it all done and ready. It’s been a long journey.

Here’s a little video of when we first turned the thing on and our reactions to it. I know it’s total audio geekery, I know it will be boring to you, and I know that we are lame. But this is the kind of stuff that we enjoy, and I make no apologies.