Well it’s been a crazy summer.  Not that it has been bad or we have not enjoyed it, it has just been different than we expected it to be (like much in our life and walks with the Lord).  This summer we moved into our new house, that we LOVE, and are getting pretty settled.  It’s closer to Lees-McRae by about 10 minutes and in walking distance to ASU.  The Lord really provided this place for us, in many many ways.  We are just beginning to decorate the inside (and by we I mean Tracy, haha).

I have also finally gotten back into biking.  My doctors have been telling me for a while that I need to be exercising because of my arthritis.  Back when I lived in Fredericksburg Virginia myself and a good friend of mine, Matt, used to ride ALL the time.  It’s been great to get back into riding, I really love it.  Though it’s going to take me a while to get used to riding up HUGE roads…I’m used to just riding on fairly flat land.  Joshua has also liked that I am getting back into riding…he like putting on my riding clothes.  He loves his bike and now loves daddy’s bike.  I would love for him to get into riding when he gets older!!  We’ll see what the Lord has in store for Joshua.

We also took a trip to Virginia and Maryland to visit with some folks that have been supporting us in our ministry to college students.  Sadly we didn’t get to catch up with everyone we wanted to but we did get to see a lot of folks.  It was a great time relationally for us.  We spent a weekend in Newport News and went to our former church, By Grace Community Church, which was awesome!!  We went to Maryland to catch up with two families we know up there and the spend the rest of our time in Fredericksburg hanging out with the people there and got to go to New Life In Christ Church.  The trip lasted for about a week and a half.

I’m now preparing to head back out of town for InterVarsity’s area staff team meeting, Aug. 3-6.  The Western Carolinas Area Staff will be gathering for four days in Boone to prepare, plan and pray for the new academic year. Be praying for our meeting that we would have some rich times studying scripture together and that we would be able to discern the Lord’s leading for upcoming conferences and training events.  As soon as I come back from the area staff team meeting, the Greenberg’s are going on a vacation.  We are heading to the Outer Banks for a week at the beach.  Tracy and I are really looking forward to this trip.  It’s a much needed vacation for our family.

That’s it for now….Here’s a few picture from our trip to Virginia

Here is a video that highlights hip hop/rap as a medium to communicate the gospel.

“There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up. I fear some are becoming more cultural than Christian, and without a big Jesus who has authority and hates sin as revealed in the Bible, we will have less and less Christians, and more and more confused, spiritually self-righteous blogger critics of Christianity.”

Mark Driscoll

If you haven’t seen this book by John Piper I encourage you to check it out.  ”John Piper unfolds the story of Job in beautiful, compassionate poetry and revels in God’s sovereign and surprisingly joyful purposes in allowing exquisite suffering in the lives of his saints. An uplifting book, especially for those experiencing great suffering and loss.”  It contains moving illustrations by Christopher Koelle.  I’ve put some sample illustration below from the book.  Here is a link to the Desiring God bookstore if you want to order yourself a copy.  It’s also 50% right now!!

WOW, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted.  I’m sorry it’s been so long.  It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say, I actually have much to post about, both theologically and ministry wise.  It’s been a busy past month and obviously updating the blog is not on the top of my list. 

I’ll be heading to Virginia this weekend to speak at a church’s for their missions month.  So I plan to post of few things over the course of the weekend.

I’ll leave you with a video I saw a few weeks ago that I really enjoyed.

Jan. 16-17 we had our leadership retreat for the new semester.  Some people from our church opened up their home to allow 13 college students spend the night and hang out there for two days.  It was a really great time.  The students loved the retreat and getting to be at someone house was a big bonus. 

Here is a quick rundown of what the leadership retreat looked like.

Friday 

• some musical worship
• I gave a talk
• huge bon fire
• spent rest of night playing games and hanging out

Saturday

• some musical worship
• I gave a second talk
• talked about spring retreat and Urbana Mission Conference
• spent time in prayer
• did some planning for the semester

I post later today or tomorrow what I gave my talks on to give you an idea of what we went through.

The semester is about to begin…students are on there way back to the mountain and the weather is much cooler.  The past three week have I have been on winter break which means a change of pace for me.  I am often asked what I do when the students are gone, they are sometimes surprised when I list all the things I do over breaks.  So I figured I would put a post up talking about this past break. The students are gone so I am not meeting with them each day.  My schedule shifts to more administrative and planning for the upcoming semester.  This break was broken into two parts, vacation & work.

Vacation

This break I took off a week to go to Florida to visit my grandmother and Tracy’s grandmother.  Both of them have never met Joshua.  The main reason for the trip was my grandmothers 80th Birthday.  We then figured that we would go see Tracy’s grandmother who only lives a few hours away as well.  We had  a great time.  It was really good to see our families.  We then took a quick trip to Newport News, Va to visit a friend of our who is having her first child, Sam & Kristen Kang.  It was a real low key trip that we didn’t plan until the day we left Boone.  It was nice to see then and to be able to be there in person to support and care for them.  Vacation was very relaxing for Tracy and I and much needed as it’s been a pretty long past 6 months.

 Work

I am going to be speaking at the first two large group meetings this semester and needed to prepare and work on what I wanted to speak on for them.  I also have a leadership retreat for the leadership team at App State the first weekend of the semester.  I’ll be giving two talks to the students at that retreat and needed to prepare those talks as well.  So, in total I needed to work on four talks over break.  I also needed to do some fundraising support as I am still not at full budget for this year yet.  That entailed making phone calls and making a few visits to people in the community.  This past semester I took all the students I was discipling through Philemon.  This semester we are going to be jumping around in the Old Testament and New Testament a bit looking at several topics so I was doing some brainstorming and planning for the coming semester.  I also took some time to reflect on the past semester, thinking about things I could have done better and dreaming about the years to come (this including spending time in prayer).  I was able to spend some time “filling up my cup” more than usual by reading, scripture study, listening to sermons, and spending time with my pastor.

That pretty much sums up winter break for me.  I’m really looking forward to the upcoming semester and what God has in store.  I’m excited to be part of his work on the campuses of App State and Lees-McRae.