Eclipse trip, August 2008

It took me a while to get this video put together. This is from a trip we took at the beginning of August out to Gansu province to see a full solar eclipse. You can check out our google map (sidebar-->) to see where we went. I hope you like the video.

My Week Off

The office was closed last week because of the October 1st holiday, which is the Chinese national day. So in case anyone ever asks you if they have the 4th of July in China, you can say yes, but they celebrate it in October.
I spent the first part of the week being sick. Not so awesome.
I also painted a bit. I may post some pictures at some point.
The interesting thing about being in youth ministry is vacations and weekends are often the best time to hang out with youth. So on Monday I shot a Youth Camp promo video with some of the kids, and on Friday I went to ReGen (youth group). We had planned on canceling ReGen for the week, but the kids still wanted to meet. I told them that we could meet, but they would have to take care off everything.
They did, and it was really great. A couple of them lead worship, my sister Anna was sort of the MC for the night, and one of the guys gave the message. In the course of the evening Anna also sort of let it slip that she would like to have a niece or nephew (and then she looked right at Kara). It was a funny moment.
Anyway it's really cool to see the kids take more and more ownership of their youth group. We don't have many youth leaders this year, but I think it's turning out to be a good thing because it allows the students to take more leadership.