silo summitting

Crestview’s building campaign is reaching its halfway point, so yesterday we went to our new property to be able to think about how we should celebrate that and encourage people in the church to be faithful in their commitments. It was pretty cool! Every time I go to the property I forget how big 17.25 acres actually is.

My favorite part about this property are the silos. They are the only preexisting structure on the property (although apparently it used to be a part of an airport runway for farmers?). This summer we had Visioneering Studios come out and work with us on designing a master plan for this property. And, what do you know? They found a way to incorporate the silos into the master plan!

As we roamed around the property, I walked up to one of the silos, and it was so cool inside. There are vines covering the outside of the structure and a tree growing inside it; there was even a fire pit people had used somewhat recently. Then I looked up, and the ladder to the top was in great condition, so I climbed it!

Do you see me? The views up there were pretty sweet (I could see Manhattan hill)! This was a fun way to spend my Monday morning at work.

savannah, part 2

Finally finished going through pictures from Savannah… one month later. Here are the best of the rest.

By the way, a couple of posts ago I talked about an airplane conversation with someone I met while in route to Savannah. Well, I just told that story today at church for my communion meditation – reading 1 John 3:16 reminded me of it. It was pretty powerful! His willingness to sacrifice echoed Christ’s willingness to lay down his life, and in this passage, sacrifice is established as the definition of love.

Of course, few of us will be sacrificing our lives anytime soon, but how different would our communities be if we lived with a willingness to give up everything we are/have in order to spread Christ’s love?

savannah, part 1

Another trip to see my dad in Savannah! Here are some pics that I’ve gone through so far:

I’m only about halfway through the pics. For some reason editing is not very exciting to me! Therefore, I go through the process very slowly.

tulip festival

This weekend I went over to Wamego for the Tulip Festival. Lame name for a festival, and there were not very many tulips. Still, in spite of the harsh lighting (my fault for going in the early afternoon), I got some decent pics. I am loving my new camera so far!

thank god for spring

I am at the WorshipTogether conference in Kansas City right now and I am being seriously challenged in ways I don’t think the conference founders intended to happen. Maybe I’ll write more on it later. But for now, here’s some recent photos of a very long-awaited but very beautiful spring thus far.

rural decay 2

I like looking at these places. It makes me wonder what once went on in them.

These pictures were taken near Pillsbury Crossing and on Deep Creek Road.

rural decay

Taken on a county road north of Manhattan. Inspired by this set on Flickr.

p.s. New design to the blog. I liked the one-column look, but I think this incorporates a lot of that feel in the design scheme. What do you think?

material legacy

This evening I took my camera and went for a “destination:unknown” walk. Not long after, I ended up in Sunset Cemetery. I thought I was going to be taking some pictures of some unique typography (how lame does that sound!?) but the theme quickly turned towards material legacy.

By material legacy, I mean stuff that lasts forever (or for a long time) which can always be attributed to you and to your life. When you die, you don’t take much stuff with you to the next phase of life, and you don’t retain possession of anything except (a) what’s left in your coffin and (b) your gravesite; the rest gets passed down to friends and family. With this line of thinking in mind, I took a look at the material legacies people left of themselves as part of their final (earthly) resting places.

At first I thought the answer to this question would be easy. Everybody looks about the same after they are buried. How can someone’s life stand out to another with a generic tombstone? It’s impossible. There’s no individuality here after death, yet that is something we desperately crave today. Our generation would hate it if our burial grounds looked so bland! Those who buried them knew better, but for those who would pass in the years to come, their legacies were only defined by their dates, and maybe relatives’ names.

But as I made my way through the cemetery, I found others’ gravesites to be much more expressive in an attempt to establish legacy. Jobs, very short memoirs, hobbies, even faces appeared on some of the tombstones so a person could be remembered more clearly. Mr. Fortune made a little house and bed for him and his wife. And that tower was actually constructed as a memorial to a loved one. Wow! Still others were expressed much less clearly – namely, those who died in battles. Their gravestones were the least decorated of them all; with dateless crosses, their lives were defined by the sacrifices they made, not even the dates in which they lived.

After seeing the simplest and the most elaborate graves, though, I realized something I’ve heard many times before. A person’s legacy can’t be measured, nor can his life be understood, by viewing an incredible tomb or listening to a laundry list of accomplishments in a eulogy. That is material legacy, which fades quickly into irrelevancy with each passing generation. There’s so much more than that! One’s true earthly legacy is established by loving God, loving others, and helping others to become more like Christ.

p.s. I saw a couple of cemetery photos by my (not for much longer) roommate Nick, which probably influenced some of the shots I took today. No link because he posted them to a facebook album.

linear trail

Taken on Manhattan’s Linear Trail, between Manhattan Ave. and whatever street the movie theater is on. I’ve ridden the entire trail at one time or another, but have seldom taken my camera. Hopefully, more to come soon.

From a ministry perspective, this semester has gone really great. My part-time worship ministry has been great, and the church has definitely been growing. But from a college student’s perspective, it’s been really boring. Somehow, my times for interaction with other people have gone way down (a combination of a lot less time spent on campus and unexplained hesitancy to seek out times for community) and I haven’t been able to travel at all. I knew I’d be giving up weekends away from town once I started working at a church, and I miss that already (though of course, the pros outweigh the cons overall). Still, I’m really in the mood for a day trip to somewhere…

a picture is worth 250 words

It was 6:25 a.m., somewhere over North Carolina, and it was already a long morning.

Few can make such a claim so early in the day, but I could. After visiting my dad’s side of the family in Savannah, Georgia, my brother and I were headed home. In order to get home economically, we had to choose the “super red eye” flight. That’s right, a 5:30 takeoff, which meant coming to the airport by 4:30, which meant getting up at 3:30 to leave the house by 4:00. I couldn’t fall asleep until 2:00, so I was quite groggy and grumpy.

Everyone else appeared suspiciously awake for that “darkest before the dawn” time of day. But as the sun’s rays finally finished their long voyage across the Atlantic and onto our horizon – belatedly, it seemed – my perspective changed.

I saw the beauty of God’s creation as the red rays rose and became yellow, the black skies turned light blue, and the clouds formed a delicate canopy over the earth.

I appreciated my surroundings – the wonder of flying comfortably on a man-made machine 20,000 feet above ground, the joy displayed by the “morning people” flying with us, and the chance to spend some valuable, quality one-on-one time with my brother.

And in those fleeting moments labeled by the pilot as the “final approach,” I felt ready to take on the rest of the day.

We landed in Charlotte, ate one last breakfast together, and parted ways to catch our connecting flights home.

They say that a picture is worth 1,000 words. I’m saving my 1,000 word efforts for academic papers, but 250 can still tell someone a lot about a picture. My goal is to try this periodically as a creative writing exercise and a way to recount some of life’s moments in greater detail.

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It was 6:25 a.m., somewhere over North Carolina, and it was already a long morning.

Few can make such a claim so early in the day, but I could. After visiting my dad’s side of the family in Savannah, Georgia, my brother and I were headed home. In order to get home economically, we had to choose the “super red eye” flight. That’s right, a 5:30 takeoff, which meant coming to the airport by 4:30, which meant getting up at 3:30 to leave the house by 4:00. I couldn’t fall asleep until 2:00, so I was quite groggy and grumpy.

Everyone else appeared suspiciously awake for that “darkest before the dawn” time of day. But as the sun’s rays finally finished their long voyage across the Atlantic and onto our horizon – belatedly, it seemed – my perspective changed.

I saw the beauty of God’s creation as the red rays rose and became yellow, the black skies turned light blue, and the clouds formed a delicate canopy over the earth.

I appreciated my surroundings – the wonder of flying comfortably on a man-made machine 20,000 feet above ground, the joy displayed by the “morning people” flying with us, and the chance to spend some valuable, quality one-on-one time with my brother.

And in those fleeting moments labeled by the pilot as the “final approach,” I felt ready to take on the rest of the day.

We landed in Charlotte, ate one last breakfast together, and parted ways to catch our connecting flights home.

was 6:25 a.m., somewhere over North Carolina, and it was already a long morning.

Few can make such a claim so early in the day, but I could. After visiting my dad’s side of the family in Savannah, Georgia, my brother and I were headed home. In order to get home economically, we had to choose the “super red eye” flight. That’s right, a 5:30 takeoff, which meant coming to the airport by 4:30, which meant getting up at 3:30 to leave the house by 4:00. I couldn’t fall asleep until 2:00, so I was quite groggy and grumpy.

Everyone else appeared suspiciously awake for that “darkest before the dawn” time of day. But as the sun’s rays finally finished their long voyage across the Atlantic and onto our horizon – belatedly, it seemed – my perspective changed.

I saw the beauty of God’s creation as the red rays rose and became yellow, the black skies turned light blue, and the clouds formed a delicate canopy over the earth.

I appreciated my surroundings – the wonder of flying comfortably on a man-made machine 20,000 feet above ground, the joy displayed by the “morning people” flying with us, and the chance to spend some valuable, quality one-on-one time with my brother.

And in those fleeting moments labeled by the pilot as the “final approach,” I felt ready to take on the rest of the day.

We landed in Charlotte, ate one last breakfast together, and parted ways to catch our connecting flights home.