Train up a child in the way he should go;
even when he is old he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6

We had the pleasure of re-connecting with our good friends and colleagues, Craig and Donna Tufts, this weekend. Craig is the pastor at Our Saviour Lutheran Church in Parksville, BC (just north of Nanaimo where we’re staying for now) and we joined them for worship this morning.

It was a little odd to be the only young family there, seeing as how we’re used to being surrounded by them. But the congregation was able to dote on the kids, which was fun. Ellia and Caitlin went up for the kids’ message, and then Ellia went out with Donna as she worked with the kids for their own age-appropriate time.

Their theme verse for this morning was from Psalm 100:1 – “Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth!” So they made and decorated tamborines. Ellia, being the big sister that she is, made an extra one for Caitlin and brought it back to her when they came back into the service. For the last song, Donna brought the 5 kids up to the front with their tamborines to accompany the songleaders.

It was a joy to see the girls up there helping to lead! Ellia began her worship leading career last summer at Redeemer’s VBS, so it’s Caitlin’s turn now to get into the act. Look out, church. There are more of us coming.

(I’ll also have to start taking my blog cues from Pastor Mark Beeson of Granger Community Church, who is an avid photographer as well and takes pics to accompany each post. This would have been a great one to have pic’d.)

(Click on the bottom-left button of the slideshow to go full-screen.)

Jonathan Michael Schutz

born

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 6:17 pm.

8 lbs 6 oz and 20 inches long

Pics will be up later tonight or tomorrow morning!

A lot of people ask, “What the heck is Twitter?” If you’ve not used Twitter before, it’s a tool for “micro-blogging”, where you send out updates kind of like on Facebook or myspace, but you have only 140 characters to do it. It’s being used for all kinds of things, and you might think “who cares what so-and-so is doing 24/7?” But rather than always answering their question “what are you doing?”, interesting Twitterers also answer the question “what has your attention right now?” I find links to interesting material online, thought-provoking questions, and more. You sign up to “follow” whoever you want, and when they post an update, you see it immediately.

So we’ll see how it goes. It’ll be an interesting experiment.