Category: gifts

Uncle Charlie and Jesus’ Love

digitalstorytelling, gifts, God, Jesus, kids, worship

This past Sunday, Shelly and I both taught Sunday School lessons at our church in Charlotte, North Carolina: Caldwell Presbyterian Church. I taught the adult lesson for our “ACE Sunday School” class on the second chapter of Acts, and Shelly taught a lesson on the theme, “Love and Serve Your Neighbor.” In the course of finding resources for her kids’ lesson, Shelly found VBG (“Valued By God”) and Carlitos, a plush monkey that is part of the Christian outreach ministry of “Uncle Charlie.” Shelly and her partner in Children’s Ministries at Westminster Presbyterian Church In Lubbock, Texas at the time, Leslie Roach, discovered “Uncle Charlie” back in the early 2000s, and brought him to our church to lead worship for everyone.

“Valued by God – Uncle Charlie” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

There are SO many wonderful songs by Uncle Charlie! After we moved from Lubbock to Oklahoma City in 2006, Shelly was able to help bring Uncle Charlie, Rachel Sanchez, and their praise band to our new church, First Presbyterian of Edmond, again through Children’s Ministries and her work with Kristin Leard, who was the Director of Kids Ministries at the time and served with her husband, David Leard, who was one of our Associate Pastors. I’m sure everyone who has ever heard Uncle Charlie sing remembers his song, “The Fruit of the Spirit,” and may even be able to sing the words from memory! I know I can. That song and many more videos are featured in their VBG smartphone app. Many are also previewed on the official Uncle Charlie YouTube channel.

I LOVE so many songs by Uncle Charlie and Rachel Sanchez. “Sanctuary” is definitely another one of my favorites. Their “Making Melodies” music album was one of our favorites to play in the car and at home as our kids were growing up.

Driving to Sunday School and church this past weekend, Shelly played the 14 minute video, “Life is Like a Puzzle.” Uncle Charlie is not only a master storyteller, but also a gifted communicator with kids as well as adults. Those gifts really shine through in this video, which “connected the dots” for me as I wanted to understand what happened to Uncle Charlie soon after he came to our church in Edmond, Oklahoma in the late 2000s. The video, “My Miracle Story” which Uncle Charlie recorded in 2015, 7 years after he had a near-fatal car accident that changed the course of his life forever, also provides more background about these dramatic as well as miraculous events.

“Life is Like a Puzzle – Uncle Charlie” (CC BY 2.0) by Wesley Fryer

I am very thankful, personally, for the life, ministry, and creative love shared by Uncle Charlie and his team over the years. This past weekend, Shelly and I recorded a new episode of our audio podcast together, “Wes and Shelly Share,” about fall traditions and memories.

As a result of related Facebook discussions, Shelly shared about Uncle Charlie and his amazing VBG app. This “good news” is too good to keep to myself, so I decided to share this blog post today before school!

I hope you will take some time to download the VBG smartphone app and listen to some of the songs and videos by Uncle Charlie. There are lots of bad things going on in our world, but as Christians we have GOOD NEWS to share EVERY DAY. Uncle Charlie reminds me and reminds us that GOD LOVES US, God is real, God values YOU, and God still acts in MIRACULOUS ways through both the good times and bad times of our lives.

Praise God, and thank God for Uncle Charlie!

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Giving Sacrificially

gifts, God, priorities, sketchnotes

This is my sketchnote and narrated sketchnote about “Giving Sacrificially,” a sermon by Jen Howat on the November 22nd, 2015 at First Presbyterian Church in Edmond, Oklahoma. Jen preached on verses from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew.

“As Jesus looked up, he saw the rich putting their gifts into the temple treasury. He also saw a poor widow put in two very small copper coins. “Truly I tell you,” he said, “this poor widow has put in more than all the others. All these people gave their gifts out of their wealth; but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.””
‭‭Luke‬ ‭21:1-4‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Also:

““Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
‭‭Matthew‬ ‭6:19-21‬ ‭NIV‬‬

 

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Energized to Tell God’s Story Through Creative Expression

digitalstorytelling, evangelism, gifts, technology

Yesterday on Saturday, August 22, 2015, Shelly and I participated in a wonderful morning workshop at Frontline Church in Oklahoma City. Our friend Kori Hall was one of the organizers of this unique event, called “Story: The Six Days In Between.” The description of the event on the Frontline blog was:

A conversation and workshop
For artists and creatives
Telling the story
Of gospel collision
With human lives

I’m not sure exactly how many people attended, but I’d guess around 75. The morning started off with musician and worship leader, Charlie Hall, explaining the background and vision for the Story Workshop.

I hadn’t pre-planned doing this, but I realized shortly after the workshop started it might be good to broadcast and archive some of the event via Periscope. Last week I learned about and registered with Katch, which is a free cloud service that archives Periscope video broadcasts so they remain online and archived longer than 24 hours. I didn’t Periscope Charlie’s initial comments, so I’ll attempt to paraphrase.

Basically, some of the leaders within Frontline Church have been planning this Story Workshop as a way to encourage networking and collaboration among artistic creatives within their community as well as the larger Oklahoma City metro area. We all have different gifts from God, and I liked what Charlie had to say about how the things we make with our gifts do NOT define who we are… yet that is a tendency we all have as human beings. Charlie encouraged us to lay our gifts at the feet of Christ, and seek to find ways to collaborate together to creatively share SNAPSHOTS of life as followers of Christ to a world in need of the hope which God offers. I love Frontline’s core mission: “To love God, to love others, and to push back darkness.” The Story Workshop is a way to invite and empower a diverse group of creative individuals to intentionally focus on telling God’s story in our community through a variety of voices and mediums.

I started to Periscope the opening session as filmmaker and videographer Derek Watson (of Lampstand Media in OKC) shared about the power of story and introduced a short video collaboration he created with Kori. I later cross-posted this video to YouTube.

I hope they will post that video online at some point, and if they do I’ll definitely update this post and insert it. It was powerful. Kori is an amazing “spoken word” poet and performer, and the video featured prose she wrote and shared.

After the introductory session, we each selected a different breakout session. The choices were Film, Visual Art, Performance Art, Writing, Photography, and Music. I was going to attend Film, but Shelly asked if I was going to writing… she was planning to stay for film. She’s helped her 3rd and 4th graders at Positive Tomorrows the past two years create and share some wonderful videos on their classroom YouTube channel,  and wanted to get some ideas for elevating their digital storytelling projects. Since I’m continuing to help organize the local “Write Well, Sell Well Conference” for writers in Oklahoma City, it did make sense for me to join the writer’s breakout… and I’m very glad I did.

We had a great turnout of over twenty people for the writing group, and we started (similar to a WordPress OKC Meetup) by having everyone briefly share about themselves and their current writing project(s) or interests.

I have worked on a variety of Christian-related media projects and websites the past 9 years, since we moved to Oklahoma, but this month I got the idea of naming the book project I’ve been wanting to write “Digital Witness for Jesus Christ.” I registered this domain on August 8th (dw4jc.com) and decided the corresponding hashtag (#dw4jc) would be both unique and good since it’s so short. I brainstormed and wrote down about seven book chapter titles, and then set aside this project to work on later.

During Saturday’s Story Workshop, I was struck (again) by how important it is for writers to have both catalysts for writing and accountability partners. I often create because of deadlines: Conferences at which I present or deadlines which are related to upcoming professional development events.

During our writing time in the breakout session, I uploaded and configured WordPress on the dw4jc.com website, but didn’t have time to write much content on it.

Inspired by the Story Workshop, last night I spent about five hours installing CommentPress, creating the chapter pages for the “Digital Witness for Jesus Christ” book project, and writing some content on each of the pages so early visitors could get a partial look into the focus and ideas of the project.

Four years ago when I was teaching one day per week at the University of North Texas and writing the first three chapters of my dissertation, I thought of the “3 Minutes About Jesus” project and registered a corresponding domain. In the succeeding years, I recorded and shared several videos on the site… but it wasn’t something that “took off” or I spent lots of time trying to develop.

When I thought of the dw4jc.com domain earlier this month, I also thought it would be good to use the October 23-24, Write Well, Sell Well Conference as a deadline to get an initial version of the book finished to share in printed form. This may seem like an unrealistic deadline, but it’s similar to timelines I’ve followed previously for other books I’ve self-published. I’m not positive if I’ll make that deadline, but the Story Workshop certainly served as a catalyst for me to take significant steps in this writing project.

Here’s the Katch archived Periscope video of the Story Workshop closing session with Charlie Hall. It’s also cross-posted to YouTube.

Like Kori, I’m looking forward to seeing where this collaboration is going to take us!

Here’s a Storify archive of all the tweets sharing during yesterday’s workshop.

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Do Not Covet or Be Greedy

focus, gifts, priorities, service

These are notes from Mateen Elass‘ sermon on Sunday, January 25, 2015, at First Presbyterian Church in Edmond, Oklahoma. Our focus verse today is Luke 12:13-21.

Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” (‭Luke‬ ‭12‬:‭15‬ NIV)

“Contentment means seeking to live simply so we can use our extra resources for the sake of God’s kingdom.”

Book recommendation: Culture Shift: The Battle for the Moral Heart of America by Dr. R. Albert Mohler

We are stewards of our possessions not owners, everything comes from God and we are called to use our gifts and “things” to further God’s kingdom.

Money can easily become our idol.

The goal of a disciple of Jesus is to have nothing in our daily lives which supplants our love of Jesus Christ.

Jim Elliott: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”

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Distinguishing Between the Spirits

gifts, God

These were some of the verses we considered today in our church service:

Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit a message of wisdom, to another a message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines. (1 Corinthians 12:7-11 NIV)

The part that stood out to me is “distinguishing between spirits.” This verse acknowledges that there are both holy and worldly “spirits” which speak to us in our lives. In our “modern” world, we often discount, ignore, or deny the reality of these spirits and the power they can wield in our lives depending on how we respond to them. This is a mistake. Spiritual gifts are real, and so are “messages from the spirits.”

I pray God would give me discernment to “distinguish between the spirits” which I encounter in my life. I pray God would open my heart and mind to both recognize and heed the voice of His Holy Spirit.

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Be Patient

gifts, prayer

God calls us to be patient and wait on Him to fulfill the promises He has made. Patience is a virtue, and we rarely hear it extolled in the worldly messages which surround us. In the book of James we read:

Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains. You too, be patient and stand firm, because the Lord’s coming is near. Don’t grumble against one another, brothers and sisters, or you will be judged. The Judge is standing at the door! (James 5:7-9 NIV)

Dear God, help me be patient and have faith in your promises. I see the fullfillment of so much around me and in my life, and I am thankful. I pray that your patience would fill my heart, and rather than look to tomorrow, I would rise up to meet the challenges and opportunities of this day with you by my side.

Amen.

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Love, Hospitality and Spiritual Gifts

focus, gifts, God, service

These words from the apostle Peter resonate with me deeply this morning:

Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love covers a multitude of sins. Cheerfully share your home with those who need a meal or a place to stay. God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you. Do you have the gift of helping others? Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies. Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ. All glory and power to him forever and ever! Amen. (1 Peter 4:8-11 NLT)

There is ancient power in the act of breaking bread together. I sincerely believe we are called to show hospitality to others in many ways, including invitations we give to others to eat in our homes, with our families. The experience of dining with another family is something that is not easily forgotten, and the relationships which deepen as a result can serve God in many ways. The basis of learning is experience, and when we get together, we experience life together in an intimate way.

The message that we should use the gifts we have received to serve others and to serve God also resonates with me. It is both empowering and intimidating to be challenged to speak as if speaking the very words of God. What a responsibility this is! But also, what an opportunity it is to show others the love of Christ not only through the words we speak but perhaps even more clearly, in the actions of service which we do together for the glory of God.

Let them know we are Christians by our love. Praise God for this wonderful day and the gifts which He will unwrap for all of us in it, as we are called together according to his purpose.

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Waiting With Hope, Encouraging Each Other& Rebuking Evil

discipleship, gifts

Jesus calls us to wait for His return with hope, encouraging each other and rebuking evil with the authority He gives us through His Father and our Heavenly Father, God.

For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good. These, then, are the things you should teach. Encourage and rebuke with all authority. Do not let anyone despise you. (Titus 2:11-15 NIV)

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Filled with the Spirit

discipleship, gifts, God

We are called to KEEP being filled by the Holy Spirit:

Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:15-20 NIV)

Amazing things happen when people are controlled by the Holy Spirit. These were verses and ideas we heard today watching the video, “Who Is In Control?” Which is part of the DVD series “When God’s Spirit Moves” by Jim Cymbala.

Here is the promo trailer video for this series. We are using is for studies in our Friday morning men’s group. Check it out, this is excellent Biblical teaching.

Prayer always precedes revival. When God’s people pray, there is always a fresh supply filling God’s people with His Spirit and power.

You can’t be taught to be filled by God’s Holy Spirit. We can only be pointed to the throne of God, the throne of grace.

Jim thinks we have an over-emphasis on teaching in our churches today. The enemy has opposed prayer meetings in our communities for a reason. We need to gather in prayer and invite God to fill us with His Spirit.

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