behold my demise

so, a coworker who we'll just call KIM...gave me a bag of small round peppers.
BEHOLD


most of them were green at first, then they all turned a bright red. so last night i decided to cut them up, and Shauna used 3 of them in a stir fry.

long story short...i should have used gloves. these are some of the hottest peppers i have eaten...EVER. did i say ever? i think they are habaneros...but the flavor isn't familiar. JUST the presence of these little demons in the stir fry was too much for Shauna. i LOVE hot food, esp peppers, and it took me a while to get through the meal...which i did and loved it.

However, everything i touch now has pepper oil on it and burns...so don't shake my hand for a while...unless you want your skin to burn. i cant wear my contact lenses right now...my eyes felt like they were going to explode this morning when i tried to put in my contacts.

so, thank you Kim...i want more of these peppers...and some gloves. and hopefully, in a few days i can put my contacts in and be normal...until then, dont shake my hand...trust me.

we accept the love we think we deserve...

i look at several blogs every week. one of them is the postsecret blog developed by frank warren. the blog is definitely something to look at with discretion, and i, personally, find it intriguing. basically (short explanation is needed), the blog is nothing but people's volunteered anonymous secrets. it is a wonderful study of our culture.

that being said, i ran across a quote on there this week:
"we accept the love we think we deserve."

i tend to highly agree with this statement. not only do we struggle to forgive and love others, but when it comes to ourselves, it is very difficult. i also think this is a large factor in someone accepting the forgiveness and love of christ. how can we accept this forgiveness and love and it be a natural part of our development?

i would love to hear anyone's thoughts on this. i find it very interesting.
taking risks,
-n

chill out and be normal...

So, I lead teams of creative people at ALC, and honestly, it kind of surprises me. You see, I am, by nature, a very obsessive compulsive type of person. When you combine obsessive compulsiveness with creative personalities, explosions happen. However, I have this affinity for the creative, myself. So, in some ways, the two personalities meet in my strange strange world.

A great example of this is what happens every week at ALC when we merge art, creativity, music, and media production together. For instance, this week, we not only had a good music set, we had eight full videos, an interpretive dance (coordinated with a video), top 20 music in the background before and after, camera production of everything, words on a screen with moving video, and oh yeah, a message (great job btw this week, Dan). With all of this happening, the teams I lead make or break the production. We constantly remind ourselves of how God trusts and enables us to communicate no matter what job individuals on the team perform. But we also consistently pray that God will dominate the conversation every week in our Celebrations.

This week (today, Nov 9) was themed around the emotion/ issue of stress. GREAT. You know what happens when you put 20-30 team members on the production line when we talk about stress?
1. The lead of the music team battles illness (however, Rich did sound like Bob Seger so it was kinda cool)
2. People FORGET that they are on schedule and we are short several team members
3. I stress out
4. We have a major message element (dance), and it is now more stressful in the production because of missing team members and the lovely welcome of winter colds. AND the leader of the dance team gets married two days before so she (for WONDERFUL GREAT REASONS CONGRATS JENN!!!) couldn't be there. (AND YOU DID A GREAT JOB AS THE LEAD THIS WEEK< href="http://abundantlifechurch.us/main/podcasts.html">You can be directed here. It is usually uploaded and ready by Tuesday at the latest.

Take the risk,
n