The following request is from Lloyd Owens, a pastor from Atlanta, on his therstblog.com.  

The fifth grade at John Hope Elementary is scheduled to go on a field trip next month, but
were not going to be able to because there are NO funds to rent the
buses for the kids. Yeah, times are that hard in GA education! SO, we
have stepped in and are wanting you to partner with us for both this
trip and an end of the year trip, but we want to get this one out of
the way first!

So, come give a helping hand
to a group of Fifth graders who need it. Exposure to life outside of
the finite circle, the four block radius of their neighborhood, is
important to a child. It is just as important as reading and writing,
and without it how will they ever know the full potential that they
have?

Help us to send these fifth graders on this one of two filed trips
planned for them this year. We have a small goal for this upcoming
field trip of 500.00 and need the monies by the end of the week. This
will cover the rental fee for the buses as well as a lunch option for
the kids, that is actually a surprise to both the kids and the
administration!! I just believe in BIG, not in just enough, my God is
an abundant God and I want these kids to know that we care!!!

__________________

YOU WILL BE MY WITNESSES IN JERUSALEM, JUDEA, SAMARIA, AND TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH A quick reflection from Brenda Salter McNiel at Catalyst 2008

____________
To be witnesses will require us to face the complexity of differences around us; To realize that not everyone is within our comfort zone… This part of Atlanta may be your Jerusalem, it may be your Judea, or it may be your Samaria.  That doesn't matter.  We are all called to it regardless.   I am honest enough to admit that I didn't even know what the Old Fourth Ward was before reading Pastor Lloyd's request, and I'd never heard of him.  I learned about him on Twitter from one of my acquaintances.  THAT DOESN'T MATTER! 

God wants to use me, and he wants to use you, to reach those we've never met and may never meet.  Will you join me?  They are halfway there, and I'm going to let God move through me today.  We're in for $10.  Will you let him use you today?  The clock is ticking.

Donate $10 to the Fifth Grade Field Trip.

Thank you. ]]> http://www.share5.org/2009/01/is-your-comfort-zone-ready-to-be-disrupted/feed/ 3 http://www.share5.org/2008/10/the-ups-and-downs-of-timing/ http://www.share5.org/2008/10/the-ups-and-downs-of-timing/#comments Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:00:21 +0000 Chad Houck http://66.147.240.185/~sharefiv/2008/10/the-ups-and-downs-of-timing/ As I write tonight, we are wrapping up day 2 of 3 in Atlanta GA for the Catalyst Leadership Conference.  Reflecting on the week, it seems that God is teaching me a thing or two about timing.  Check it out:

1.  We got into Atlanta on Tuesday night, and shortly after our arrival, while in the parking lot of our favorite (not available in Idaho) restaurant (Chick-Fil-a), we received a phone call.  It was our property manager back home asking if our house was still available for lease.  She has a tenant!  Good news- tenant.  Timing – we have 10 days to be out of our house once we get home.
2.  That makes us homeless as of the 24th, but that is ok, since our plan was to be in Phoenix by the 31st.
3.  Still up in the air on the November tour.  Waiting on confimation from the headlining band that we didn’t mess up the timing and miss the opportunity.  We’ll keep you posted.
4.  Tonight, we had a great meeting with some new friends, but it wasn’t with the full group we originally intended. The timing just didn’t work out, so the original plan had to be modified.  (Why is that seem to be becoming my theme song?)  end result:  The great night and discussions we ended up having wouldn’t have worked with a larger group.  I’m so glad things work out like that…
5.  We went to a meetup of bloggers at Catalyst, but since we had the other dinner already, we showed up like over an hour and a half late.  TIMING:  because we were late, we actually had more time to speak to the host, his wife, and others, since the main crowd had already headed out.

I continue to be amazed at how I always seem to have one plan or agenda, and as soon as a single wrinkle in the timeline appears, my "plan" falls to pieces.  God somehow manages to take the results and make them work out to my benefit.  How is that?  Someone (sorry, I wish I could remember who so I could credit you!) said to me today, "In the movie of my life, I tend to look at the individual still frame, but God sees the entire film strip".  He truely does have a perspective and an ability to, regardless of our own inadequacies, mistakes, or shortcomings, use our successes and our failures to work his purposes for our lives.

We have had a great week, and were fortunate to have Amy’s parents surprise us with a visit last Friday night, so they’ve been hanging out with us and their grandkids, which has actually let us get alot of things done.  Keeping priorities, however, we did decide to do a 3 day "RV Experiment" and went camping with them in their 5th wheel to give the kids an appetizer of "life on the road".  What a blast!

I leave tomorrow for a men’s retreat in the Idaho mountains for 3 days, so I will try to put a post or two about what God is doing/saying while I am there.  By the time I get back, it will only be 3 days to wheels up for Catalyst!

Blessings, and watch for blog updates from MAN CAMP!

Chad

We just finished the design for the new shirts we will be printing for Catalyst last night. (see image)  These will be printed in small quantities this week for a test run to see how people respond to them before we print a larger quantity for the tour with Wavorly in November. (see my post on The Difference a Year Makes)

So… the flights are booked, rental car reserved, and its off to see what God has in store for us this year.  We appreciate your prayers this next week as we continue discussions with those we will be meeting there.  Please also be praying for either a renter or buyer for our house, as we’d love to get the house situation put to bed by early October.  We have been packing and moving things into storage at my mom’s, as we will only have basically 3 weeks after returning from Catalyst before heading to Arizona to kick off the Wavorly tour.  That makes for a lot of loose ends to still tie up in a relatively short time!
 

I walked up to a coffee table run by a group doing reconciliation ministry through Rwandan coffee.  As a volunteer unpacked their story, God spoke to me for what would be the first of many times that week.  He said “you need to work with this ministry”.  I thanked her for the coffee, and left wondering what that would mean.

The first person I had an appointment with suggested we go catch Andy Stanley’s opening session.  We headed to the front row of section 110, right next to the speaker’s entry. The intro video for REVERB (the theme for 2007) began, and all the screens in the arena flashed the statement “one person can make a difference” followed by the question “What will you do?”  I had no way of knowing it then, but this theme would resonate in my head and my soul until it caused a change to take place.

Andy Stanley called me “the most powerful person in the room”, and told me how God wanted to put “extraordinary influence” in my hands.  He asked how I would leverage that influence for the sake of others.  There may have been 11,999 other people in the arena, but I know he was talking to me.  I returned to the same seat after the break, and Francis Chan said that if I’d only believe what God says about me, there was no limit in what God would do through me.  More importantly, he asked if I was in love with my Jesus, and if I was doing the task he had set apart for me to do.  I called my wife and told her something indescribable was going on, enough to make me oddly sick to my stomach.  I told her I couldn’t explain it, but knew God was up to something.  She promised to pray.   I went to the hotel.  I went to bed.

Craig Groeschel told me the next morning that his 6 children were praying that God would disturb me.  Little did he know that God had already answered their prayers in advance. Shane Claiborne talked about being a different kind of Christian, and my eyes filled with tears.  I knew God meant me.  There was Sunday Adelijah, Erwin McManus, and others.  God used each one of them over those two days to speak to me at my very core. I ended up listening to every speaker, recognizing my only appointment was a God appointment.  Finally, Rick Warren asked what we would do with what God had placed in our hands. I began to inventory exactly what that was. He spoke of influence once again, and the responsibility that comes with it.  He spoke of his trips to Africa, and my eyes filled with tears yet another time.

My wife and I had just returned from our first trip to Africa only three weeks prior to Catalyst, and the memories were still fresh on my heart.  In 2005, God called my wife and I to start a nonprofit to work with and support ministry projects and development in Africa.  We founded the nonprofit, but a few months later, I was offered a position with a company to work in Christian media.  We put our nonprofit on hold, and I took the position.  A trip to Africa had been in our plans as well, but I canceled it twice over the next two years because it created schedule conflicts with my “real” work.  I guess God felt Catalyst was a good time to realign my priorities.

I returned from Catalyst and I knew God had done something, but I wasn’t sure what.  I remembered the coffee people.  I remembered the messages.  I even looked through my notes and watched the DVD’s I bought.  Its only in looking back today, however, that I can fully see what Catalyst 2007 meant.

As I write this, I am sitting in my home office with my wife.  We just booked our flights to come (together) to Catalyst 2008.  I am no longer an executive with a media company, though they are still doing quite well.  I resigned from that post in June, leaving my comfortable salary, benefits, and stock options to return to the calling God placed in my heart three years ago.  We have put our house on the market and will soon be moving our family of four into an RV. (thanks to Shane Claiborne for that idea!) We’ll be starting a traveling ministry for the project we call Share5, kicked off October 31st by 3 week multi-state tour as the ministry partner for Christian Rock band Wavorly!

This year at Catalyst (where the theme is appropriately "Together"), you will find us serving coffee from the table of our now good friends and ministry partners – Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee.  Turns out we’ve been able to fund some microfinance loans for a few of their growers.  There is a meeting on this year’s agenda as well with a couple other nonprofits whose leaders just happened to be either attending or speaking at Catalyst.  The introductions have literally been happening over just the last few days as we realized everyone would be in Atlanta.  Our plan is to discuss how we could combine our Share5 concepts, Land of a Thousand Hills’ coffee growers, specially designed bicycles from another nonprofit, and microfinance processes from yet a fourth to create an efficient, manageable and sustainable ministry solution none of us could have done on our own.  We’ll be coming together to talk about working together.

One year from Reverb to Together.  God spoke to one person, me, in 2007. Now, a year later, I find myself in a position of influence, bringing ministries together to help address problems we can’t solve on our own.  You think the Holy Spirit is leading us this year?  I look forward to being together.  Save me a seat at the front of section 110, right next to the speaker’s entry.  I seem to recall that God’s anointing is extra heavy in that spot.

Chad Houck
Director, Co-Founder
WorldWins International/ Share5