Decisions are hard sometimes.  Making the right decision can be even harder.  We face all sorts of decisions everyday that we don’t think twice about, and then some, both of consequence and otherwise.

Like for instance the decision I had yesterday when a friend of mine called me up and invited me to join him for the Celtics-Mavs game tonight, which according to this poll, is the 2nd and 3rd best team in the NBA right now.

The situation:  I have life group tonight (our small groups) and its at our house and I really believe in authentic community, and it’s italian dinner night and 100 other things on my mind.  The other end:  I love the Celtics (specifically the new Celtics).  Always have. Ever since the 80′s when my dad and I would sit in front of the TV and watch Larry, Robert,and Kevin dual away at Magic, Kareem, and James.

So what decision do I make?  I’ll tell you tomorrow, but I’ve learned this:  Some decisions don’t have a right and a wrong answer.  Some just are.  You go with what feels right based on your past experiences, present circumstances, and future hopes and dreams, and “hopefully” represents the direction you want your life to go.

In this case, both answers in different ways represent a good direction.

What would you do?

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3871696840639537951&hl=en]

So the process is evidently very important when it comes to churches.  I’m currently working on our “process” at Fellowship Church.  When speaking of the process I’m speaking of a particular way which we use to accomplish everything that we set out to do. 

So a process for us might be how we staff our lobby with greeters and cafe workers, or how we program our Sunday service, or where we want people to go into and out of, as far as environments at Fellowship.  The truth is, since I have difficulty with detail minded organization, this is very difficult for me so I have a team of people who are helping me with this.

Our focus (of course) is to lead people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ.  Our opening environment is the Sunday morning service.  But a success for us is to move unchurched people into life groups.  It is in this environment where people can grow (we hope)relationally in authentic community with God and with other people.

This is our process.  Moving people from introduction to relationships. 

So I have two questions I hope you can help me answer:

1.  What is your process (either in your life or in your church?)

2.  What do you do to make sure your process is working the way you want it to work?

Until next time…

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3492092041738913117&hl=en]

I am so sore, as you can see here.  Last night I had my first official basketball game in 14 years.  So let’s say the highlight of my game came in the 1st minute when Someone passed me the ball down loe and I backed my defender up, then shot a turn around over the 6’6″ giant who was guarding me. It went in.  2-0, our only lead in the game.

After that, there was not much to say, other than my team, otherwise known as the town of Paxton, was beaten 82-43, or something like that.

Afterwards, I was going to go get a Big Mac, but decided to call my wife and see what she was doing.  She didn’t answer, so I drove home and all the lights were out, so I concluded that she had gone away with her sister shopping or something.

So I went to play Volleyball.  I played until 9:00 pm, and won 3 games by a total score of 63-25.  Now that’s better.

This morning I woke up at 5:30 and my body begged me not to get up.  “Don’t do it”, it whispered in the annals of my mind.  But I did it, and at this point I’m glad i did, though I really am very sore.

It’s gonna be an amazing week my friends!  Let me know what you’re doing to make it eventful.

 Until next time…

I just saw Rambo on the big screen.  It was short, action packed, and Sylvester Stallone talked only a small amount. All of this led to a pretty good movie if you’re down with blood and violence.  If not…I’d go with “The Bucket List”.

Now, about yesterdays services at Fellowship.

*We started a new series called “The ATOM Bomb” that focuses on the four principles we use for each of our life groups. Here’s a link where I talked about our small groups.

*It snowed.

*I’m excited to see what the future of Fellowship Church’s small group community is going to look like. 

*Al and Amy busted out some great vocals in the music.

*I was told in one service on Sunday the nursery had double digits.  Babies coming left and right @ FC!

*I love talking about authentic community.  And the rest of this series is going to be great!

*I’m playing my first basketball game tonight.  Pray for me.  I’ll probably blog about it tomorrow, amidst the pain.

Until next time…

I’m posting this because of my friend and coworker for Christ, Jeff Campbell, and how I’ve wanted to say something like this for a long time, and could never put it this eloquently.  Winn Collier, a great writer (based on his blogs, but who also has a few books I’ve talked about in the past) wrote this, which you need to read.  Its on forwards that people send and how they play with the truth.  It reminds me of those stupid “chicken soup for the crac…I mean soul” stories.  Lies…all lies.  It’s amazing how easy it is to lie.

I have a little bit of a lot to blog about today so stay with me. 

I love my life group. I think that’s a great place to start.  This has been the strangest mix of small groups I’ve ever been apart of, and its been such a blast.  We have a few couples in there 40′s, a couples in there 30′s, a few couples in there 20′s, and several single people from their 20′s to the 40′s. 

I love the community, and appreciate their patience with me as far as all the changes that have gone on with Carie and I over the last 6 months.

This weekend at Fellowship Church, we’ll be beginning a new series called “The Atom Bomb.”  Frankly, I believe it’s one of the most important series we’ll be doing in 2008 for those of you who attend FC.  Our team is ready to present a great 4 week series, so get ready!

Also, we’ve started a new blog.  It only has two posts right now, but feel free to RSS it.  It’s fellowshipthis.wordpress.com and it will be dedicated to Fellowship Church stuff, and written by our lead tea only.  Check the first few out here.

Today’s Friday, which means yet another meeting with “the guys” at Finders Pub in West Boylston at noon.  I love this day!  For Friday at Finders, and more so, for date night.  But alas, tonight there will be no date night because of Family Fun Night, an event Carie has for Sonlight City, our elementary school age environment.

We did have date night on Wednesday.  We used a gift certificate and went to Ravezzi’s in Rutland.  It was amazing Italian food (of which I ate too much of), and a great environment (of which I would gladly go back again).  It’s a great place, and I hear that there is Ravezzi’s in Shrewsbury and Worcester too.  Check it out sometime.

Happy Birthday to Ian Ferguson!  A man has now made a mention on my blog for two days in a row now.  Here’s his.  You’ll notice he hasn’t blogged for several months, and my advice to you would be to comment and to inquire why.

This leads me to a question:  When’s your birthday? I’d love you to share that info with me, so write me back and let me know and I’ll put it into my giant database and call you on said day.

I feel a game of Monopoly coming on this weekend.  Anybody in?

Until next time…

Yesterday, as I mentioned here, I encountered a virus on my computer the likes of which I haven’t seen for a for about 5 years.  I was doing some google searching on “authentic community” in preparation for the next four weeks at Fellowship, and I came across a web site that looked like it “could” be useful, with a video on the front page that said I needed to access a “Flash player” to download it. 

I’ve downloaded a flash player or a shockwave player or an adobe reader lots of times and just figured this was another one of those times, which it was not, because when I pressed the button, it brought up a popup that said I had let viruses into my computer and “do I want to run a virus scan immediately?”  The immediate answer, by the way, should be no. But in a fit of reaction, I hit yes.  Hitting yes to this,and not the first pressed button, was indeed the thing that released the virus onto my computer. 

Earlier I was thinking of a good way this could be used as an object lesson or as a point to make about life, but really I just remember how ticked off I was that I could instantly make that decision and allow a crappy virus onto my own laptop, and how I wasted a whole morning trying to fix this mess I created. 

So no lesson here today, except to be careful kids, of the buttons you press on your computer. It could end up being more trouble than its worth.

Thanks to Ian and Tina by the way for their encouragement towards yesterdays blog and the whole virus thing.  I’m still waiting for Ian to blog something else.  His lasy entry was in November.

By the way, have you heard about Twitter.com?  Check it out.  Its a short blog site, and you can find me under the name martyjon.

Until next time…

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4696358197727649404&hl=en]

If you don’t know why you had off yesterday, or why everyone else had off yesterday, you need to read what MIchael said here.

This weekend I started reading another book written by a guy named Glenn Beck.  He’s a radio talk show host who’s somewhat conservative, yet he isn’t like Rush Limbaugh where the republicans can do no wrong and everyone else is just wrong.  And he’s incredibly funny.  Now he’s on CNN (Probably because Fox was kicking their butts and they thought,”Maybe there is more than one point of view out there.”

Anyways, enough of my sarcastic soapbox material:  In the book I’m reading, called “An Inconvenient Book”, Beck writes about a lot of different topics, politically and morally.  I’m not done reading the book, so I’ll save my judgment for later, but I did find one thing interesting as I was reading.

He starts off the book with the topic of global warming.  I’m not really that interested in the science of the first chapter but he has some interesting things to say.  Much of the stuff though either went over my head (which I didn’t like) or made fun of Al Gore (which I did like).  The next chapter he picked a funny subject to switch over to – Marriage.

I don’t think there was a method to the direction of the book because the third topic was Islam.  But anyways, in his topic of marriage he goes through a cycle which he says almost always leads to divorce, if not an unproductive marriage. That cycle is Marriage – Pornography – Adultery – Divorce. I found it fascinating that he tackled this subject in the midst of politics and other such controversial things.

In this section he also went through his life story.  And it wasn’t pretty.  He talks about what a scumbag he was, and how he straighteed his life out.  He talks about how he hurt his wife and kids and everyone around him and that he was “young , foolish, and weak.”  All in all, though he didn’t go into detail about his past (aside from the countless numbers of jokes about Jack Daniels I could have done without), he was very gracious to those in his family he had hurt the most.

It’s very encouraging that this political radio host tackled this issue of marriage.  It’s even more encouraging that he did so in the way he did it.  If you’re ever in Target, and need to wait for whoever is with you and may be shopping a bit longer than you’d like to stay there, go to the book section and pick up “An Inconvenient Book” and read chapter two. 

I’ll let you know about the other stuff.

Until next time…