It’s that time of the year, one of my favorites as groups from our church and churches across the country are sending their people out on short-term mission trips.  My wife and I are once again going with our church to the Navajo Nation in Arizona and New Mexico this summer.  I will be updating with blogs and pictures as much as possible.  We have a large RV and trailer that left last night to make the drive, as well as multiple flights of people flying into Albuquerque till Friday afternoon.  The whole team minus the driving team will be in Albuquerque Friday night and then we will meetup with the drive team on Saturday in Window Rock, the capitol of the Navajo nation.

Please pray specifically for the health of each of the team members before and while they are travelling on Friday as well as protection for the drive team as they make the long drive.  Also pray specifically for Keith and his health and energy on this trip as he recently finished his chemo treatments for cancer. You’ll remember he found out about his cancer one year ago exactly on Friday after having to fly back early from last years trip thinking he had severe kidney stones.

It’s true I recently got the Apple iPad to use as another communication and connection device when away from the office or home.  While I’m still learning the different apps I’ll want to complete the different tasks I do, obviously one of the main things I want to easily access is my contacts and calendar.  I went through and added my account on the ipad using the GMail button as we use GApps.  It loaded email just fine but my calendar and contacts did not work.  After some further googleing and searching I found and did the following which allowed me to properly do a Google Apps sync on my iPad (instructions i found said Apple device so I assume this will work as well for iphones and touches though I only did on ipad). This is all found on Google’s site on a couple different pages but I want to make sure it was easily found the next time I needed it.

All instructions found on Google’s Support site:

Mail, Calendar, & Contacts:

Set Up Your Apple Device for Google Sync

If your business, school, or organization uses Google Apps, your administrator will first need to enable Google Sync before you can take advantage of this feature.

1. Open the Settings application on your device’s home screen.
2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
3. Tap Add Account….
4. Select Microsoft Exchange. Yes, choose this even if you are not using Exchange

Enter Account Info

5. In the Email field, enter your full Google Account email address. If you use an @googlemail.com address, you may see an “Unable to verify certificate” warning when you proceed to the next step.
6. Leave the Domain field blank.
7. Enter your full Google Account email address as the Username.
8. Enter your Google Account password as the Password.
9. Tap Next at the top of your screen.
9a. Choose Cancel if the Unable to Verify Certificate dialog appears.
10. When the new Server field appears, enter m.google.com.
11. Press Next at the top of your screen again.

12. Select the Google services (Mail, Calendar, and Contacts) you want to sync.

13. Unless you want to delete all the existing Contacts and Calendars on your phone, select the Keep on my iPhone option when prompted. This will also allow you to keep syncing with your computer via iTunes.

If you want to sync only the My Contacts group, you must choose to Delete Existing Contacts during the Google Sync install when prompted. If you choose to keep existing contacts, it will sync the contents of the “All Contacts” group instead. If there are no contacts on your phone, the latter will happen — the contents of your All Contacts group will be synced.

You’ve set up Google Sync! Synchronization will begin automatically if you have Push enabled on your device. You can also open the Mail, Calendar or Contacts app and wait a few seconds to start a sync.

Choosing Which Calendars to Sync

The latest blog i’ve done with our senior pastor for timsvlog.com.  Make sure to check it out and leave a nickname or a vote for the best hip-hop name for Tim.

It’s true we’ve done another video blog.  You can only imagine what’s on the table of mystery with such a clever title.  You’ll also hear a story about a guy who went to school late in life for one particular purpose, when you have a goal are you disciplined to reach it?

I told you i’d be sharing my video blogs that I do with Tim Passmore, the Pastor at Woodland. This weeks is Flashlight and as I tweeted the day of I was bossed around, called names, and nearly blinded in the making of this video, and for that reason alone you shouldn’t miss it!

One of the things I got our senior pastor to do was a video blog on a semi-regular basis.  The are ususally short, funny, and provide a unique spirtual viewpoint that helps reinforce a biblical truth.  I was in the very first one (which you can see here) and am now becoming a regular person to interact with Tim.  See the first of the latest videos below and keep up with me (twitter and facebook) and Tim too (twitter and facebook).

It’s quite easy to watch though for me understanding was a little difficult since it was in Spanish.  Next step is to find livestreamed audio to go with video.

1. Get the Skyfire browser for your phone, it allows you to watch most flash videos: http://get.skyfire.com/dl_android.php
2. Then head over to Univision for the livestream video of the games: http://futbol.univision.com/fifacopamundial/partidos-en-vivo?source

Enjoy the games and Go USA!

As  part of the creative team for Woodland, part of what I do is find creative elements to use in the services.  As this weekend is Valentine’s weekend I found this hilarious clip from the Skit Guys called Love Words, enjoy!

I was going through my twitter feed tonight when I came across a tweet that got me to go to Amazon.com and on their front page they were talking about their use of Frustration-Free Packaging. It’s not totally new but it was the first time i’ve actually read through the page, the one that got my attention:

What’s the difference between Certified Frustration-Free Packaging and traditional packaging?

The Certified Frustration-Free Package (on the left) is recyclable and comes without excess packaging materials such as hard plastic clamshell casings, plastic bindings, and wire ties. It’s designed to be opened without the use of a box cutter or knife and will protect your product just as well as traditional packaging (on the right).

Did you get that? They want to take away all the crap that gets in the way and allow you to get to what you really want. Sound familiar? In church it seems to be the same way many times there’s lots of crap we have to get through to get to what we are really searching for, the Grace and Love of our Savior.  But how many times have people not gotten to that because there’s so much crap in the way? They have to get through all the “church” to get to the Christ.  All the rules and regulations that people have created that actually stop people from the relationship.  When people are worried more about where to park, what to wear, or all the other things than being able to forget about all  these distractions and begin to on what God is trying to share with them that day.

So what are you doing to make it easier for people to reach Christ?