Life on Snow Hill

After long preparation and a lot of hard work by everyone involved, we had a great Christmas program/play at church last night.  We had a good crowd with several visitors – I hope that it will be something they’ll remember and that God can work in their hearts through what was done.

I was getting pretty nervous leading up to the whole thing.  I did have a part, but I was more nervous for everyone else than I was for myself.  Everybody did an awesome job, though, and I was glad to be a part of it at all.

I don’t have any pictures myself (I was too busy doing curtains and running from one side of the building to the other), but I do know some were taken.  If I’m able to get my hands on some, I’ll post them here.  My parents also had our camcorder, so when I’m able to get the video off it I’ll try to post some clips here.

Becky and I were given gifts by the church as a whole and by a few individuals.  For that we are truly grateful and humbled.  We have worked hard on the program, but we’ve totally enjoyed it.  We thank God for the opportunity and ability to be able to have done something like this.  During all of it, getting anything was truly the last thing on our minds.  I don’t know how better to express our gratitude and thankfulness for the thoughtfulness and caring we’ve been shown.  That the program and all that it included was a success is all that we had been praying and hoping for.  We just hope that even though the program is over, it will continue to bless and/or help those who witnessed it.

It’s been nearly two weeks since I’ve blogged about anything. After thinking about it for nearly two weeks, I’m still not sure if it’s because I’ve been lazy, or if it’s because I haven’t had anything to write about. Honestly it’s probably a little of both.

Christmas is coming up really soon, so Becky and I (mostly Becky) have been doing as much Christmas shopping as we can. I’ve noticed that as I get older, Christmas gets here faster and faster. When I was a kid, it took forever to get here! Becky and I are also heading up the Christmas play at church this year, so that has been an added, but welcome challenge as well. We’ve really enjoyed working with the youth and hope to be able to do more with them in the future.

I guess all of the Christmas preparations are what has been keeping us busy, but we’re also having to take care of all of the normal day-to-day stuff at the same time. Last year I think I let all of that turn me into sort of a Scrooge – just ask Becky..she’ll be honest with you. I’m determined not to let that happen this year though. I’m trying to stay full of Christmas cheer. See?!

Something else that’s cool is that this entire post has been written on my iPhone. This is the best gadget I’ve ever owned, and probably the most useful as well.

“What on earth is a CMS??” you may ask…  CMS stands for Content Management System.  In other words, it’s a fancy, easy way to update, add and edit content on a web site.

First, let me start by explaining why I’m looking at CMS’ in the first place.  (Well, besides the fact that I’m a geek and I like that kinda stuff anyway.)  The church that Becky and I recently joined has asked me to try to do some work on the church’s web site.  The existing one isn’t bad, but some of it is a little outdated and could do with a little bit of a facelift.

So, I set out on the easy (yeah, right!) task of selecting the best CMS for the job.  My first idea was to use WordPress to do the job.  Done deal, right?  Not quite…  It wouldn’t quite handle some of the pieces of the site the way I’d have liked for it to.  So I said goodbye to WordPress for this particular job.

I tried Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, dotCMS, PHP-Nuke, MODx, Plone, and probably 2 or 3 others that I can’t remember.  Now, don’t get me wrong, all of these systems are great systems.  Some of them were just simply too complicated for me to figure out and to be able to administer efficiently.  Others either didn’t have the modules I needed to be able to do certain things, or the modules I did find didn’t work as promised.

Enter Exponent CMS.  I skipped over this one on my first run through possible choices, although I’m not entirely sure why.  Probably mostly because I’d never heard of it.  Anyway, this one has all of the trinkets I needed to be able to include everything the old system has, and more:

• Standard HTML pages are supported (You don’t know how hard that is to come by in some systems)
• An Events Calendar is included
• Blogging ability is included (Great for, say, new prayer requests, etc.  It posts the new ones at the top automatically rather than having to edit an entire page by hand.)
• A News mechanism for site-wide news feeds.
• Forum software is included for an interactive area of the site – great for a Bible Question area on the old site.

So I’m excited about finally finding the software that is a perfect fit for this site.  I was asked about a week ago if I was working on the site.  I replied that I was, but not a word about how much difficulty I was having with choosing some good software.  Now that I’ve found it, migrating content has been a fairly easy task.  We’ll see how the rest of it goes.

I mentioned in a post a little while back that the church we were attending had disbanded.  Becky and I have been visiting with a couple of churches for a while, seeking God’s will in where we ought to go.

This is sort of a funny story, but before we pulled out of the parking lot we knew that the Lord wasn’t leading us to the other church we were visiting.  We were pretty sure already, but we went one last time to be positive.  When I started up the truck to pull out of the parking lot, I heard a strange noise from where I thought was the fuel tank area (also where the fuel pump is).  As I drove down the road it started acting strange.  It finally died on me on dead man’s curve just outside of Harriman.  Maybe that was the Lord telling me, “See?  I already told you that wasn’t where you should go.”  Ok, that was a joke, but it’s funny how coincidental it was.  That fuel pump was going bad before then I believe, I just ignored the signs.

Anyway, back to the purpose of this post.  The Lord led us to Fellowship Baptist Church in Mossy Grove (near Wartburg).  We exclusively visited there for a few more weeks, wanting to be sure of God’s will and not do anything in haste.  Once we were sure, we met with the pastor and he talked to us for a little while about how the church operates, what they believe, etc.

He opened the doors to the church last Sunday, the 24th, and Becky and I went forward, along with my parents.  We gave our testimonies, and we were received into the church.

We’re thankful that God has given us direction, and He is already blessing us for following Him.