| July 18, 2008 4:00 pm | to | July 19, 2008 3:00 pm |
$50 to go down the rapids. I bet David falls in. 
We’ll be kicking it in Knoxville, Tn. Bring your Gator colors! Giant Flower Makes Big Stink The Amorphophallus titanium is the world’s biggest and worst-smelling flower. The plant, also called titan arum, but popularly known as the corpse flower, blooms only a few times in its 40-year life span, and the bloom lasts for two and a half days at the most. During the first eight hours, the bloom emits a scent that has been variously described as similar to that of rotting eggs, a dead elephant, an outhouse in sweltering heat—and worse. But what is putrid to humans is a siren call to the carrion beetles that pollinate the flowers. They can smell the stench for miles. What is the lesson here? For one, don’t write your UTH NEWS article at 8am on Sunday morning. I forgot, please forgive. However, the other lesson is…sometimes things that are beautiful to some are not to others and vice versa. Celebrate individuality and look for the beauty in all things. Have a great week! Awesomeness Abounding! Lee Are we still looking for life on Mars? Apparently we are. I’m fascinated by this stuff, as humans continue to look for evidence of something else besides what we know on our own world. Let’s hope we find an intergalactic Exxon station and pronto! Check out this news article from the Associated Press, written this week by Alicia Chang: “Is the white stuff in the Martian soil ice or salt? That’s the question bedeviling scientists in the three weeks since the Phoenix Lander began digging into Mars’ North Pole region to study whether the arctic could be habitable. Shallow trenches excavated by the Lander’s backhoe-like robotic arm have turned up specks and at times even stripes of mysterious white material mixed in with the clumpy, reddish dirt. Phoenix merged two previously dug trenches over the weekend into a single pit measuring a little over a foot long and 3 inches deep. The new trench was excavated at the edge of a polygon-shaped pattern in the ground that may have been formed by the seasonal melting of underground ice. New photos showed the exposed bright substance present only in the top part of the trench, suggesting it’s not uniform throughout the excavation site. Phoenix will take images of the trench dubbed “Dodo-Goldilocks” over the next few days to record any changes. If it’s ice, scientists expect it to sublimate — or go from solid to gas, bypassing the liquid stage — when exposed to the sun because of the planet’s frigid temperatures and low atmospheric pressure. “We think it is ice. But again, until we can see it disappear … we’re not guaranteed yet,” mission scientist Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis said Monday. Even if it’s not ice, the discovery of salt would also be significant because it’s normally formed when water evaporates in the soil. Preliminary results from a bake-and-sniff experiment at low temperatures failed to turn up any trace of water or ice in the scoopful of soil that was delivered to the Lander’s test oven last week. Scientists planned to heat the soil again this week to up to 1,800 degrees, said William Boynton of the University of Arizona in Tucson.” Awesomeness Abounding! Lee
It will be a great afternoon and evening. Cost = $35 + food money, etc. for the day. Day = Thursday, 6/19 Time = Leave the church at 2pm and return at 11:30pm. What to bring = Stuff for hanging out at the park…blanket, frisbee, football, sunscreen, chair, cooler, etc. Here are the bands for the main stage = TobyMac (Awesome!) Lee
The theme of our trip was surrender. We looked at defining surrender and the different ways that it could look if we applied the idea of surrender to our lives. That is what we are going to continue to look at over the course of this summer. We will have many different opportunities to serve and surrender to the will of God. The verses we looked at in North Carolina and Virginia were 2 Corinthians 12:9 “ ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me…For when I am weak, then I am strong.” If this seems to go against human nature to you, you’d be right. It does. It usually doesn’t sit well with us to think about deliberately being weak. We usually come up with our own plans, our own agenda, our own methods, and then resort to asking God to bless those. So this will more than likely be a challenge for us this summer… learning how to surrender. Learning to give of ourselves to serve a greater purpose. Learning to be in the place where the words to this old hymn become powerfully alive in our lives: All to Jesus I surrender, all to Him I freely give. I will ever love and trust Him, in his presence daily live. I surrender all, I surrender all. All to Thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender all. Kristy
It really got me thinking about the body of Christ, how we help ourselves out and how we teach each other to act as Christ acted.By no means am I equating the actions and attitude of the McLean staff with the suffering of Christ. We were a slight pain…nowhere near the devil in the desert. But I know what it is like to work in professional ministry, to have to deal with unexpected situations, to have to fix problems that I didn’t cause and all in a day where I already have a full plate of responsibilities. I also know I would not have been as gracious and kind. I would act as expected: Annoyed, frustrated and impatient. These feelings, coming from the staff at McLean Baptist Church, are not evident to me this week.I believe this kind of patience and grace comes only from God. It is not typical human behavior. And if it is present in the staff, it must also be prevalent in the church body, as the two usually run hand in hand. I wish for all who experience the gift of grace this week to accept it and learn from it. We see a good model of a church willing to welcome strangers. I hope Smoke Rise will return the favor to someone else down the road. Awesomeness Abounding! Lee
Please call with any questions. Check out the links for all information. Lee = 678/481-0488 In Memory… Everyone longs to leave a legacy. Have you noticed that? We all are striving to ensure that once we are no longer here, someone will remember us. We will have had an effect on someone else that causes them to remember us long after we are no longer here. It’s interesting. This characteristic of human nature is as old as well, human beings are. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt inscribed their images onto walls and other things so that once they were gone, they would be remembered. People had portraits painted, statues erected, later photographs were taken, diaries and journals are read, scrapbooks are made, family trees are traced, and so many other means of remembering are taken up by people of all generations. We are creatures of memory. And so, on this holiday that celebrates remembering… let us take some time to remember those who fought and died for our freedom. 620,000 Americans died in the Civil war alone. Keep in mind that after the Civil War, we participated in so many other wars, and countless more lost their lives in the fight for freedom. Read the rest of this entry » As I spent my first week as a graduate, working hard to prepare for summer activities, it did not sink in until today (Saturday 5/24) that…I…was…done. No more school, as least at this level and at my current career plan. One cannot help but reflect on the years it took to get through and the effort that at times seemed so overwhelming. After this self reflection, I came to one conclusion. I’m not ready to be done! Read the rest of this entry » Congratulations seniors!! Today is your day- you made it! I’m sure by now you’ve all received Dr. Seuss’s “Oh the Places You’ll Go,” eaten lots of cake, shared pictures, reminisced on the beginnings of high school, said good-bye to the halls of your high school, and are dreaming about the future. You deserve it! Today, we want to honor your hard work and effort. We want you to know that you will always have a church home here. I was thinking back to my high school graduation and I remembered how I thought the summer wouldn’t go fast enough. Read the rest of this entry » Education is so very valuable. Whether it is received through the rigors of daily life and hard work or through the student/teacher classroom experience, it is what shapes us as people looking to reach God’s purpose in life. You have heard it a thousand times, yet even at 1001, it is still true: One never stops learning. Education begins at day 1 and continues until our last breath. If not, we run the risk of becoming stuck in our day to day routine. How boring that would be. Read the rest of this entry » Scientists make paper planes for space A spacecraft made of folded paper zooming through the skies may sound far-fetched, but Japanese scientists plan to launch paper planes from the International Space Station to see if they make it back to Earth. Read the rest of this entry »
Give Mom some ‘me’ time. Time alone to do nothing but what interests her is a great gift. If she likes to read, be sure she has the newest book of her choice available. If she wants to spend 3 hours in the bathroom taking a bubble bath without having to yell answers to questions through the door, give that too her. ‘Me time’ is anything she wants without all of her loved ones present. Read the rest of this entry » Acts 1:6-14
Thank you to all of you who filled out my Getting to Know You surveys. They were really fun to read, and needless to say, I feel as if I got to know you guys a little better. Therefore it’s only fair that I answer some of those things myself: Read the rest of this entry »
Youth helpers are required. For those who help, we will enjoy an activity on Wednesday after the event is over.
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Summertime is officially here!! As you may have noticed, quite a few of us were not here last week. That is because we were on the Music and Mission’s Trip. We loaded up the bus and headed to the small town of Ahoski, North Carolina. We worked on a community playground that meant a lot to the town. We pulled weeds, sealed the playground equipment, washed everything, and did a little landscaping. We got the opportunity to meet a whole bunch of wonderful people, and just in case you didn’t know, we got to see how much of a rock star Danny is! Everywhere we went, people were coming up to hug him and welcome him back. It was a truly great experience. Then we packed up and headed to McLean, VA which is right outside Washington D.C. Here, we split up and did some needed cleanup around the church and also went to a community clothes closet and cleaned up there. All in all, we really got a great chance to serve two different communities in a variety of ways.
The attitude of some people that exudes forgiveness, flexibility and kindness sometimes astounds me. It is Monday, June 2nd and the youth plus 6 adults (including myself) are in McLean, Virginia on the second leg of our music and mission trip. To make a long story short…in the first 6 hours of our visit, we broke two glass objects in the church. Both of them will be expensive to replace. Both of them will take some time to replace. It is a source of embarrassment for us that these accidents occurred. But placing myself in the shoes of those who have to fix our accidents and fix them in their own house, makes me wonder if I would have been as forgiving and easy going as the staff at McLean Baptist Church.Cam Edgar, Associate pastor and former Smoke Rise member, along with Dianne, the church administrator, have opened the doors wide for our youth to stay in their space, do some local mission work and see the sights of DC. We have been demanding by just being there, not to mention dealing with the accidents. Their graciousness is overwhelming and we cannot thank them enough. 
at Cedar Creek Swim & Racquet. More info to come.
Do something nice for your mother!
Breakfast and service.
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