Here’s my daughter, Ash, communicating with great clarity what’s on her mind:
Jun
07
2010
Category : Uncategorized
I grew up during the Hair Metal craze and loved all the Poisons, Warrants, and Strypers of the world.
As a drummer myself and cutting my teeth on the same bands, I found a kindred spirit in this video. Where we differ is I retired my inner Ricki Rockett in ’91 and he’s still keeping his very much alive.
Enjoy!
May
30
2010
Category : Uncategorized
I have a sense that words like “branding” and technology are not the main topics discussed at their weekly staff meetings:
May
26
2010
This is so jacked up:
May
18
2010
Category : Uncategorized
Yesterday I was in our weekly Team Huddle meeting here at Grace Point and the question came up: “Could one experience God without having a relationship with Him?”.
As you can imagine, this question opened up a 45 minute debate.
In our weekly meetings, it seems these types of questions come up often. So much so, that we now bring a wooden spoon to our meetings and pass it to the one who we believe is “Stirring The Pot.”
So, for this post, I’m holding my virtual wooden spoon and would love to hear your thoughts and perspectives on this question.
Jan
28
2010
Category : Uncategorized
“So take a new grip with your tired hands and strengthen your weak knees.13 Mark out a straight path for your feet so that those who are weak and lame will not fall but become strong.” Hebrews 12:12
The doctor had just left my room in the ER after giving me the update on my condition. I was told that if my heart didn’t respond to the current treatment, they were going to move forward to Plan B by stopping my heart and restarting it.
Right.
Now, I may not be the sharpest toothpick in the box but my thinking was “A jacked-up heartbeat is better than NO heartbeat.” I mean, what was my guarantee that they would be able to start it back up again? Just sayin’.
My own mortality was never more in focus than it was in those following moments in the ER.
I think my story is a lot like Jonah’s. Jonah found himself having to cozy up in the digestive tract of a fish for him to realize he wasn’t fulfilling God’s purpose and mission for his life.
It’s hard to run from God when you’re in a fish.
It’s also hard to run from God when you’re on a stretcher in the ER with your heart doing flip-flops.
As I laid there, all I could do was monitor the monitors hooked up to me. The machines were keeping perfect score and were giving me and the doctors a play-by-play with their beeps, digital readouts and line graphs. I really needed some help from the bench because at that moment I was losing the game in a bad way.
I’ve since noticed that when there’s a real crisis, there is normally a strong sense of helplessness and fear accompanying that crisis for those who haven’t been fulfilling God’s mission and purpose for their lives.
What I mean is, we really like being in charge until we’re unable to be in charge. It’s a scary feeling to think God won’t take our collect call when we need bailing out.
I decided to make the call anyway and take my chances on Him answering.
I prayed out “God, if you will give me a second chance, I will do whatever it is you put me on this planet to do…Amen.”
No longer my will but Yours, God.
Within moments it was as if someone hit the ‘reset button’ on my heart. My condition went from grave to great within an instant.
I knew God heard me. I knew that I was given the 2nd chance I was asking for.
The machines stopped beeping. The line graphs and numbers slowly left the high triple digit territory and in the 4th quarter, God won the game for me.
In the days and weeks to come, I was very weakened by this episode.
It took me close to a year to fully recover from this event. With that said, any hope of keeping our music career going officially died.
Sarah and I saw our musical career take a drastic nose-dive and I became a professional cubical dweller taking orders for hair care products.
I suspected God’s big plans weren’t for me to fill orders for conditioner and hair dye so I began to sincerely seek God to discover what He really spared my life to accomplish and fulfill. Of course, the idea of being in ministry never crossed my mind.
One evening, while driving home with Sarah and Dave, we were on Hwy 16 going through Pipe Creek. There was this church to our right that had just let out their youth group. There were students running around in the front acting like, well, kids.
I looked at that scene and made the passing comment to Sarah: “You could not pay me enough to be a youth minister, ugh!”.
I meant that too.
Question: Are there limits you’re setting when it comes to doing God’s will?
Are there conditions attached to your obedience and willingness to follow Him?
MONDAY: “Why I’m a Student Minister: Part 4″
Jan
27
2010
Category : Uncategorized
I know I was supposed to post Part 3 of “Why I’m a Student Pastor” but today is my last Wednesday at KSR and I’m crazy busy.
So, to keep you entertained…enjoy!
Jan
26
2010
I knew I was supposed to be a pastor at a very young age.
Heck, I’m even named after a pastor. I was named after Dr. David Cavin, the pastor of the High Street Baptist Church in Springfield, MO where my dad was attending Baptist Bible College.
Decades before I would present my first formal sermon in front of those 8 students at the First Baptist Church of Pipe Creek, if you hit the “rewind” button about 30 years, you’d find me preaching my face off while standing in the big picture window of our living room.
My mom said that I would preach powerfully as if every couch and coffee table in that room was about to gasp its last breath and sink into the eternal flames.
I would yell from the top of my lungs “Jesus!” “da-Bibol!” “da Cross!”
I remember the feeling I got from preaching in that window and enjoyed the occasional “Amen” that came from my mom in the other room.
I was really just emulating my dad. As I grew older, my wish to be “like my dad” began to wane as I noticed the words he shot from the pulpit to the congregation were inconsistent with home life. The divide between his platform and real life only widened further into my teens.
My dad then sealed the deal by ending his 26 year ministry by finding a younger woman to “make time” with and he walked away from church, away from my mom, and away from us.
By the time I was 17 years old, I jumped the church band wagon too and it wouldn’t find me coming back until over a decade later.
During my 20′s, I enjoyed my status as a backslider. I wasn’t doing anything bad but seemed to have developed an unnatural love for sleeping in on Sunday mornings.
In 1995 I got married to my wife Sarah, and had our first son, Dave Jr. a year later. Around that same time, we started a band called Lady Jane Grey. We made beautiful music together. We sold a good chunk of CD’s, traveled the country, and paid our bills playing music.
We did this until the bottom fell out.
There were really high hopes attached to our 2nd CD “Love and the Search For…”. We had fired our long time manager and decided to promote and push the new project ourselves. We got investors and then got the best studio musicians money could buy. I worked tirelessly by writing the majority of the music on this CD so, needless to say, my heart was heavily wrapped up in this project.
The time came for us to release our much anticipated 2nd project and to put it simply, it flopped.
That sucker flopped so bad that we couldn’t give the CD’s away. Our playing opportunities dried up and I was forced to get a ‘real job’ working for a place called Princess Beauty Supply, in San Antonio.
Can I just say that I had to swallow a lot of masculine pride to work at a place called Princess. So, I went from “living the dream” to taking hair color orders over the phone.
On January 31st, 2002, I woke up with major heart problems. This was a first for me.
After driving an hour to the emergency room, I was told I was experiencing “tachycardia/a fibrillation”. In other words, my heart rate was in the 160′s, blood pressure through the roof and the chambers of my heart weren’t pushing the blood out like they were supposed to. It was then explained that I was running a high risk of a heart attack or stroke or developing a blood clot which would most likely be fatal.
Say what?!
The problem was, everything they tried didn’t work. After 4 hours in this condition, the doctor walked in and said “We’re going to give you 15 more minutes. If our current treatment doesn’t work, we’re going to put the paddles to ya.” Translation: “We’re going to stop your heart and start that bad boy again.”
Once the doctor walked out, I realized I may not see the sun set on that day. I began to think about my marriage and all the things it wasn’t. I began to think how I wouldn’t be the one to raise my son. I realized that if I died that day, I would’ve left this planet without fulfilling my purpose for being here.
Question: If you were to die today, would you be able to say that you fulfilled God’s plans for your life?
If not, what needs to change in your life where you can live out your God-given purpose?
Tomorrow: “Why I’m a Student Pastor: Part 3″
Jan
24
2010
I’m a Student Pastor.
Five years ago, on June 1st, 2004, I walked into the First Baptist Church of Pipe Creek, TX as their new youth minister and it only took me 33 years to get there.
In Pipe Creek proper, the sign next to the Post Office reads “pop. 87″ and the one yellow flashing light on Texas Hwy 16 is what connects that little Baptist church to the Mini Mart across the way. Inside that country church were 8 students who weren’t looking for a slick, power point using, faux hawk having, Rob Bell glasses wearing, youth guy. The only expectation those 8 students had for their youth minister was that he spend time with them in the hopes that he’d love them so that they could love him back.
That simple expectation was good for me because it was the only part of the gig I felt I might able to pull off successfully.
When I stepped through the door of that church in 2004, I walked in having no experience, no education, no confidence and absolutely no idea what I was going to do once I was there.
I’ve since learned that these are the ingredients, in God’s economy, that make good bible stories great.
Being a youth minister wasn’t my first choice.
As a matter of fact, being any type of minister within any church would’ve been the last thing I would’ve chosen for myself.
One of the reasons why it took me 33 years to darken the door of a church as a minister was that I was a pastor’s kid first.
Trust me, there’s a reason why the reputation of a “P.K” is what it is.
Growing up as a pastor’s kid, I got to see behind the curtain and sadly, many times I found it to be a world of isolation, neglect, sadness and discouragement.
As a kid, I remember countless times of me lying in bed hearing my mom and dad talk about “real church life”. I would hear the conversations about power-hungry deacons trying to run my dad off. At church, I remember certain church “family members” awkwardly avoiding having to shake hands with my mom after she had cancer from fear they would catch it from her. I remember lying in the church pews till 10 and 11 at night while my dad would counsel a couple that would later raise their hands in favor of voting him out of his place as pastor in the business meeting. These kind of stories are endless and honestly they’re not really worth reliving but as a kid growing up in this type of environment, the “Joy, Joy, Joy, down in my heart” was a song I sang but didn’t experience much of when it came to being a pastor’s kid.
Sadly, stories like these are more the rule than they are exception for families in ministry. So, as a P.K., what better way to cope in this environment than to smoke cigarettes behind the church, carve the words “Motley Crue and Quiet Riot” into the Sunday School room desks, and make out with girlfriends in the baptistery closet after church?
As I grew up, questions like “Why subject your own family to the dark underbelly of church life?” “Why not just ‘live and learn’ and follow what interests you?” were whispered into my reasoning.
Here was the big problem I couldn’t get around regardless of whatever finely crafted argument I swallowed or level of denial I was in:
I was created to be a pastor.
It’s what I’m wired to do and there’s no amount of running that will let me change that fact.
I’ve learned that there are two ways to do God’s will: The easy way and the hard way. If you don’t believe me, revisit the story of Jonah.
When there is a calling on your life, the calling doesn’t go away because you wish it away or try to orchestrate your circumstances to where you can’t follow it.
Like it or not, I was called to be a pastor and there were not enough excuses I could find or enough screw ups I could make that would allow me to wiggle out of it.
Here’s what you may not know or believe: You have a calling and purpose on your life as well and there are not enough excuses or screw ups that you can muster to wiggle out of it either.
Here’s why:
Psalm 139:16 says: “You (God) saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.”
Now, without getting into the whole “Free Will” argument, this verse reveals that every day of our lives have been recorded before we ever lived out our first moments.
So, in my case, the record shows me running from my calling for 33 years and we never see God sweating a drop over any of it.
Question: With this verse fresh in your mind, how can we argue that somehow we are able to make mistakes too big for God to clean up and rearrange for his glory?
Are you fulfilling your calling?
Tomorrow: “Why I’m a Student Pastor: Part 2″
