I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to blog. I have good intentions - I really do mean it when I say I’m going to blog weekly. But, the week rolls by and I have nothing to say. So here I am again at attempting to post. No more promises, though. Apparently, I don’t have my thoughts organized well enough to put them out there on a weekly basis. There are plenty of thoughts up there, they’re just not organized. I have an organization shortage.

In spite of the cold temperatures and the snow, however, things are happening. We are currently working on updating our website. I say “update” but it’s really a total re-do. It’s going to look great. It will be designed in such a way as to make updates very easy, so we’ll be doing a much better job of keeping current and relevant information flowing on the site. It will become a place where you can go to learn anything and everything you wanted to know about The Gate.

So, my Christmas was very enjoyable. Tim and I went to Pittsburgh on Christmas Eve to be with my mom, my sister and the family. We had a wonderful time - lots of food, a few gifts, and a good time spent with everyone. If you’re interested, when you see me, remind me to tell you how I saved Tim’s life with my heads-up driving skills. It’s quite a story that requires props to get across the full effect.

We spent the night in our new house Christmas Eve, then on Christmas day, we went to Erie to Tim’s mom and dad’s. I have never seen anyone decorate the house for Christmas like my mother-in-law. Everywhere I looked, there was a Christmas decoration of some sort. There were even themed rooms; the bathroom was done in snowmen. Downstairs in the finished basement was Christmas Central. The whole family gathered there to open gifts, eat, and have a great time together. Mom Bennett goes all out for Christmas. She loves it, and she makes it a wonderful time for the entire family. I’m happy I got to be a part of it.

Mom Bennett got a Wii for Christmas. We got addicted to bowling and stayed up until 4 a.m. Bowling for six hours left me pretty sore. In fact, I’m just now fully recovered! ha ha!

No resolutions for me. I’m going to do what I always try to do –  strive to know God more deeply, and in the process hopefully become a better person; a brighter light. I’m not always successful, but I try to have more successes than failures.

God bless, and Happy New Year

As the worship leader of The Gate, I am grateful for a church that embraces all styles of worship, and all kinds of worshipers.What is “worship”, though? It has been observed that there are three overlapping definitions of worship. The broadest is “worship in all of life.” Romans 12:1 tells us true worship is offering our lives to God. The second would be the “worship service”, the time we believers join together to perform specific acts of worship. The most recent and narrow definition would be the music portion of the service. The modern church may have done a disservice to the modern worshiper in boxing in worship to mean just singing and music.

Psalm 29:2 Honor the LORD for the glory of his name. Worship the LORD in the splendor of his holiness.

Psalm 30:11 You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy, that I might sing praises to you and not be silent.

Psalm 96:11-12 Let the heavens be glad, and the earth rejoice! Let the sea and everything in it shout his praise! Let the fields and their crops burst out with joy! Let the trees of the forest rustle with praise before the LORD, for he is coming!

Psalm 103:1 Let all that I am praise the LORD; with my whole heart, I will praise his holy name.

To me, these verses seem to beg us to let go with everything in us and offer up extravagant praise. If the fields and crops can burst out with joy, and the trees can rustle with praise, think of the many expressions of praise we humans can offer up. What does it look like to worship “with my whole heart”? I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it on the faces of my church family – with hands raised, voices lifted up, flags waving and feet dancing!

John 4:23 But the time is coming – indeed it’s here now – when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The Father is looking for those who will worship him in that way.

God is Spirit. He’s not physical, and he’s not limited to a place. His presence is everywhere and he can be worshiped anywhere, at any time. It’s not where we worship that counts, it’s how we worship - our attitude of worship. Is it genuine and true? We were created to worship Him - not just with our voices, our songs, our instruments. Our lives should reflect our worship of Him and our worship of Him should bring us to a place where we are experiencing Him in a very personal and powerful way. I get there with singing and playing my guitar. The feeling I get cannot be explained. My hope is that everyone can experience a personal encounter with the Living God through their worship whether it’s through singing, playing, dancing, raising hands, waving banners, giving, living. Worship with abandon and let your expression of His love for you show the world the transforming power of a Savior worthy of praise.

I heard once that dogs have no sense of time. In other words, you could leave the house for five minutes or five days, and a dog’s reaction to your return would be exactly the same - euphoria! They can’t judge their sadness at your absence by the length of time they’ve been missing you. So when you return, their unbridled joy at having you home is pretty hard to miss.

I’ve noticed this with my dog, Luna. She does this cute thing where she stands up on her back legs and and claps her front paws together. Along with the clapping is happy yelping, tail wagging and dancing. It brightens my day to come home to that!

As great as her reaction is, I can’t help but think that it pales in comparison to God’s reaction when one of His comes home. What would God’s euphoria look like? We know that angels in heaven celebrate. Can you imagine that? A legion of angels “clapping”? Wow! The thought of it takes my breath away.

It seems as if my resolve from my last post has not been very strong. Here I am again after over a month’s hiatus from blogging. It’s not as if I don’t want to keep in touch, it’s just that I don’t have a lot to say.

My big news is this: I’m getting married. There are those of you who read this who I wanted to tell in person, but haven’t had the opportunity to do so. I like to break such major news face-to-face, but as I’m not entirely sure when that will happen, here you have it. Keep July 31st open! (yes, it’s a Friday, and yes, it’s this year!). Oh, and by the way, Tim Bennett is his name

A good friend of The Gate, Pastor Burl at Calvary Baptist Church in Boardman, has graciously agreed to let us use the church for our ceremony. The Gate currently meets in the auditorium at Columbiana High School, so it’s not a great venue for a wedding. Besides, being that Tim works at the high school as the music/band director, he doesn’t really want to get married there as well. Calvary Baptist will be a lovely setting to get our family and friends together to celebrate with us. I’ll fill you in on more specifics as I get them nailed down.

We have our first Gate Give of the summer today. We give away soda at the “Y” in Columbiana at Newton’s gas station. (Aside: I’ve noticed that Newton’s seems to have the best gas prices in town). There are two traffic lights there that make it the perfect spot to catch as many people as we can when the lights turn red. It’s always a fun time, so if you’re not busy tonight at 6:30, join us for the Give, or at least drive by and get your thirst quenched on us!

We had our first of a series of Summer Blast parties last Sunday at the Genova’s. We cooked out, played games, basked in the sun at Genova Beach, and just generally had a relaxing time together. It lasted all day and through the night for those who decided to camp out. Even the pets had a good time. I don’t think Winnie Knickerbocker has recovered yet. We’ll have many more of these throughout the summer, so if you couldn’t make it to this one, I hope you can make it to one of the other fun things we have planned. You can check the calendar on the site to find out the dates, and we’ll be announcing upcoming Summer Blast events before worship on Sunday mornings as well.

God bless! Let’s hope I can get my act together and not wait such a long time before the next post.

It’s been way too long since I’ve written  – I’ll try to do better, I promise!

Easter Sunday at the Gate was fantastic! There was such a feeling of rejoicing; an awesome response to the good news of a resurrected Savior.

I used to post songs we did on Sunday mornings, so I’m going to do that again here:

1.    We opened with “Slow Down Time”. It’s a very upbeat song by Jeremy Camp – love it! Our drummer, Jeff, drives this one well, and the highlight is the Jerry Lee Lewis piano in the choruses (which is a lot harder to play than it seems).
2.    “Give You Glory”. Another Jeremy Camp song, but it’s not a theme, I promise. I just thought it was an appropriate song for the day.
3.    I threw in our medley of “How Great is Our God”/”How Great Thou Art”. Dave wanted some familiarity with the new. “How Great Thou Art” is one of my favorites, especially the last verse – When Christ shall come with shouts of acclamation and take me home, what joy shall fill my heart. Then I will bow in humble adoration and there proclaim, “My God, how great Thou Art!”
4.    We ended the first set of songs with “Redeemer”. Perfect for Resurrection Day.
5.    After the message, we did “Before the Throne of God Above.” We did the Shane Barnard/Shane Everett version. Great harmonies, and an added chorus that’s perfect for Easter.
6.    “True Love”. This was a new song for us by my new favorite Christian songwriter, Phil Wickham. We learned this song for the community Good Friday service at the Nazarene church. The original bridge says, “Jesus is alive, He rose again.” While we did different words there for Good Friday, we went back to the original bridge for Easter.
7.    We ended with the driving “My Savior Lives”.

 Here is an interesting history on St. Patrick as found on serioustimesdotcom:

It was a pagan world, outside the borders of the accepted disciplines and understandings of civilization.  But spiritual.  Deeply spiritual.  The supernatural was everywhere, in places and days, people and events, filling their lives with images, symbols and ritual.  The earth and all in it was sacred; gods and goddesses roamed the landscape; the world of magic was embraced; but there was no God who sat in Heaven, and no knowledge of a Christ who had come to earth.

Into this postmodern milieu, 1500 years before postmodernism was born, came Patrick, the patron saint and national apostle of Ireland (c. 5th century).

Patrick did not come to his task by choice.  Kidnapped at the age of fifteen from his father’s villa in Britain, he was enslaved in Ireland and made to serve as a shepherd.  There he came into the fullness of Christian faith, and after six years of praying, finally made his escape.  But upon reaching his homeland, he had a dream where a man who seemed to come from Ireland handed him a letter titled “The Voice of the Irish,” and at the same time heard the voices of those who lived “beside the Wood of Foclut, which lies near the Western Sea” asking him to “come back and walk once more among us.”  Patrick writes that he was “pierced to my heart’s core.”

Patrick returned to Ireland.  Not as a slave, but as a missionary.

The legends surrounding Patrick are, well, legendary.  He reportedly drove the snakes out of Ireland into the sea.  Whether true or not, there are no snakes in Ireland to this day.  Another is that he used the shamrock to explain the Trinity.  There may be some truth to this; pointing back to Patrick, the shamrock is the national flower of Ireland.  He is to have confronted and overpowered the druids; fasted for forty days and nights on a holy mountain; and openly challenged a king by lighting a fire for an Easter celebration in open opposition to the edict that only one fire was to burn in the land, and that for the pagan feast of Bealtaine.

What is most apparent is that Patrick looked for ways to connect the message of Christ to a pagan, but supernaturalized, world.  In doing so, he imaginatively put himself in the position of the Irish.  Looking for what they held in common, Patrick made clear that he, too, embraced a world full of magic.  As Thomas Cahill noted, the difference between Patrick’s magic and the magic of the druids was that in Patrick’s world, “all beings and events come from the hand of a good God”.  When Patrick arrived, the Irish were still practicing human sacrifice; Patrick made it clear that through Christ’s supreme sacrifice, such offerings were no longer needed.  Patrick took an entire culture’s leanings toward the spiritual and led them to Christ.

During Patrick’s time, all who lived outside of the boundaries, or walls, of Rome were called “barbarians” (literally, “without the walls”), and were to be avoided at all costs.  The Irish were barbarians.  Cahill writes that Patrick was the first Christian missionary to a culture outside of Rome’s world; “The step he took was in its way as bold as Columbus’s.”  Patrick simply wrote, “I came in God’s strength…and had nothing to fear.”  As a result, Maire B. De Paor writes that Patrick “not only changed the course of Irish history but made Ireland the burning and shining light of barbarian Europe for the best part of the next thousand years.”

So on the day that “everyone is Irish,” let’s wish for it to be of the kind modeled by the saint whose name marks the day.

My cat, Babs, is a very quirky cat. She likes to eat clothes, she likes me to pet her only when I don’t have hand cream on my hands, and she likes to be in close spaces - she’ll sneak into a closet whenever I open one, or she’ll make her own close space using whatever she may find lying around. She’s very loving in her own way, but she’s not a lap cat. I’ve had her for three years, and she’s only sat in my lap twice. She sleeps with me every night, but she just does not like to lay in my lap.

Take a look at this:

That, my friends is Babs, and that is not my lap. Bah!

The Gate has been blessed with a fantastic worship team. When I think about the people and the talent that God has brought to this church, I am so grateful and still amazed at the way He works.

Our awesome drummer, Jeff, is taking a much-deserved week off, so it is my pleasure to inform you that Alex will once again be joining us on the drums! Those of you who are new to The Gate will get the opportunity to hear another great musician. Alex was the first ever drummer of the worship team and with his help, we really were able to get the music to the level that it is today.

So, welcome back, Alex. It will be good to see (and hear) you again!

Being that this Saturday is Valentine’s Day, it got me to thinking a bit about it, and I realized that I don’t quite understand it’s purpose. Yeah, yeah, I know. “To show your special someone that you care about them.” (imagine this being said in a high-pitched voice with a bit of a sarcastic tone). My question is: shouldn’t you be doing that every day? Shouldn’t care, affection, love (or whatever else you want to call it) be an every day habit and not a once-a-year happening? I try to show just how much my loved ones are appreciated by me every day. It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture or anything, but it’s the little things that are remembered, not the necklace, flowers or candy that might be received once a year, right?

What if God only showed His love for us once a year? The rest of the year would leave us wondering just what this faith thing is all about. Why would we try to get closer to a God who just doesn’t seem to care. Our spiritual journeys would be severely lacking, and many would most likely end all together. This is not to say that we deserve His love, but in getting it unconditionally and undeservedly, doesn’t that speak volumes about what real love is all about?

Having a real relationship is about give and take. God gives us His all. We should strive to give him the same of us. Not just one day, but every day.

I’m talking about the British chocolate-covered-biscuit treat! Those of you who have never been to England have probably never had the chance to experience one. You are missing out of one of the best chocolate experiences ever!

Penguins come wrapped separately in cleverly-designed, brightly-covered wrappers. Each wrapper is different and shows a penguin in various activities/situations. Here’s a photo:

On the back of the wrapper, there is always a silly joke. Here are some of the jokes that can be found on a Penguin wrapper:

Q. What’s black and white and has eight wheels ?
A.  A penguin on skates

Q. What’s a penguin’s favourite dessert ?
A.  Baked Alaska

Q. What do penguins wear on their heads ?
A.  Ice-caps

Q. How does a penguin build its house ?
A. Igloos it together

Q What do you call an angry Polar Bear ?
A  You don’t call him anything, you just run.

Q. Why are penguins such good racing drivers ?
A.  Because they are always in pole position.

Q. Why do penguins carry fish in their beaks ?
A.  Because they haven’t got any pockets.

I recently had the pleasure of eating some Penguins. You see, Vanda’s father will bring them from England when he visits, and Dave and Vanda are very kind to share their stash with me.

I’ll leave you with this thought, Frank. May your trips across the pond be numerous and heavy-laden with Penguins!