Archive for June, 2009

We are here! After many months of fundraising, prayer, communication and planning, our Poland sports mission team arrived in Krakow this afternoon. We had a looooong, fun, exhausting, movie-filled plane ride of a trip. 

The main development of the trip has been the official declaration of a jokes war between me and Tracy Reed. So far, I’m winning. 

I’ll be posting regularly all week about the trip, so stay tuned!

Over last weekend, we started hauling junk and treasures out to our driveway and carport. All week long, we’ve continued to add items daily as we clean rooms, attics, and closets in our house. It’s been quite the adventure. Here are some things you learn during a week-long yard sale:

• No matter how many times you say, “You get all this stuff free if you buy the house!” and no matter the tone of voice, you get no takers.
• Just because your iPhone says it’s 95 degrees doesn’t mean it really is.
• if you have to take a 4-hour shift, watching your junk and dealing with potential junk buyers, the best shift to take is in the a.m., from 8:30-9:00rom 8:30-9:00
  English: World English Bible - WEB
  Štetje svetopisemskih vrstic se začne z ¹! Vrstica ⁰ ne obstaja!
  
  WP-Bible plugin. (Yes, I know that’s not 4 hours, but if you plan right, you can have a meeting during that time that takes you away…)
• Yard sale shoppers are some of the most, um, interesting and unique people on the planet. (I actually sprayed air freshener in my carport after one of our customers left today. The alternative was gagging.)
• You discover the drama of nature that you never knew before. It was like Discovery Channel to watch a perpetual fight between a woodpecker and a tree full of squirrels. The squirrels had made a nest in the hollow section of a pine tree. That was the same section that the woodpecker kept returning to to, well, peck. The squirrels were rather loud in cussing the poor pecker out in squirrelese. I was shocked at the language they were using. It was nuts.
• You can get a lot of reading done while manning a yard sale. And you can tell which pages you’ve read by the sweat drops in your book.

People will buy anything. I repeat – anything.

Upcoming Schedule:

Carolyn and I are leaving for Poland on Monday! I’m excited about going back to work with Team Krakow. They’re an incredible group of IMB missionaries.

Our kids flew out today to spend a week with their grandparents in New Mexico. Sam was at Kanakuk two weeks ago; he and Adelyn were at Lake Tiak O’ Khata for kids camp with First Baptist this week. By the time they’re home again, we will be just about ready to move out to Virginia.

We are trying to schedule the movers for July 15. We’re hoping to cram a float trip to the Buffalo River into July 14. I can’t believe my kids have never been! It’s an Arkansas classic outdoor experience.

So stay tuned around here! I moved my web servers this week on top of everything else, so most of my sites have been offline for a couple of days. I’ll be posting from Poland next week. If you’d like to read last October’s entries about Poland, check them out here.

I will not get melancholy. I will not get melancholy…

When a friend told us, “Don’t plan anything for the night of June 21,” we knew something was up. We just didn’t know what. Then came the announcement in MonticelloLive.com about a “reception,” and Carolyn said, “Oh no. I hate being the center of attention.” Having endured a roast before, I was a little nervous too.

However, when we arrived at the Baptist Collegiate Ministry at 7:00 Sunday night, we were unprepared for the diversity of people there and the outpouring of love and laughter.. and tears. From a great video composed of 100s of pictures from our years here (did I ever really have that much hair?!) to a few meaningful speeches, to a massive prayer time for us. Our gratitude for the time God lent us in Monticello has been increasing.

There was the pie from Chips Barbeque sent by my sis and husband in Little Rock. There was two massive cakes. There was a money tree! There were former students, pastors, and a pleasing assortment of Christ-followers from several churches in town.

It was special to be in the new BCM building for which we worked so hard to begin raising funds. It was humbling to hear from folks I respect so much how the Lord had apparently used us in lives beyond our capabilities. It was surprising to know of the coordination behind the scenes to get the word out.

Sunday evening was worshipful for us. It wasn’t because of the undeserved accolades given to us. Rather, it was because the abundant love led to our own increasing gratitude of the God who led us here. We never imagined how precious this paranthesis of life would be.

We came home and put the money tree in the middle of our living room, breaking branches all the way through the house to make it fit. We all sat in a circle on the floor around it, slowly unpinning the money and savoring the cards and letters which we will read over and over to remind us of God’s goodness.

One of them in particular – the Saffold’s – stuck out:

May you leave slowly and come back quickly and often! You always have a place in Monticello. Peace of Christ. ~ Scott, Mistye, Nora Catherine, & Patrick

Philippians 1.3 is an apt description of our increasing gratitude: “Every time I think of you, I give thanks to my God.”

The following was for an assignment at Ouachita Baptist University during 1990. I wrote it about my experience during the summer of 1988 at Hamburg, Arkansas. It was then that I got to live with my dad’s parents for the summer while I served as the summer youth minister at First Baptist Church of Crossett, Arkansas.

Both of my grandparents have passed away now. I will see them again, I’m confident of this. But that wonderful summer left an indelible impression on me. Sweet tea, Corn Flakes, shelling peas and seeing young lives transformed left my cup running over.

There was a tick crawling on my arm. I sent him sailing through the air with a flick of my middle finger. It was hot. I took another sip of my lemonade, the ice cubes sliding forward to clack against my front teeth. My back was wet with perspiration against the wooden slats of the porch swing.

It was July. Four months earlier, I had been asked to be the summer youth minister at First Baptist Church in Crossett. My grandparents’ home was just 15 minutes away, located in the pine forests south of Hamburg. I was living with them for the summer and commuting to work, rather than trying to find housing in Crossett.

I sat on the front porch swing sipping lemonade, deep in thought. It was my supper break. I had to be back at the church in an hour to open the activities building for the youth. I took a deep breath of the magnolia-scented air. It was still hard to believe I was getting to spend the entire summer with my grandparents, Opal and D.B. As long as I can remember, I have had a special love for their home in the pine forests of Ashley County.

I didn’t experience the wonders of the country alone. I had grown up there with my cousin Robert Allen for two weeks every summer when I came to visit. He was just a few months older than I, and during those few weeks each summer, we had developed a bond that would never diminish, because cousins, unlike childhood friends, never grow apart. They only grow closer together.

Looking back, it seems that a pair of young boys 20 miles from the Louisiana border cornered the market on happy childhood memories. There was no world out there but the one we experienced.

It was a world of superhero action figures and G.I. Joes with kung-fu grip. They always went bald when you got their head fuzz wet. It was the best argument we could think of for not taking baths.

It was a world of war. When we played “army,” our guns had an unlimited supply of ammunition, but neither one could shoot the other. Detente was reduced to two simple words, “You missed!”

Not a single inch of our grandparents’ land had gone untouched or unexplored. We knew every tree, every stream, the garden, chicken house and barn just like we knew who each comic book belonged to.

I remember that on those rare days when it rained, we were sentenced to the confines of the house, including the front and back porches. But even then, there were endless possibilities. We would pull out the Hot Wheels or retreat into the world of “play-like.” We were astronauts, cowboys, cops and robbers in less than an hour, each making a miraculous recovery from five or six fatal wounds incurred during that time. However, this summer was different. My cousin was at advanced training camp for ROTC, and there were few physical remnants of the time we had spent together. In the yard, a few initials cut into trees years ago were still readable. One lion of a set from the Holy Land was sitting on a shelf in the living room. For some ungodly reason, we had thrown its match into the fireplace during a scientific experience. There was still a hole behind the barn that Robert Allen had dug and covered as a trap for me (it had worked). The numerous pictures we had drawn for my grandparents were hanging in frames on the kitchen wall. All gave mute testimony to the fact that two small boys had shared a special moment in time.

None of it was new to me. However, the purity and simplicity embodied in my grandparents’ home and land never ceased to amaze me.

I looked down at my lemonade sitting where I had set it down beside the swing. The ice cubes had shrunk during my brief reverie.

I was now 20 years old. I was used to paved roads and interstates, flouride city water, a gas fireplace and grocery shopping at Kroger’s with double discount coupons. Yet my dad’s parents had a dirt driveway with a cattlegap. They had a well house and a butane tank behind the house and homemade preserves and cakes in the kitchen. And to top it all off, there were deer tracks in the garden.

This summer, I had learned that it wasn’t just Opal and D.B. who had a monopoly on the aspects of country living. Driving to work on any given day, I saw endless emerald fields of soybeans, more expansive than any airport runway. I saw dogs and cats just running around. The only fences were barbed wire to keep in the cows.

I recalled that one morning, when I rounded the corner, there were these dog-sized cattle things just standing around on the road. It was incredible. I was even more amazed to discover that they were goats. I thought they were only found in the mountains. I had acquired some of that country hospitality by then. I stopped at the next house to tell the old man sipping coffee on the porch that his goats were escaping. He laughed and thanked me. I had watched him in my rear view mirror as I drove off, but he never left his rocker.

D.B. had told me one evening at supper that we had rabbits in the garden. He urged me to nail one with the .410 if I got the chance. That next afternoon, I had tiptoed stealthily around the garden, a shotgun clutched in front of me. I felt like Festus on Gunsmoke. I rounded the end of the dead corn rows — their raspy blades rattled in the breeze, covering the crunch of my footsteps on the dry dirt. And before me, just sitting there on his white cotton puff of a duff, was Roger Rabbit. The only rabbits I had seen this close were in the IQ Zoo in Hot Springs. Our moment together was infinite, frozen in time. Hours later, I raised the gun and fired. The rabbit jumped so high that I figured he must have anticipated what was happening and dodged the blast. I was awed at his reflexes, content to let him escape for his skill. Such was the respect between hunter and hunted. But the rabbit never got up after he landed. The ground slowly reddened around him. I had left him lying there as I ran back to the house yelling, “I got one. I got one!”

Several weeks and several rabbits later, I had noticed that I was living in a regular Garden of Eden. I found I could keep myself fed by picking pears, peaches and apples right off the trees. That fact, coupled with the presence of a water faucet next to the back porch, led me to believe that survival of the fittest wasn’t hard at all. As I had sat on the edge of the back porch, looking at the clothes line and munching on a pear, I had calculated that with all the fruit trees around, I could probably make a few hundred dollars by selling their produce to the Big Star in town. I never got around to trying it, though.

I had also learned that bees were evil that summer. They were truly spawns of Satan. I learned this fact one morning while strolling past the three hives D.B. kept behind the garden. One hive wasn’t doing much at all. The others were a, uh, a bee hive of activity. I threw a small rock at the dead one to get them on the ball. I must have run around the house for 30 minutes trying to escape the demons from hell.

I looked at my watch. It was time to go back to work. I got off the swing, drained the rest of my watery lemonade with one gulp, and went inside to eat a snack.

That was four weeks ago. The youth group and I had played volleyball at the activities building that night. The rest of the summer had gone by quickly. Too quickly. The paradox of the activity at the church and the peacefulness of the country gave me a sense of perspective that has stayed with me today.

August 19 was my last day in south Arkansas. I had to be in a wedding in Mountain Home the next day. My send-off was a quiet, though emotional one. Few young people ever have the opportunity to know and to love their grandparents as real people, as individuals. The opportunity and experience gave me insight into my father, my past and my future. It also gave me a respect and appreciation for this world that God has given us.

As my car bumped over the cattlegap, I was sweating again, but this time it was from the arduous task of packing. My grandparents were still there on the porch waving as I drove off. I breathed goodbye to them, my summer and my temporary lifestyle. And as I turned the car north onto Arkansas Highway 81, I began to cry.

I just wrote a review of streamy.com last month. It’s a service that gives you Tweetdeck-like functions in a beautiful website. I was so impressed, I set it to my homepage.

It didn’t stay on my radar screen long.

Enter peoplebrowsr.com.

You’ll notice quickly that it has the ability to display as many columns as you want. You can shrink the column width or expand it. From there on it, it’s just downright amazing/fun to discover all that this site (and its corresponding Adobe Air app) can do. Everything is mouse-able.

I particularly love the ability to view my Twitter contacts’ “@” replies as a threaded conversation. That’s extremely handy for figuring what in the world is going on in your Twitterverse. Sure beats scrolling back a mile to figure out who said what.

Hovering over any contact photo gives you a plethora of options to respond to your contacts. Shift-clicking on a status update allows you do something pretty nifty… create a Tag Group.

The Adobe Air app has all the same features of the web site. One of the amazing things you’ll find about peoplebrowsr is that after many minutes exploring, you’ll discover that there are different levels of use for different levels of users. I typically use the Lite Mode, but there is also Advanced and Business Modes. Very nice.

The Settings are also a great feature at the bottom of the window. You have all kinds of options, and you can even change settings per each column.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one social media browser that combines the two most popular services – Facebook and Twitter, you may have finally found a great solution. Better than Tweetdeck. More full featured than Streamy. At home on whatever computer you choose… PeopleBrowsr.

That’s how you could sum up my Monday.

Adelyn got some money for good grades, and when she combined it with what she’d been saving, the next thing you know, we are the astonished owners of the technological fitness craze called the Wii Fit. I was skeptical at first, but after watching it and now playing with it for two days, I’m impressed. I knew it was a great invention when it gave me a Wii Fit age of 42 (only one year off) after measuring my weight, BMI, and testing my balance and other things. Carolyn didn’t fare so well. She has a Wii Fit age of 55. I have been offering to help her descend and ascend steps all day.

We started packing today. It’s a bittersweet moment, but pack we must. We have a ton of stuff, junk, and treasure that we’ve collected over 14 years here in Monticello. We began in the studio, and we spent most of the morning and early afternoon going through my books. I had 5 bookshelves full, and we sorted them out between books heading to my office at Northstar Church and books that I want to try to sell in a near-future garage sale.

In the middle of packing and sorting, there was also some cleaning. Carolyn stepped out at one point (conveniently enough). While she was gone, I noticed there was a basket on top of one of my bookshelves. As I began to empty it, my insides turned to ice when I saw a pregnancy test box. It was unopened. Still new. “What the…?!” I thought. Soon, however, I assured myself this was some strange anomaly. It was covered in dust.

When Carolyn returned, I pointedly asked her about it, and she couldn’t remember how it got there either. But for some reason, she thought it was extremely funny that I was quizzing her about it so anxiously.

With Sam gone to Kanakuk Camp this week, Adelyn has the run of the house. We went this evening over to our friends, the Saffolds, for the closing softball pool party. I was the assistant coach of Adelyn’s team. We had a perfect record. We didn’t win a game. All the trophies we distributed tonight said, “The Team With the Most Heart.” The girls didn’t seem to mind, and so Tim Chase and I drowned our coaching inadequacies in brownies and homemade ice cream.

OK, just for insanity and your viewing pleasure on this Monday morning… For what it’s worth, I think this would be a great thing for a welcoming committee at a church to do in the foyer once a month or so.

HT: Shane Vanderhart

Adelyn and one her friends spend an afternoon with an empty box…

Box Mystery from Jeff Noble on Vimeo.

Whew. The last three weeks at the Noble household have been a blur. I went from planning for future impact and ministry here in Monticello to an abruptly joyful turn toward future ministry in Virginia. It’s complex to drag your brain and focus from one group of amazing people to another. I feel caught in a lobotomy limbo. We went from helping plan Vacation Bible School with two other churches to trying to sell a house in a month.

Carolyn and I went out to eat tonight with Phillip and Rosie, some very good friends of ours. It’s starting to dawn on us that every meal, every get-together with Arkansas family and friends should be savored. As we prepare to make the trek east in mid-July, we are trying to cram in as much as we possibly can.

She and I will be co-leading a trip to Poland on June 29 with Tracy Reed, the UAM BCM director (another great friend). We will be taking six of the UAM softball team members with us. They will be conducting a sports clinic to aid the missionaries in Poland build relationships with more of the Polish people. If you can give to this trip, I’ve written about the great need here. That will be a week we’re out of town in the middle of all this.

We have shown our house 3 out of the last 5 nights and have two more appointments in the next few days. We are praying that the right family discovers this wonderful house and makes a quick offer so that things will progress smoothly. It’s almost too much to consider.

Sam is leaving for Camp Kanakuk tomorrow morning, and after that he and Adelyn will be going with the First Baptist group to their children’s camp. From there, it’s off to New Mexico for them to visit grandparents while we’re in Poland.

I’m doing a wedding for a couple at the end of this month, and I’m praying and working hard to help our church establish a transition team and process. I’m thankful that they have such incredible faith attitudes during this time with us. It’s been encouraging to receive such blessing from them.

Perhaps one of the most meaningful exchanges I’ve had over the past three weeks was one evening with Adelyn. As we were returning home one night, a conversation in our car was ending as we exited the vehicle. Adelyn said, “What church wouldn’t want Daddy to be their preacher? Duh!” My heart and head are still a little swollen after that, I confess. It meant all the world to me to have the confidence of my children, whether or not any group of people felt the same way was irrelevant. I’ll have to remind her of that next time I catch her coloring in the “Os” on the announcement sheet.

Grateful

OK, yes, I’d take one. No, I won’t pay for one until I’m eligible for a full upgrade. But this guy is my hero.

Essential Church?:
Reclaiming a Generation of Dropouts

I’ve tried to show in this series of entries that for us in the church or the campus to do effective collegiate ministry, we must begin far earlier than when students arrive on the college campus. The senior year in high school is too late as well. Thom Rainer argues effectively in his book Essential Church that age 16 is when teens start to drop out of church. (It’s a great resource for those wanting more research and insight into the subject of reaching young adults.)

In summary, here are some things I’ve highlighted that may help us re-begin our witness and encouragement to young adults in the church:

• Desegregating youth groups from the church at large
• Establishing well-defined and meaningful transitions to adulthood
• Raising our expectations of church and young adults
• Making the faith stories of church members a vital part of worship and small groups

Collegiate ministers located on the college campus have their work cut out for them. They face a difficult, time-consuming challenge: proclaim the Gospel to lost students and reclaim the “Christianized” students. In the latter, they work to transform an apathetic, dead faith crawl to a vibrant, glorious faith walk. At present, it’s a losing battle. Collegiate ministers need help from the church.

They must not disconnect from the church in frustration, but instead radically reconnect with the church with a fresh vision of what it will take to reach this generation together. I believe that in order for collegiate ministry to be done well, it must be done early. The hurdles in our churches are not insurmountable. Let’s jump high!

I used to write reviews for iPhone apps for the website appropriately titled appleiphoneapps.com (now appadvice.com). It’s a fantastic site to keep up with the good and terrible of apps for the iPhone. For every $.99 jewel, there are about 50 bombs. It’s always good to read reviews before hastily purchasing – unless you just love throwing dollar bills in the digital gutter.

I stumbled across someone’s recommendation of the app called Groups: Drag and Drop Contact Management a while back, and after doing some research, I pulled the trigger. Even though it’s a bit pricey at $2.99, I’ve found it to be a stellar addition to my iPhone.

If you don’t use the Address Book on your Mac all that much – and especially if you don’t use the Groups feature of AB, it won’t be that appealing. But perhaps it will inspire you to organize that messy contacts database you have.

Groups allows you to add contacts to specific groups by dragging and dropping them on the iPhone. This is a feature that Apple did not build into its Contacts app. You can also create Groups with the Groups app. There are are host of other inspired features as well – such as being able to email an entire group.

In addition to working with groups, the app also has a beautiful graphical interface. It’s really a pleasure to use. You’ll discover new features consistently that are well thought-out. For instance, a number will appear beside the name of your contact, indicating how many groups that contact is in. By tapping the number, an interface is brought up which allows you to edit the groups that contact is currently in.

Also, the ability to interact with individual contacts in your database is extremely well-done. Simply tap on a contact, and a dialog interface opens up that allows you to:

• Call any of the numbers assigned to that contact
• Send a text message
• Email
• Go to that contact’s website
• Map that contacts address
• Identify the groups that contact is in
• Send a contact card (in .vcf format) of that contact
• Edit the contact

There is also an attractive dial pad integrated into the app. The app really could become a replacement for Apple’s stock Contacts and Phone apps. It’s that impressive. The ability to scroll down the group list on the left by dragging your finger down the list is also very impressive.

Cons

The only significant caveat to this app is its load time. It takes too long to load. That in itself isn’t a deal killer, but it’s lengthy enough that you could be in the Phone app and Contacts app of the iPhone by the time it loads. That prevents me from replacing the former two apps with this one.

Of course, with the release of the iPhone 3G S, processor speeds are significantly increased, and this problem may go away. For the rest of us with 1G and 3G iPhones, however, this precludes us from using this app for anything other than groups and contact management.

Overall

If you have an extensive contact database, this is a must-have app. It’s smooth appearance and graphic design are excellent. Even though it tops out at $2.99, don’t let this discourage you. In addition, if you have a lot of contacts, this app will help you beat that database into great, manageable shape.

Run; don’t walk… over to Monergism’s site to enter for a chance to win a free Bible. Deadline is June 10. Click on picture below to be taken directly to entry form.