Pastor Mark had a seizure on Thanksgiving morning and was quickly taken to the hospital where they discovered a tumor on his brain.
He is currently recovering in the ICU at the hospital and reportedly doing well following the surgery that happened just a couple days after he shot this powerful video.
The video shows a real-life faith that comes from knowing that our Lord is in complete control. The video rocked me this afternoon.
Particularly, this phrase:
“…but none of those things is better than Him [Jesus].”
One of the ‘perks’ in youth ministry is occasionally having the opportunity to see something before it’s “officially” available. Maybe it’s a manuscript of a book that’s coming out that we get to preview, maybe it’s a new album that hasn’t quite been released publicly.. For me today it was a pre-screening of the movie, “To Save a Life” – a new film due out in late January.
TRAILER:
I am an admitted cynic when it comes to “Christian-media” – those “things” that are marketed to and produced by Christians.
I’m cynical about them mainly because they’ve been produced pretty terribly again and again in my lifetime.
There are PLENTY of things produced by Christians that are worthwhile, influential, well-produced, etc., but rarely do these well-produced items get the publicity from the Christian community that they need to. It’s the not-so-well-produced things that get the attention. I think this is true because the Christian community is still nervous about “pushing the envelope” of what is real-life and what we want real-life to be portrayed as.
To Save a Life is a movie that was birthed out of the life of a youth pastor – Jim Britts, writer & producer. Cool, huh?
I went to the pre-screening this afternoon with an open-mind, I thought. I settled in waiting for the film to start and tried to start betting on whether the song “How to Save a Life” by The Fray would play at the beginning, middle, or end of the movie. I thought I had the movie pegged.
Not only did the song not play during the movie (they did turn it off soon after the credits began to roll), but I wasn’t disappointed in the film after it was all said and done. Sure there were some moments of feeling underwhelmed, but overall I was impressed with the quality of production, acting, and content of the film.
The message of the film is its greatest asset, too. The storyline follows teenage basketball jock, Jake after the death of his childhood best friend who commits suicide during his Senior Year of High School.
Jake is rattled by this event and seeks counsel from “Chris”, the local youth pastor. Jake isn’t an “overnight success story” through his conversion to Christ – making this movie more real than the typically-produced films like this.
Divorce, abortion, teenage drinking, and numerous other “unmentionables” are confronted in the storyline.
Currently, this film is not coming to any theaters near our area in Western PA. If it were, I could see us taking a group of students to see it. Being PG-13 due to “mature thematic elements involving teen suicide, teen drinking, some drug content, disturbing images and sexuality”, I know some will shy away from To Save a Life. I would be excited about watching and discussing this film with students and their families.
Our church has a Clover Site website. (cloversites.com) It’s beautiful, it’s functional, but it doesn’t do EVERYTHING I want it to… I’ve e-mailed them suggestions but it seems like they’re pretty set on keeping things the way they are when it comes to changing some of “the way things work”. I’m okay with that, just makes me search harder for solutions to issues I come up against.
Speaking of issues. I recently switched from being a strict MS Outlook-guy to a strictly Google-guy. I ONLY use Google for my e-mail and ONLY use Google for my calendars. Kind of nice to have made that switch just weeks before owning a phone that works very nicely with Google’s e-mail/contacts/calendars, by the way.
Anyhow, Cloversites doesn’t play nice (or at all) with Google’s Calendars App. They have their OWN calendar built-in that apparently they offer to those who may not even know what Google is, I guess. I asked Clover about integrating the two and they said, “Sure! Just point a link to your Google Calendar.” Not the response I was hoping for, but a solution we are using nonetheless.
The problem, however, was that I pointed our “link” to a public-version of our church calendar that showed strictly church-events, but I also have another calendar for our youth-events, and imagine having other calendars in the future that show other ministry-events that don’t necessarily need to be listed on just the main church-calendar. So, our link ONLY showed our church-events, NONE of our youth events. This bummed me out, but I didn’t have a solution.
