Leaving the blogging world...

...AGAIN! As a result, I probably won't be able to blog until Sunday or Monday. Please pray for a safe trip. Another Jesus Freak Friday will be skipped over. Mom, the boys and I will be driving (well, the boys won't be driving :) to Judson in Elgin, Illinois to register for classes, seeing my room-mate and the like. I am so excited that I am able to go there!!! YIPPEEEE!!!!!!!!! And praise the Lord for scholarships! :) It was amazing what the Lord provided!!

Pictures

I took these pictures with the digital. It is the yard light, but I moved the camera in a bunch of different directions. Cool, huh?!

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M for Megan!

Supernatural Strength

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out something is very wrong with the idea of a good God overseeing a suffering world. If He exists, then why does He allow such horrible things to happen? It’s a question as old as humanity itself. The only answer is that this isn’t the way God intended things to be. We humans messed things up, and now we are paying the price for it.

But Jesus Freaks have a secret weapon against the horrors of this world: Jesus Himself! When He comes to make His "home" in your spirit, it truly is His home. And He will protect what is His. He doesn’t promise to make your life easier, but He changes the way you view that life and gives you supernatural strength to make it through the hard times. Suddenly your perspective is filtered through His eyes, His heart, His gentle Spirit, His joy.

A baby girl named Fanny, born in a small New York town in 1820, contracted a cold in her eyes when she was just six weeks old. A country doctor prescribed the wrong treatment, and the little girl was left blind for life. As she grew up, she determined to make the best of her disability, writing at age eight: "O what a happy soul I am! Although I cannot see, I am resolved that in this world contented I will be."

Fanny went on to a career as a teacher and writer-in-residence at New York’s Institute for the Blind. She recited her poems before Congress and made friends with powerful people, including presidents.

But something was missing from her life. In 1851, she found the missing piece: a relationship with Jesus Christ. Fourteen years later, she was introduced to the hymnist William Bradbury, who encouraged her to turn her poems into hymns. Bradbury gave Fanny the idea for a song he needed, and she sat down to write her very first hymn: We are going, we are going / To a home beyond the skies / Where the fields are robed in beauty / And the sunlight never dies.

It was the first of more than 8,000 hymns written by Fanny Crosby. Perhaps her most famous hymn, "To God Be the Glory," goes like this:
To God be the glory, great things He has done; So loved He the world that He gave us His Son, Who yielded His life an atonement for sin, And opened the life gate that all may go in.

Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, Let the earth hear His voice! Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, Let the people rejoice!
O come to the Father, through Jesus the Son, And give Him the glory, great things He has done. Great things He has taught us, great things He has done, And great our rejoicing through Jesus the Son; But purer, and higher, and greater will be Our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see.

Another of Fanny Crosby’s best-known hymns, "Blessed Assurance," contains the words: This is my story, this is my song / Praising my Savior, all the day long . . . / Perfect submission, all is at rest / I in my Savior am happy and blest / Watching and waiting, looking above / Filled with His goodness, lost in His love.

Though we might look at Fanny Crosby’s story and see a life filled with hardship and sadness, she found a reason to sing out for joy. It was the supernatural joy of a Jesus Freak!

Calling all voters!

If you want to vote for the following poem that I wrote, you can just click on this link and rate it from 1 to 10. I hope it isn't too terrible that it gets all ones!

Jesus

Jesus, I want to praise Your name always;

I want to praise Your name all my living days.

When I am in Your presence, I feel like a newly-sprung flower.

When I am kneeling humbly, I feel Your love and power.

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I declare Your glory and majesty.

I wish that everyone in your presence could be.

You are the Lord of Heaven, earth and beyond.

With You, I have formed an everlasting bond.

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You, Jesus. are full of great mercy and compassion.

You are with me when I feel like things are in a fast rotation.

When on my bed I pray,

I love You more each day.

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I try more and more to read Your Word,

As in church and Sunday School, I have heard.

After I am back from church,

With my Bible do I search.

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Copyright ©2007 Megan Margaret Erbele

HA!

Bible Charades and Drama...

are ALWAYS a blast! Wissmann's wrote the drama and it is always fun to see what everyone comes up for the charades. I had to do a separate post for the dramatics because I couldn't narrow it down very well! :) I still don't have a lot of my pictures, but maybe that is a good thing! ;)

CHARADES

Brad and Andrew made a great team!! They were HILARIOUS together! I'm sitting here laughing about the other skit they did together! Lol! I don't have pictures, but if I did they would be very blurry on account of laughing too much! :D You just had to be there! Maybe next year ....

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"Dude, I can feel the darkness...I'm scared. Hold me!"

~Pharaoh's servant~

Another camp post!

Well I gotta admit one of the highlights about camp was being able to see Charissa! aka the cutest baby in Nebraska. :D
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Four-square and volleyball were sports that were played most of the free time.
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Meet Elphie and Boe! They are interesting to learn from. I wish you could have been there (although, some of you were!) Anyway, they usually take things quite literally. Sow the seed/sew the seed...

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(inch by inch) `
Singing songs (with actions) is very intergral to chapel!
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Oh, I wouldn't want to forget Farmer Jones and his wife! They came faithfully every day to chapel.
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We went to the Ashley Retirement Home again this year using the Flipper-Flapper witnessing tool. It was fun fellowshipping with them, but since we went there last year, we remembered a few. Well, God softened one of the lady's hearts there. To read about it go to Bethany's blog post, "Ambassadors of Christ." More pictures there! ;)



Pssst!...Wissmanns have a slideshow of pictures.

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to a...

Happy Father's Day to

(emphasis on my)

(Dedication)

I want to be just like Daddy!

I love you, Daddy!!!

And happy Father's Day to every father!

It's all about the...

Well, I found my camera so I thought I would download some pictures from camp. There are so many that I took though, that I might be posting about camp until next year!.. no wait, that should definitely be reserved for Bethany. :D Anyway, I had such a fun time and learned so much!

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Some new things this year about camp are padded pews and a newsletter.If you give me your address, I could pass it along and you can be added to our mailing list! Free of charge! How much more exciting can you get?!

Praise the Lord! We only had one day where it was really wet. I think it was the last day. Camp went by so fast, its hard to remember! On that day, we did Bible charades!! They are so much fun!

(Jesus calming the storm)

Robert and the evangelist, Norman Wenig were playing a game. Does anyone know what it is called? You throw tennis balls that are on strings on different bars.

More pictures and info to come soon!

I'm back!

Well, I don't have any pictures right now. I'm not sure where my camera is at the moment..., so you'll just have to bear with me! :)

Camp was awesome! I don't know if I can put into words the impact it had on me. The theme this year was the Heart of the Matter. Our story was The Parable of the Sower and our memory verse(s) was Galatians 6:7-9. I'll write more later, but I have to go do some dishes!

Advice, part two

I will be absent from the blogging world until Wednesday or Thursday. I will be at camp!!!!! Yippee!!! I am so excited! You can go to the Wissmann's blog for an update on camp. I'll be taking lots of pictures, so hopefully I don't run out of space on my camera!! I mean, that is four days without being able to unload!!! :0 Well, hopefully it won't be raining during the whole week of camp. It's in the forecast, but it was in the forecast last year, too and it didn't rain. Maybe the Lord will keep the rain away for most of the time this year, too! :) Anyway, I thought I would leave you with some very important and profound advice. I would like to know your opinions of said advice when I come back.

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Work together.

It will get better.


Watch your step.

Be conscious of your appearance.

Relax.

Take an occassional risk.

Meet new people, even if they look different to you.

Run when you have to.

Study hard.

And close your eyes and smile at least once a day!

Extreme "slave"

Leonard Dober wondered if Jesus had thought the cross too much; then he remembered Jesus' prayer in the garden ended, "Not my will, but yours, father." Leonard's task seemed impossible, but he was pursuing God's will and not his own.

Leonard Dober determined that God's call to him was to reach slaves in the Virgin Islands. He planned teach these men and women by selling himself as a slave and working alongside others each day while sharing Jeus' love with them. The thought of being a slave frightened and sickened him. He dreaded the treatment he would receive. "But Christ was willing to die on the cross for me," he thought. "No price is too high to serve him." It wasn't the slave masters who were Dober's hardest persecutors, but rather fellow Christians. They questioned his call to minister to slaves and ridiculed him as a fool for his plan. But Dober would not be dissuaded. He arrived in the Virgin Islands late in the 1730s.

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When he became a servant in the governor's house, he feared that this position was too far removed from the slaves to whom he had come to minister. So he left and moved from the governor's house to a mud hut where he could work one-on-one with slaves.In just three years, Dober's ministry included more than 13,000 new converts.

If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.

~II Corinthians 5:13~

Jesus freaks. That's what the world calls those whose faith seems a bit radical. Odd. Extreme. Dober was an eighteenth century "Jesus freak"--a free man who chose to live as a slave in order to win them to Jesus. He was willing to do whatever it took to squeeze the last ounce of devotion from his heart in service to Christ. For Dober, that meant a specific plan that made sense to no one to him. Have you been written off because of your freakish refusal to go along with the majority rule? If God has called you to do something radical for him in your family, church, or community, you must obey. Let others call you crazy, but may Jesus find you committed.

Psalm 32:10

...the Lord's unfailing trust surrounds the man who trusts in him.
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When the train goes through a tunnel and the world gets dark, do you jump out? Of course not. You sit and trust the engineer to get you through.

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~Corrie ten Boom

Never...

be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

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~Corrie ten Boom

Camp Clean-up, Part Two

We worked very hard today, had no fun,

Okay, we had some fun...

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Florence, Trisha, and I cleaned in Jericho, the girl's dorm, until lunch/dinner time (we got there around 10). After dinner, we vacuumed the chapel, hung the curtains up, and got confused about putting which ones where. :) Around that time, Kris arrived. Then we cleaned at Hebron and Bethlehem (more dorms).
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More vacuuming, sweeping
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and wiping off matresses. When we got done with that we headed over to the dining hall and the view out of the door was...
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THIS! It started pouring rain!
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So, we stayed inside and vacuumed.

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Thanks so so so much for helping

Kris

and

Trisha!!!