Happy Birthday, Jon!!

Over the River and thru the Woods....

....to North Carolina! Last week all of us at The Ezekiel Project went to North Carolina for the South Eastern Workers Conference. The weekend before, though, some of us stopped to be the beneficiaries of wonderful hospitality with the Hyltons at Mountain Top Youth Camp. Chris spoke at a Valentine's outreach banquet the chapel near the camp hosted. When we were not there or at meeting, we had fun relaxing at Mountain Top. The last morning we were there, it snowed. When I told my mom this, she told me "You can run, but you cannot hid!" I know we are all grateful for the time we were able to spend there with old and new friends.
On Monday, we made our way down to Charlotte for the conference. The confernce was only a couple of days long, but the hopefully from it our service to the Lord will change in such a way becasue of it, that it will impact us for a lifetime. It was encouraging for me to see people and meet new ones who have compeltely dedicated their lives to serving out Lord and who are burndend to see souls saved.
We are back now, doing what God has placed before us for today, but encouraged to faithful service becasue of our time in the good ol' south.

Fashion on Mars

This morning I went to our public access television class with much anticipation.

Last week we focused on learning about the studio and the production room. Apparently there are a lot of important roles when it comes to filming something as simple as an interview; there’s the director, a floor director, at least three camera operators, a sound technician, graphic technician, a technical director, the host, the guest, etc… So today we had the fun experience of putting what we learned into practice.

We started by randomly picking one of the above positions out of a hat – quite nerve racking. In the car on the way to the studio I was really hoping I wouldn’t get director or host. I wanted to get a simple job, like operating one of the cameras; turns out, I got to operate camera #3!!! The instructor said he never saw someone so excited to operate a camera. Long story short, we shot the first 8 minute pretend interview and I managed to mess up a real simple job by not focusing. Oh well, I was glad to get that over with --- or so I thought.

To my horror, the instructor again had us pick out a role from the hat. I got the position of floor director. It wasn’t so bad; the most I had to do was count down with my fingers at the beginning and end of the other pretend interview, so I survived.

Then I noticed the clock was about to strike 11:00 a.m. and I was quite happy, until I realized that we had till 11:30 a.m. and the instructor once again wanted us to pick a name from a hat! Oh no!!! So I was near the end of the line, and to my dismay I pulled out the one thing I didn’t want…HOST!!! Oh no, I had to think of questions, and for 8 minutes I had to pretend to be interested in what my “guest” was saying! Fortunately I had JC as my “guest” and I’m really good at pretending to be interested in the things he has to say (just kidding JC☺).

I had only a few moments to come up with a topic and a title for my pretend show. I thought about the things I like and came up with fashion as the topic. Since my guest was a guy I decided to name it Fashion on Mars (men are from Mars, women are from Venus, et al). The interview turned out to be a whole lot of fun. I did pick on JC’s old fashion faux pas (blue jeans, grey fleece sweaters and combat boots for every day of the week except Sunday’s) and asked him to share with us how he “emerged” into the stylish fellow he is today. So after getting his opinion on where the best places to shop, what color socks a man should wear with dress shoes (always dark!) and what style of jeans he prefers we ended our 8 minute segment on fashion.

I look forward to more of these classes and rumor has it that we’ll be having our own little “Antique Road Show” next week. We should have fun examining the props in the studio as if they were antiques!