Monday Miscellaneous

- On Halloween, our student ministries department hosted "Trunk or Treat" for the young kids in our community. Families in the church sign up to host a trunk and are assigned a parking spot in our lot and decorate their cars and hand out candy as little ones file by. It was really, really fun and attracted an amazing number of families from our community who had never stepped foot on our church campus.

- "Trunk or Treat" ended at 7:00 p.m. and we then spent two frantic hours turning the Refinery around and setting up for our High School department's "Pumpkin Fest" which lasted until midnight. Our high school team and several of our junior high team members worked until about 3:00a.m. cleaning up and getting the building ready for the weekend.

- In Junior High, we kicked off our first week of our new series, The Red Stuff, and overall I think it went pretty well. We had lots of fun programming around the topic including a "Red Stanley" activity that involved giving every student their own Red Stanley to take home in the hopes that they will take a fun picture of Red Stanley and email it to us for a slide show next week. The music was great, the games were fun, attendance was strong. I ditched out of the fourth service and hustled down to our San Clemente campus to cheer on their new youth pastor.

- Football: I think my Broncos might be lucky to finish 8-8...but that could be good enough to win their division. Hard to believe a USC dropped two spots in the ranking after a blowout win. It is shaping up to be a wild finish to the college football regular season.

- Today, I'm having lunch with an old friend from San Diego who I haven't seen in years. Every time I am with him I go home refreshed, challenged and spiritually sharpened so I'm looking forward to re-connecting.