General

Just a reminder ... we podcast our weekend teaching series and you can find it here. It's also available by doing a search at iTunes.

It's a rough life ... first off to Orlando for the National New Church Conference and then to Malibu for a week-long Bible conference at Pepperdine University. For those of you who haven't visited Pepperdine's campus, it's definitely not Kansas State. The campus is built into the Malibu hillside with dramatic views of the Pacific Ocean. It's absolutely incredible. My college offered not-so-dramatic views of Dairy Queen.After a second week of classes and workshops, I'm ready to be a regular joe again.

It's not very often that I use an exclamation point in my blog heading. Especially since I've been using all lowercase letters and to use proper grammar seems out of place ...But last night's cafe was worthy of an exclamation point. We featured two local artists -- Dustin Shey and Gregory Page. Both did a fantastic job. Dustin went solo, just him and his acoustic guitar. I first met Dustin back during the pre-launch days of LifePoint. It was good stuff.Gregory Page is the first artist I've invited to the LifePoint cafe that I hadn't first met in person. He's very well-known in local music circles and I can see why. He brought along an awesome female vocalist and a violin player. He himself started off with the ukelele and then went to the acoustic guitar. It was fantastic ... in spite of our demon-possessed sound system that seems to…

I'm really looking forward to tonight's LifePoint Cafe. We're hosting Gregory Page along with Dustin Shey. Page has worked with Jewel, Steve Poltz, Jason Mraz, AJ Croce, and many others. He's the first artist we've hosted that I haven't met first in person. I've only listened to his music online. It ought to be a great show!

A new Shakeys Pizza Parlor opened near our house. It's the first one I've been to since growing up in Peoria. We used to go this Shakeys on University in Peoria. It even had a player piano and you could pick the songs it played. Nothing but fond childhood memories.So you can imagine my excitement to have a new Shakeys nearby. The excitement had greatly dissipated during the 50 minutes it took to get two mini pizzas. The whole time I kept thinking about this article in USA Today that talked about the new ovens Papa John's is installing that can bake a pizza in four minutes. Shakeys must have running low on coal.