This Sunday, February 5, 2012 there will not be an Ablaze Youth meeting.  As it has been a tradition of our youth ministry in the past, we will not be meeting.  If anyone is interested in watching the Superbowl as a group please contact me ASAP.  As I do not have a lot of in my apartment I can only invite my small group.  If you do have space and don’t mind the imposition we can arrange something. Also, parents we will be having our meeting still on Thursday night at 7 to become more famil...

Have you ever played God? No, we don’t mean played, like you played the role of God in a theater production and wore a white beard and a robe and sat on a big throne. We mean played, as in play, as in used Him. Yep, that’s right—we try to use God. We try to shape Him to fit our own preferences. And when we do, He doesn’t like to do the things we don’t like to do, He doesn’t like the people we don’t like and He doesn’t care about the things that don’t interest us. Essentially God resembles us—but...

Last night at Ablaze we discussed how some times as we progress in our relationships with our parents, we start to push away from them in our teenage years. But we have suggested that they don’t need to and should not ever push their parents our of their lives. Learning how to be an adult is more about accepting our relationships and taking personal responsibility for our actions in those relationships. Some times we for get that our parents have thoughts feelings just like we do. So w...

When we were growing up, our family was everything to us. They were the safe place to run to. They were the calm in the storm. They were the people whose opinions we trusted most and whose advice we took to heart. But over the years, especially the teen years, the voices of our mom and dad become more like nails on a chalkboard than the sweet sound of comfort. So what happened? Our relationship evolved. And while that isn’t necessarily the most comfortable thing in the world for a teenager to go...

Consider: Plenty—it seems—is never really sufficient. “Christmas” in the mind of most is synonymous with “getting.” We build an empire of expectations for this season, only to end up disappointed and left wanting something more, or already bulldozing ahead to next year. There’s something amiss here. Christmas should be our call to trade consumption for generosity. To trade the next best thing for one everlasting gift. What if this year was the start of a new kind of Christmas? A Christmas unlike...