I’ll be performing a few acoustic numbers at the open mic night at Amazing Tone Music with my friend and fellow worship leader Alastair Vance (@alastairvance on twitter).
Come out and have a good time! They’ve got a coffee bar at the shop in case you get sleepy.
Set List:
Everything Glorious – David Crowder Band
Fire Fall Down – Hillsong United
Enough – Chris Tomlin
Mighty To Save – Hillsong United
Sweetly Broken – Jeremy Riddle
This was Week 2 of our “Famous Last Words” series. Pastor Bill is speaking about the phrases that Christ said while he was on the cross. This week we looked at the phrase “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
What a powerful sermon. It was one of the best sermons I’ve heard Bill preach (which is saying something – Bill is an awesome speaker). One of the main points was that it is tempting for us to think we relate to Christ when he said these things. We feel pain and loss in our lives, and sometimes it feels as though God has abandoned us in our time of need. But, no matter what we go through – we will never, ever understand what that moment was like for Christ, because it would the only time in history – past present and future – that the relationship between Jesus and God the Father was ever, or will ever be broken. And we can’t understand that. And he did that for us.
Our drummer wasn’t with us this morning – he was playing with another band that has an opportunity to play Christian music in a prison, which is pretty awesome. We did more of an acoustic set with keys, bass, electric guitar, vocals, and acoustic guitar. It’s cool to change it up every once in a while from the straight up rock and roll vibe we usually do.
We started with “Everything Glorious”, Bill welcomed people, and then we did “Fire Fall Down”, “Enough”, and Mighty to Save”. After the message we did “Sweetly Broken”, which fit beautifully with what Bill said during the message. “Sweetly Broken” has one of my favorite phrases in all of modern worship music that goes like this:
To the cross I look
And to the cross I cling
Of its suffering I do drink
Of its work I do singFor on it my Savior
Both bruised and crushed
Showed that God is love
And God is just
Speaking (or singing) those words out loud is a powerful thing.
I’m the worship leader at River Oaks Community Church.
This is Sam. He liked to sit inside bags and boxes and other such things.
I’d like to introduce a new section of the blog here: Photo Friday (yes, I know this is Saturday…)
I really like taking photos. I tried a project365 – basically you take at least one photo a day for year. It lasted about a month, so I’m going to start this little project. I’ll take some pictures throughout the week, pick the best one, and post it on Friday. Pretty simple.
I’m not much of a website development guy, but I get into building websites. I discovered Joomla a long, long time ago. I had just started thinking about creating a website for my music, and I was looking at solutions. Once I wrapped my head around Joomla, I really, really loved it. It is very powerful – you can display content in just about any way imaginable, and there are some very good companies making templates for it, so it can look really good, too.
I ran this site on Joomla for a while, and then I discovered WordPress. WordPress is blogging software, but it can act as a content management system if you are creative with it. While Joomla is very powerful, it can be a bit difficult to use. WordPress is very elegant in its simplicity, and it is a joy to use – a lot easier for a person to just jump right in and start building a site. So, I jumped platforms, and I’ve been running WordPress for quite a while, now.
I’m getting to the point, though, where the versatility of Joomla is something I keep looking for, and WordPress just can’t do what I want it to, while Joomla can. At least, not with my knowledge of tweaking WordPress “under the hood”. Both systems are built on PHP, so if you are good with code, you can do pretty much anything with either of them. I’m not a code guy.
If I were to compare the two, here is my brief and uneducated synopsis:
WordPress is very elegant and a joy to use. With the right template, it can easily act as a content management system and display your content in very creative ways, but you seem to be locked into the confines of your template if you aren’t good writing PHP and CSS code. If you’re running a blog or a simple site, using WordPress is almost a no-brainer.
Joomla, on the other hand, is very powerful and flexible, allowing you to display your content in almost unlimited ways. If you are looking to build a bit more complex site and showcase different content in different ways inside of your site, Joomla is definitely worth a look.
I’m building a mirror of this site in Joomla right now – I think I might just make the switch. Again. You can view the Joomla site while it’s in development here.
“Deconstruction” by Justin McRoberts is one of my favorite songs ever. It’s on his album also named “Deconstruction”, which happens to be one of my favorite albums ever as well. You can check out Justin’s stuff here and follow him on twitter here.
