Making the Connection

Bethanie showed me a cool site called Wordle that creates a very creative word-cloud of your webpage/blog. You just enter your URL and it takes the weighted words that it finds and makes a randomized picture that you can customize with your chocie of fonts, colors, etc. The results are very interesting.

Give it a try and feel free to link to yours in the comments section below.

We all love birthdays. It’s a special day to celebrate surviving another year. And people generally make a deal out of the day they’re born. Everyone is born once, but not everyone is born again.

In our family, we make a big deal out of Makenzie and Bethanie’s spiritual birthdays, the day that they accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. Today is Bethanie’s 4th spiritual birthday. The girl’s just happened to get out of school early today, so we spent a few hours at Gatti’s pizza complete with a birthday cake.

Here’s something to think about: If you are born only once (physical birth), you die twice (physical and spiritual death); but if you’re born twice (physical & spiritual) then you die only once (physical).

By the way, if you’ve never gone public with your decision to follow Jesus, you can do that this Sunday morning at The Connection Church through baptism. Sign up here.

Have you ever found yourself doing something you didn’t want to do? And then feeling guilty about it but doing it again and again? Do you wonder if you’ll ever be free from those chains? Everybody struggles with something? It’s the human condition. And it seems like as soon as you think you’ve got one problem solved, another one rears its ugly head. Welcome to life. Yeah, I know it’s not the most encouraging blog post, but it’s reality.

But in the middle of our mess, Jesus has a solution. Jesus begins the greatest sermon ever preached with a list of principles that he says will bring us extreme happiness and life. They’re called the Beatitudes and we’re going to be looking at them one by one over the next 8 weeks.

This Sunday, we’re kicking off our newest series called “Remedy: Living Free From Addictions” all about healing our hurts, hang-ups, and habits that are keeping us in bondage and keeping us from God’s best. I’ve been looking forward to doing this series ever since the start of The Connection Church because I know that this is right where people are. I cannot wait to see what God is gonna do in our lives.

Let me personally invite and encourage you to do whatever you have to to be with us this Sunday at TCC for the start of this new series. This is the perfect week to invite as many people as you can to come along with you. We want to pack the house with people because we know God wants to do some life-changing. I’ll see you there.

For more info, check out our website and our Facebook page.

No, I’m not talking about the Police minus Gordon Sumner, I’m talking about my recent experience of getting rid of the wasps on my front porch. Check it out (hang in there or fast forward for the action sequence):

Where’s The Sting? from Cole Phillips on Vimeo.

This weekend I took the fam to see the new movie, “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.” Now, when I first saw the previews for this one, I wasn’t really excited about it because I figured it was just another kids movie cranked out to make a few bucks. I also wasn’t too pumped about the idea of that much food raining from the sky. It sounded kind of gross. Not to mention my concern about what would happen to all the water if it was raining meatballs. But, it completely blew away my expectations. It was one of the best movies I’ve seen recently. I’m continually amazed at how incredible they’re doing 3D now. And this one had some beautiful animation. It also was filled with lots of laugh-out-loud moments and quotable lines. But what really stood out was the way it brought out some important truths/lessons without being in-your-face preachy. Here are the Top Ten Life Lessons from CWACOM…

• You can accomplish anything if you stick with it and give it your best
• The value and importance of creativity
• Be yourself and people will love you for who you are, if they love you at all
• Too much of anything is not good, especially if it’s junk food. Moderation is the key
• Don’t take shortcuts to success
• God don’t make no junk
• Sometimes you’re working to try and please everyone to earn the love of someone you will never please
• If you just keep piling up your trash, eventually, you’re going to have a huge problem
• Sometimes the people who love you don’t have the words to communicate how they really feel, but love you just the same
• Monkeys don’t have anything worthwhile on their minds

It’s all in there along with Mr. T and Doogie Howser, so how can you go wrong?