The team, the volunteers, the church, the gel groups- all came together to put on an amazing evening for Vince, Jen, Dawson & Marissa. They are an amazing family and I am thankful to have spent the time I have under Vince’s leadership. Thanks to the Christies for donating the amazing space. You guys are amazing. If you Forefronters are looking to do an event, use them or else…. we’ll send little circus midget clowns to your house to creep you and your kids out.
To Anne, George, Mike, Kevin, Jada, and Chris- your stories are an inspiration to me and I thank you for sharing your hearts tonight with the family. Thanks to everyone from the Gel Groups who showed up to support the family. Thanks to the Bruner Crew for keeping the little kids in one piece as the evening happened, and to Lisa & Dan- you guys worked a great deal behind the scenes to make things happen. You guys are great.
Well here is the video we used this evening, it was a great time. We have one more little something special for Vince on Sunday… and then we’ll send Him off to continue to serve God as we hold it down in the 757 as we Love God, Love People & Turn the World Upside Down.
So it’s Friday and I have Chloe while Carrie works. Most Fridays you can find us cruisin’ around Lynnhaven Mall wasting time. Today my daughter turned into Houdini. She lost her sock 4 different times in the mall.
First three times I was like Matlock and found that joker… but attempt #4 she fooled me my friend. The little pink sock is MIA.
So, our new website is hosted by Clover Sites. They’ve been great and there are quite a few churches across the country who use them to create quality sites. One of those churches is launching this Sunday in ATL- The Courageous Church. I would love for everyone who goes to Forefront to do 2 things today:
Pray for Shaun King and his team that is launching Courageous Church this Sunday that God will move those who are far from God to get out of their homes and experience what God has in store for them.
Please read Shaun’s story (located below) of God’s amazing movement through a miracle. I know many people believe miracles don’t happen today, but they have happened in my life and I am glad they have happened in Shaun’s as well.
“I Experienced a Miracle and I’m Not a Loon”
I’m not sure how well you know me, but I am a relatively normal guy. Well, normal isn’t the best word for me, but you if we all agreed that I’m a down to earth dude, we’d at least be in the right ballpark. It is after 1AM as I am typing this and we get up at the butt crack of dawn in the King House so I have to cut to the chase. I tell you that as circumstantial evidence that what I am about to tell you is important and I am pretty confident that someone out there needs to hear this.
On November 28th, 2003 I experienced a miracle. Not a cool coincidence. Not a freak occurrence. I experienced a miracle.
I am completely sure of it. Several very normal members of my family witnessed it and doctors at the University of Kentucky were baffled by it for days.
On the evening of November 28th, 2003, my wife and I were in a very serious automobile accident in which I was sent through the windshield face first in a head-on car collision going full speed on an icy interstate. I have talked about it several times on this blog in terms of what I had to overcome, but have been reluctant to share my entire story with the world – in part because I did not want to become known as the Miracle Guy.
Tonight I realized that not sharing this story is a disservice to God. Not only that, I feel in my spirit that someone out there needs to read this story right now.
THE SETTING
Visiting our family in Kentucky for the Thanksgiving holidays, my wife and I, after a long day of Christmas shopping, got a bite to eat at Moe’s and were preparing to meet my brother and his wife to go see the movie Mystic River. The roads were covered with black ice that day and Rai and I had actually witnessed a few minor accidents earlier in the afternoon. Being the safe driver that I am, I knew that I would have to be extra careful during the 7 or so mile drive to the movie theater.
Rai and I were SOOOO happy that day. We were scheduled to close on our first home the day we returned to Atlanta and had purchased a bunch of cool items for our new home super early that morning in those crazy, day after Thanksgiving sales. On the way to the movies Rai and I were JAMMING! I mean music cranked all the way up, heads bobbing, full blast JAMMING to the new Byron Cage CD. It had only been out for a little while and we loved it! We were there in Atlanta for the live recording a few months before then and we were Jamming with a capital J to the main song on the disc – “The Presence of the Lord is Here”. In some ways, we were singing it in celebration because we were both keenly aware of how good the Lord had been to us and we had even mentioned our blessings earlier that day.
The instant the song was over, I reached down to hit the button to start the track from the beginning so we could re-do our jam session. As soon as the track began again, I hit a patch of black ice on the interstate and completely lost control of the car.
THE ACCIDENT
After doing a complete donut in our lane of the interstate at about 40 MPH, I tried as hard as I could to straighten the car out, but couldn’t do it. Separating one side of the interstate from the other was not a rail, but a very steep ditch. Our car, a black 2002 Mitsubishi Galant, my first new car, sped toward the ditch, and, according to eye witnesses in the police report, our car went deep down into the ditch and then went airborne into oncoming traffic on the other side of the highway. Seeing the headlights of a truck coming toward us, I very clearly remember my wife screaming out,
“I’m going to die!”
Desperately, with what little faculties I had left, I tried to move the car out of the way of the truck that was coming right for us and BOOOOOOM! Some type of bomb went off in the car. The explosion was so violent that I could smell it, taste it, hear it, feel it, but not see it. Something weird had happened to my face in the explosion.
I could catch only a small glimpse of my wife who was moaning in pain and appeared to be about to pass out or die. Within seconds I started to realize that the bomb that went off must have gone off in my face. I started screaming in pain. I could not see and it felt like my face may have been on fire. My mouth was full of glass and I could tell from the way I sounded in my own ears that something terrible had happened to my lips and teeth. Afraid that my wife was dying and pretty confident that I was about to die myself, I screamed as loud as I could for help and did not understand why my wife was not trying to help me. I noticed that the song, “The Presence of the Lord is Here” was still blasting and felt just a slight comfort by its message. The mind is strange, because I remember thinking that having it playing will probably let people know that I wasn’t a drunk driver. That was important to me.
A bomb had not gone off in our car at all, but, instead, our car collided head-on with a truck going full speed on the interstate. Instead of the truck hitting my wife on the passenger side, which we were told would have likely killed her in an instant, we hit the truck head-on and the impact threw me forward and I crashed, face first (not head first or arms first, but nose first) through my windshield and was thrown back into the car after hitting a side railing on the road.
Unable to free myself, I felt like my face had been broken into pieces. I felt skin falling off of my face and both of my legs felt broken. I could not move. Smelling the smoke, I was panicking and screaming in agony like a raving mad man, but did not sound like myself. Something bad had happened. I could not see and I felt and tasted blood everywhere. A man, who unknowingly broke my heart, came next to the car, looked at me, said nothing, and left. He could have gone for help for all I know, but when he left I felt like I had been totally abandoned and was moving much closer to death.
What may have been just a minute, but felt like about an hour passed when a very sweet woman, like an angel without fear, came to the car. I moaned to the woman that I was a young pastor and that the woman with me was my wife. She grabbed my hand and told me very gently that she was a nurse and a Christian and that she was praying that I would live and for me to hold on. Her words were nice, but I began to feel an unspeakably deep sense of depression fall over me. (I never stopped screaming in pain throughout this ordeal.)
Her words confirmed for me that I must be dying and I began to get very sad. I am crying now as I type this because I remember the overwhelming sense of sadness and despair that started to swallow me as I considered all of the unfulfilled dreams and hopes with my wife and our young family. My daughter was not even two years old and I was about to leave her alone in the world. The woman told me that it was urgent that she find a cover to wrap my face up to keep it together. She grabbed a blanket from my back seat and began to gently wrap my face with it. She never left my window until the police and EMT’s got there a few minutes afterwards. The police asked me for emergency contact information and I seemed to have given them my mother’s contact information. Apparently my wife also gave them contact information for her mother and her aunt.
After a team of people yanked the door open to get me out, my grief and sadness began to grow because I could hear and sense the trepidation and fear on behalf of every person that saw me. I was being carted away on a stretcher away from my wife and I had no idea what her condition was. My sadness grew because I kept feeling like I was going to die. I began to imagine places that we wanted to vacation together and all of the things I wished I had told her about my love for her. I had convinced myself that if I could live until I got to the hospital, that everything would be OK.
I heard the EMT’s assess that my left leg was badly broken and that it appeared that every bone in my face had been broken when it went through the windshield. I started to drift in and out of consciousness and heard the EMT’s tell the driver that they “were losing him.” Real life is different than television because it was clear that the EMT’s were very nervous. The driver then started yelling at them that he couldn’t rush or that they’d all end up like “him” (me).
The EMT’s kept lying to me and telling me that we were almost there. It helped me a little. I heard them say that my blood pressure was dropping. Because something had happened to my eyes, I could not see anything, but could hear very well. I heard them charge the paddles and, I kid you not, got so afraid that they were going to use them on me that I think the last adrenaline I had left kicked in. They told me that my injuries were very severe, but to just hold on until we got to the hospital.
I held on and prayed and prayed and prayed that God would just spare my life.
THE MIRACLE
By the time I got to the hospital, my mother, my mother-in-law and many of the members of her small Pentecostal church, my wife’s aunt, and my brother, who was a youth pastor in Indianapolis at the time, had all been notified by staff or called by one another. My mother was told that my legs were broken and that my face was broken into many pieces and that my injuries were life-threatening.
Every person above that I just named began praying for me and for my wife. My brother began praying for healing. My mother began praying that the Lord would save her son. The nurse that comforted me at the scene of the accident had prayed that I would live.
After they got me into the emergency room and began to assess my injuries, I began to feel the Spirit of God in a way that I had never felt before or have never felt since. With doctors and plastic surgeons waiting to perform surgery on my face, I heard them talk about assembling the right hardware and plates that were needed. Knowing that I would not be able to talk once they started operating on my face (while I was awake), I began to beg nurses to write a note on my chest that said,
“I still believe in the Goodness of the Lord”
After begging two nurses to write the note and trying to tell them that I wasn’t crazy, the third nurse wrote the note and placed it on my chest. I asked her to not let anyone remove the note and pointed to it every chance I got. It is on my chest with my blood on it in this photo.
After washing my face and picking out shards of glass from it, they rushed me to have a CATSCAN done on my face and on my legs. The results shocked them and shocked me.
In spite of the fact that my face went through a windshield during a full speed head on-collision with a truck, in spite of the EMT diagnosis that “every bone in my face was broken,” in spite of the phone call made to my mother, in spite of all of that…
NOT ONE SINGLE BONE IN MY FACE WAS BROKEN. NOT ONE. NOT EVEN MY NOSE. NOT ONE BONE IN MY LEGS WERE BROKEN. NOT EVEN A HAIRLINE FRACTURE IN MY FACE OR MY LEGS.
Doctor after doctor and nurse after nurse told me that nearly ever person that goes through a windshield in such a violent head-on car collision dies and every single one of them ends up with scores of broken bones.
In spite of the fact that it took over 300 stitches to put my face back together – including stitching a big part of my bottom lip back on and my left eyelid back on – NOT A SINGLE BONE WAS BROKEN IN MY BODY.
I have thought about this across the years and there is a chance that every nurse and EMT and doctor that examined me and felt on my face and legs and studied me before I had those CATSCAN’s and MRI’s was simply wrong. They all misdiagnosed my condition. That is possible.
But for me, it takes just as much faith to believe this as it does for me to believe that something unexplainable, something strange, something miraculous happened to me that put the bones in my face back together again.
For days while I was recovering in the hospital at the University of Kentucky, doctors would visit me and discuss the strange occurrence of what happened. Medical students came by to examine me because of the peculiar nature of it all. My eyes were swollen shut for several days, but I could hear how peculiar people found my condition. Because my face still looked so horrible, I think people had a hard time actually believing that no bones were broken beneath the wounds.
I am choosing to believe that a miracle happened on that day. I experienced it for myself. If you know much about me, you know that I’m not that religious and I’m certainly not a very spooky dude. Before this happened to me, I probably leaned more to the side of believing that miracles rarely, if ever, happen in the real world. I had prayed for miracles before this incident and saw my prayers go (seemingly) unanswered.
I can’t explain miracles. I can’t predict when they’ll happen. I’m not sure why they happen when they happen. I don’t know why they don’t happen when we often want them to.
But doggone it, they happen and I am convinced that God still wants us to hope and believe that they are possible in every circumstance. Will a miracle happen every time? No. Why? I don’t know. But miracles can happen and my face (scars and all) is living proof!
Now if you don’t mind, I have to jam out to the track, that while nearly killing me, gave me a new lease on life!
Don’t you hate it when you forget someone’s name? Growing up in the area, I see people I knew in high school all the time. Unfortunately, I am HORRIBLE with names. I always say something like, “Hey man!” or “What’s up brotha?” or “How’s it going dude?” But not their name. I remember what nicknames people gave them in high school, but most wouldn’t be appropriate to call them. It’s always an awkward moment, and I’m pretty sure they can sense it too.
Names are such a sensitive thing. It carries identity, purpose, meaning, and more. It truly tells people who we are and makes us known. Peter had a “name” moment in Mark 8. Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do people say I am?” They begin spouting off answers like, “John the Baptist, Elijah, other prophets.” I’m sure Jesus at this point has a little smirk on his face and turns to Peter, “Who do you say I am?” Peter responded, “You are the Christ.”
I love how simple and to the point Peter is. He gets it. He knows that the weight of Jesus name is heavy, and His purpose is great. I pray that I can hit the alarm each morning, put my feet on the floor and truly recognize who Jesus is and the importance of His life of love. I pray I can recognize Him like Peter did. I pray the same for you too.
So just to clear up some confusion- we started the Bible reading plan when we launched the new program at Forefront. That was December 28th. The program has the days labeled for you and what passages correspond with the days of the week.
Here is the run down from the beginning to today so you can follow the progress:
Sunday, Dec 28- Psalms 1 and 2 Monday, Dec 29- Mark 1 Tuesday, Dec 30- Mark 2 Wednesday, Dec 31- Mark 3 Thursday, Jan 01- Mark 4 Friday, Jan 02- Mark 5 Saturday, Jan 03- Proverbs 1 Sunday, Jan 04- Psalms 3, 4 and 5 Monday, Jan 05- Mark 6 Tuesday, Jan 06- Mark 7 Wednesday, Jan 07- Mark 8 (POSTING LATER TODAY) Thursday, Jan 08- Mark 9 Friday, Jan 09- Mark 10 Saturday, Jan 10- Proverbs 2
And on Sunday, you will get your program and it will have the next week’s passages with the days next to them for your reading pleasure. I love how many people are doing the reading plan and I’ve received quite a few emails about how people are loving getting into their Bibles (some for the first time ever).
In middle school, I LOVED TO CUSS. You name the word and I was all over it like white on rice. Four letter words dripped from my tongue in every sentence, conversation, talking to myself- it didn’t mater. While hanging out with friends, I would see how I could weave together a web of obscenities that would cause any sailor to blush. It would be safe to say my mouth was ‘unclean.’
One day, we’re hanging out as a family in the backyard- cookin’ out. My dad’s at the grill, mom’s setting the fixings on the table and I’m joking around with my brother. I remember swinging this stick around and accidentally catching him right in the jaw. WHAM! His mouth is bleeding, he’s crying, I begin to panic- but in the moment a wordy dird flies… “Oh SSSS-HHHHH-IIII-ZZZ-ZZZ-LLL-EEEE!” Only I didn’t have the “izzle” at the end if you know what I mean.
My mother ran over and smacked me on the mouth. Twice. Once for hitting my brother and another for being ‘unclean.’ She asked where I heard the word, I told her I didn’t know. She called me a liar and told me, “I don’t need to talk like that. That’s not how people talk.”
In Mark 7, we see some religious leaders who try to call out the disciples for eating without washing their hands. Jesus lays out some verbal ninjary (yes, I made up a word, but it sounds awesome) and slices their thinking by responding with, “It’s not anything from the outside that makes a man unclean, it’s what comes out that makes a man unclean.”
In the moments when life isn’t all you planned, In the quietness of your room where no one sees you, When you leave the doors of yoru church’s facitlity, As you hang around the office with co-workers, As you have a disagreement with your spouse, When you talk to your kids when they’ve messed up,
What comes out? What do you do? Is it clean? Or is it… shizzle?
The other night my wife and I sat down and watched “Hancock.” I was definitely down with that movie. If you haven’t seen it, you should definitely check it out. He is the guy from another world- He tries to help people in need, but even as he helps people, he isn’t really accepted, people just want more, or they don’t even recognize him.
Sounds a lot like Jesus in the reading today. He’s in his home town, the religious leaders question Him asking, “What authority do you have? Aren’t you that carpenter’s son?” So, He moves on, but in the process does some amazing things: walks on water, feeds 5,000 with just five loaves of bread and two fish, sends out the 12 to spread the message of love.
Jesus continually pushes forward doing what God called Him to do no matter what the reaction or who questioned Him.
His disciples get worried in a storm- Jesus calms it. People come with needs- Jesus feeds them. People need healing and miracles- Jesus does the miraculous. Leaders question Him- Jesus responds in love and continues with ministry as He has been called.
So, if people push back, take advantage of you, or don’t even recognize your deeds of love… just keep doing what God has called you to do. Even if you are an Unwanted Super Hero.
- Today was a great day at Forefront - Saw quite a few new people at Beach Campus - People are loving the new website layout - Forefront online community is blowing up - Enjoyed tag team preaching with Vince today - Reality Forefront series is great way to start the new year - Michael Kelly is doing an amazing job with global missions - Our local outreach with Bob Neary is spreading and I LOVE IT! - Heard good things about Chesapeake Campus today with Chuck bringin’ the message - Speaking of Chesapeake, we’re on the move to Cinema Cafe in February - We have a great staff who is making it happen for real- send them an email or phone call letting them know you appreciate them - We should thank God for how He moves here at FF - Can’t wait to see what He’ll do in 2009
I love the book of Mark. I’m extremely A.D.D. and so the fact that he kind of moves from moment to moment quickly- it keeps my attention. There was one verse that really stuck out in this chapter after reading it this morning. Verses 24-25:
“24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
It made me think about two things.
Number one- my wife. She knows what’s best almost all of the time for our family (notice I said what’s best and not, what’s right, I can’t ever tell her she’s right- j/k). Anytime something comes up she is usually the first to lay out a plan, but sometimes we don’t always agree. That causes the house to be divided- because sometimes disagreements in our house turn into World War 3 (I’m sure that never happens in your house). I wonder if our communication was better, if our relationship with God was stronger and more consistent, and we learned to compromise & give a little more… if our house would not be divided in those moments? I think we could fall into a place where God was the center and it wasn’t about our desires or plans. We’re not a wreck, but we are continually striving for a better marriage and family environment.
Number two- God’s church. Everyone’s got an idea how to create and be the biggest, baddest church in the whole universe. I have my ideas, you ave your ideas, your kids and our students and our pets probably even have ideas… So what happens in the church when you put a ton of people who love God and are passionate about Him and have their idea of what’s best?!? It gets messy. The church was never meant to be a safe place. We bring baggage, hurt, pain, addiction, questions, doubts, and the list goes on. With all of that we want it to be a place where people can find Jesus and we can grow. So, through that passion sometimes comes ownership of ideas that if they aren’t made to happen- people get frustrated. Through that passion people in ministry areas butt heads over who is right.
I love that passion, but a house divided cannot stand. As followers of Jesus, we need to seek His plan. His plan for Forefront, for you, for those who are far from God. As we move forward into 2009, my prayer is that we will be a house that has “gel’ed” together through one common bond- that’s the fact that we love Jesus and want to share it with others. I wasn’t expecting a super big revelation today through the reading (to be honest), but God continues to speak to me and I’m so glad we’re doing this reading plan as a church.
The team, the volunteers, the church, the gel groups- all came together to put on an amazing evening for Vince, Jen, Dawson & Marissa. They are an amazing family and I am thankful to have spent the time I have under Vince’s leadership. Thanks to the Christies for donating the amazing space. You guys are amazing. If you Forefronters are looking to do an event, use them or else…. we’ll send little circus midget clowns to your house to creep you and your kids out. 
