Spilling the Beans

Several weeks ago I let out at hint about some cool upcoming stuff happening in our lives. Melissa is pregnant. Just kidding. She has had her woman parts took out of her insides so if she were to really be pregnant then some major miracles would have to had happened or either the doctor took out a whole lot of the wrong stuff. Neither happened. She is not pregnant. And for those who have asked, I am not pregnant either. Yes, I have put on a few pounds in the belly area but I can lose weight at any time. You, however, will always be ugly.

Anyway, on to the beans being spilt. I am launching my own ministry called Merge. This has been in the works for quite some time and I have been waiting to announce it. Merge will basically consist of three parts. Merge camps will be designed for students in grades 6-12. Merge will be producing camps, retreats and conferences through out the year. Our first retreat will be January 18th-21st 2008 in Gatlinburg,TN. As of this posting, this retreat has several youth groups committed to come and is already over 50% booked. Our summer camps are going to be held in the Florida Panhandle for 7 weeks in the summer of 2008. As of this posting, one complete week has already been filled and this is still over a year away. We also will be producing several mini retreats and disciple now weekends throughout the year. If your youth group would like to be a part of this please email me at sammy@sammyclary.com.

Many of you know that I have spent 14 years in student ministry. As a result I have a passion for helping student ministries reach students for Christ. The second part of Merge will be focusing on equipping student ministers and youth workers through custom Creativity and Leadership Conferences. We will be holding 4 of these retreats each fall as well as booking private Creativity and Leadership Conferences for individual churches. Again, for more information on these please contact me at sammy@sammyclary.com.

And lastly, I will be speaking at Camps, Retreats, Conferences, and Churches throughout the year. To see my schedule you can visit my new site sammyclary.com. This site will consist of mainly student ministry related items and my booking information. If the crazy antics of my everyday life are what you are looking for, then my current site will still be the place for you.

My new site sammyclary.com is operational but more is coming to the site. It is still a work in progress. The sites to get all the camp and retreat information are mergecamps.org or mergecamps.com. These two sites are still about a month away from being operational.

What can you do?
1. Pray for our ministry
2. Tell your student pastor or youth leader about us.
3. You can partner with us. We are being set up as a non profit ministry and all contributions are tax deductible. We are waiting to receive our tax status back from the IRS. We have been told that the process takes between 3-6 months. We hvae already been approved by the Secretary of State and usually the IRS follows along with the whatever the decision of the State.

The way it is looking, we will be hopefully launching all of this at about the same time as Isaac is able to be at home full time.

Congrats to the 24 and 48

Congratulations to the 24 and 48 teams in Sunday's Nascar Race. 2nd and 3rd wasn't too bad. I guess the Isaac Mo Jo paid off for both of these teams. I guess that if Isaac had spent a little more time giving them pointers on their chassis set up then maybe they would have won. Here is the link to the pics of Isaac's visit to the race shop last week. http://sammyclary.blogspot.com/2007/02/awesome-day.html

The Big Town of Williamston

Tonight I had a cool opportunity to hang out with a couple of my former youth(Joel and Kristen). The cool thing is that they each used to be in two different churches that I had served years ago. Melissa and I kind of introduced them through a Disciple Now weekend and now they have been married for several years. They didn't get married that weekend it was many months or maybe a year or so later. That was and is the only time we have kind of set someone up on a date. So I guess that would mean that we are batting 1.000. I guess maybe I should open up some type of internet service where we fix people up. Na. I'll leave that to Match.com or whoever those places are.

Anyway, Joel is the youth minister at FBC Williamston and I had the chance to hang out with their youth group and see what all was going on. I learned a new game tonight. Basically you put a bunch of people in a gym and you play dodgeball except there are no teams and it is every person for themselves. So technically it is perfectly legal to pelt someone with a red playground ball from point blank range. I found this to be quite theraputic. I can only imagine how many people left with welps from being bombarded. My apologies to the adult leader that I almost decapitated from 10 feet away.

They had some cool stuff going on down in Williamston. They had students leading on stage and students running sound and media which was cool. I will be back down there on April 15th speaking so I hope to see you guys there. I hope there will be a every man for himself dodgeball tourney that night after youth.(That was a hint to the youth pastor).

In other news, we will be heading back to Cincinnati next Monday. It looks like we will be there for a couple of weeks.

I will be launching my new website in the next week or so. It will have contact information as well as my upcoming speaking schedule and other cool stuff. I will be speaking at Pendleton Street BC the week after we get back from Cincinnati. Other upcoming dates will be listed on the new site.

One last thing, today I went to my grandparents 65th wedding anniversary today. It amazing to see two people who have persevered through so many years. They truly are an inspiration to me.

Funny

This is pretty funny stuff. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxmc9_AnyN0.

MSM

Wednesday night I got to do something I haven't gotten to do in a long time. Because of the busy schedule, I haven't gotten to attend a youth service at our own church in quite some time. Let me just say that the place was rockin. There were tons of students there. The center section of their main auditorium was full. If you haven't been to Marathon, the main auditorium holds around 1000 people.
But that wasn't the cool part of what I saw. These guys have students that lead. They had discipled and mentored students to a point where they ran the sound, they led in worship through their student band and more. You could tell that they had spent a lot of time pouring into their students rather than just having a program where the adults did everything and they just sat back and watched. I think a big part of their success has to be with their small groups that take place in homes all over the area on Sunday nights. Having been in Student Ministry for over a decade, it saddens me when I see churches neglecting the basics in discipling kids. And when I say discipling, I'm not talking about sticking them in an area and having a 30 minute lesson with them and calling that small group or discipleship. I'm talking about someone that is more mature spending time pouring into their life. Many churches are failing in raising up the next generation of leaders. Good job MSM. You guys are raising up leaders.

Another great moment Wednesday night was seeing Bryan Holder( http://bryanholder.blogspot.com) an awkward on stage moment during the music. He was called on stage by Chasen (http://chasencallahan.blogspot.com), the student worship pastor to demonstrate his skills. I'm still not sure what those skills were but it was funny.

I failed to mention that these guys are doing all of this without a youth facility of their own. They are in the building stages as we speak. The cool thing is that with the rate of their growth they will have to do multiple services as soon as it opens. Their new youth facility "The Garage" will hold several hundred students. Parents, if you are in the upstate and looking for a place to get your students plugged in to a Student Ministry that have an impact in their lives, then get them to Marathon on Wednesday nights at 7:07 p.m. Then be sure to get them involved in one of the small groups that meet on Sunday Nights.

Awesome Day

Today we went to Charlotte to let Isaac see where they build some of the Nascar cars. Our first stop was Hendrick Motor Sports. They have the cars of Jeff Gordon(Isaac's favorite driver), Jimmy Johnson, Kyle Busch, and Casey Mears. We were visiting one of the shops and met a very nice lady at the desk named Sally(I think this was her name. I hope this is right because she really hooked Isaac up with a great suprise). We were talking about the Hendrick Marrow Program and how much programs like that have helped Isaac and others who needed donors, when she tells us she is going to make a call. She called two more very nice ladies. Isaac met Courtney and Pam. They head up the Hendrick Bone Marrow Program. Courtney asked Isaac if he would like to meet one of Jeff Gordon's crew. He happened to be her husband. Courtney and Pam then proceeded to give Isaac a personal and all access tour of Jeff Gordon and Jimmy Johnson's race shop. He got to see all of the cars as they were being built. He met many of the crew members. They all were probably the friendliest group of people we have ever met. Each one would stop what they were doing and spend some time talking to Isaac. He met Jeff Gordon's spotter who gave Isaac his hat. One crew man gave him some lug nuts off of Jeff Gordon's car. He met Courtney's husband who is Jeff Gordon's gas man. While we were standing there, Jimmy Johnson's crew chief Chad Knaus came up to Isaac and spoke to him for a few moments. All in all it was probably the coolest thing ever. I was about to wet my pants it was so cool. Isaac just took it all in with amazement.

Next we went to several other race shops including Ganassi Racing, Dale Earnhardt Incorporated, Ginn Racing and last we went to Penske Racing.
At Penske Racing it was like Deja Vu. The receptionist asked us if he had gotten to see a lot at the other shops. We told her he had been given a behind the scenes tour at Hendrick. As soon as we said that, it was almost as if they didn't want to be outdone. She called up a guy named Gary who is the shop foreman at Penske. That basically means he is the head honcho of the over 200 employees who build the cars for Ryan Newman and Kurt Busch. He the proceeded to put us on a golf cart and give Isaac a personal behind the scenes tour of everything that goes on in their shop. When I say shop, I mean the place is so huge inside that you have to have a golf cart to get from one end to the other. They had over 70 completed race cars for the two drivers with each car costing around $200,000. This was another way cool pee my pants moment and once again Isaac was in awe of everything. He just soaked it all in and you could see his little mind thinking.

Thank you to all of the Nascar folks we visited today, especially to the very nice people at Hendrick Motorsports and Penske Racing. They both won Isaac's heart

Boogity Boogity Boogity

Since we were in the hospital for so long and since we still have a a few more months to go before Isaac is ok to go without IV infusions, we haven't been on a real type vacation for a couple of years. Instead, though we have found ways to take one day trips and kinda make it feel like a vaction. Well, this week was Melissa's week to pick where she might want us to go for a day. And would you believe it, she wanted to go to Concord, NC and Mooresville, NC. All this time she said she has been wanting to visit some Nascar Race shops and see how the cars are made. So tommorrow morning we are heading up to North Carolina and let her have her wish. Ok I'm lying. She is hating the fact that Isaac and I were wanting to go up there but she is going to go too. I told her that there is shopping near Hendrick Motorsports. I failed to tell her that is a Bass Pro Shops World. Oh well, she'll find out soon enough. Isaac has been wanting to see how they make the cars and where they make them so we are going to take him to see them.

While we are up there we are going to drive on up to Randleman North Carolina and let him see where the Victory Junction Camp is. This is the camp started by the Pettys. It is for children with special medical needs and gives them an opportunity to experience camp when they possibly otherwise couldn't. Isaac qualifies to go for either the week with Liver Transplant Patients or the week with Bone Marrow Transplant Patients. We hope that after he is doing better and feeling better, that he will let us send in his application for camp. Right now he is still going through mommy and daddy attachment because of all he has been through. Actually, it is probably more of the mommy attachment thing. Anyway, we will surely have some pics of our adventure tommorrow. Who knows, maybe I will take my shirt off and paint the number 8 on my chest and stand outside of Dale Earnhardt Incorporated headquarters. Na that's been done before every week at the Nascar race. Oh well, I'll think of something to do.

That's all I have for now. 3 Forever