Ok, now I have the attention, of:

1. Football Fans
2. Music Junkies
3. Bird Lovers
4. Eagle’s Nest Members/attendees 

Ok, well sorry to disappoint any of the people in categories 1-3, but I’m not talking about Football, Music, or Birds. THESE THOUGHTS CAME TO ME WHILE CLEANING… First, I want to put out a disclaimer, that this specific blog post is not a bash on anyone, it is not written out of anger, and it is not intended for the purposes of de-facing the value of the history of Eagle’s Nest.  

A little back story for my new/outside readers. I attend, and have attended Eagle’s Nest Fellowship Church for a little under 11 years now, Have been very involved with many ministries and have even worked for the church some as well. Now there is a point to all of this and if you leave now you’ll probably just think I’m another agree rebellious teenager (19)…but this blog is going to be pretty honest only for the sake of making a good point.

I’m afraid that it won’t do the story justice, but I have to start somewhere, so i’ll start with the fact that Eagle’s Nest has many Eagle’s and paintings of eagle’s and are logo has an eagle on it…and rightfully so I might add, goes well with the name…  and so throughout the building you will find many. *(I think in one office I have counted somewhere around 20) Now, of-course some of us love to joke about it, and the truth is that Eagle’s happen to be a large part of who we are. 

**So, I have a confession to make. I have been on a team (comprised of myself only) responsible for the slow removal of Eagle’s from the viewable presence of people. Yes, this is true i started stashing them. Only I soon realized that soon there would be no decorations left, so I gave up. but if you read this and your favorite piece is missing, come find me on Sunday, I’ll give it to you and you can take it home with you.**

I share this next true story from my perspective, and my perspective only. And I’m not using names for the sake of… well you get the picture. But one sunday, After the removal of a particular Eagle Painting I, along with a few other people where questioned about the disappearance of said eagle, (said eagle had been promptly replaced by a beautiful hand painting from another location.) If I believe correctly, we lied, and said we didn’t know where it was and for that I am sorry. However, by the next week the Eagle was placed back and has remained there since. Apparently other church members had complained or otherwise asked about the painting not being there.

IF I’M LOOSING YOU… hang in there I’m getting to my point.

Wake up church, that is my message. That is my challenge to you!!!! Some people may argue and say that I’m just as wrong for wanting the Eagle to not be there. but I’m not saying that. I’m saying that Its NOT about what is hanging on our walls. AND WE HAVE MADE IT ABOUT THAT.  If we don’t love people like we should then the stuff on our walls is POINTLESS. 

Community is not about some identity, (ours being the eagle) Its about fellowship. Where are all the pictures of ministry happening, and the art work of worshipers, where is the life and the joy that we are sharing?? Why don’t we publish that to our people? why not leave our corporate Identity for the sake of our community?

This will be my final paragraph I promise I have written enough, and feel like i have explained nothing, but hopefully your hearing my heart here. Ok, so I’m going to leave you with these last thoughts. I go to college, and I spend time with people who are hurting, and seeking and NOT FINDING A PLACE. Where do these young people hang out? a lot of them, bars. what if our church looked like a bar? Ok, HEAR ME I’m not suggesting that we rip out everything and start serving beer. But I am asking you to consider WHAT ARE WE ABOUT? are we about our pictures of eagles? Are we about our favorite songs? are we about pretty colors? are we about fancy buildings or Amazing Graphics? OR are we about showing people the LIFE found in jesus? What if we stopped going to church on sunday for ourselves and started going for everyone else? Why wouldn’t the church be the perfect place to display EVERYTHING going on in the community of the church itself?  And so I leave you with this question, and this challenge.

Ask yourself this question: WHAT IF CHURCH WAS BUILT FOR THEM AND NOT FOR ME.

thanks for enduring, if you have questions or you’d like to beat me up for my honesty please email me: takaminescx@gmail.com. I hope that you have heard my heart I strive to love you all with everything I have. And I want to be a piece of building something so much greater then anyone of us could be alone. 
In Christ’s Service
Jeffery Peck

(www.myspace.com/no_your_other_left) 

*** if you email me comments, I may in-fact post them back on here to reply.***

Ok, so this is going to basically going to be a short little commentary on, well, myself. When I started this blog I pretty much figured  that I’d A. never use it, or B. Only post random things every once in a while. I haven’t posted much to be honest. But, I do have a few more things I want to write I just haven’t got around to writing them just yet. 

So, that being said, I think most people think of me as a light hearted, not particularly shallow, but not really deep, i mean, those of you who know me when was the last time you heard me make a serious comment?… my point exactly. Well for me this blog has become a place where I can write out all the deep things that I think about… the only problem is finding the time to type thoughts. So all things concluded, look for more “deep” posts in the future, and if they aren’t there, its not cause I’m shallow and have no depth its that for me to explain my thoughts well it takes a while. Work with me people ok that will be all. 

Jeffery

Have you ever sat down at your Tv playing your favorite Video game, and your just messing around and then all of the sudden you come to the end of the designed game the invisible force field were nothing exists past it… doesn’t that ever bother you? have you ever been like, “I want to go farther, there should be more to this then what is here!!” What if the universe was just out past the last planet? and you could go out and hit the edge? Wouldn’t you hate it? if all the stars out there were really just graphics composed of pixels to make you think that they are RAGING BALLS OF FIRE? How disappointing that would be. Wouldn’t you must rather have a never ending universe that no matter how fast we travel, no matter how long we live, and no matter how big we make our telescope, we never can exhaust the beauty of it?  

At our young adults group on wednesday night we watched a video of a speaker talking about the indescribable-ness of God. He used astronomy to put this into perspective… it was way too detailed for me to try and explain it to you here, but essentially God holds the universe in his hand, and just our galaxy alone is so immense that IF we traveled at the speed of LIGHT (light can travel around the world 7x in one second) it would take us 100,000 years to cross it. I DARE YOU… look up some pictures of the milky-way galaxy, do some research… see how small earth really is.

Neil Armstrong said it this way on his apollo 11 mission, ”I put my thumb up to the window and blotted out the earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”   

Psalms 8:3-4 Says, When I view and consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained and established, What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You care for him?

I mean to say, that if the universe were the size of the sun, then we would be smaller than the most microscopic organism known to mankind! WE ARE TINY.  Its so easy to say that God has the whole world in his hand, and picture a man holding a ball, about the size of a bowling ball standing there…just chilling. In the eyes of God earth is a speck that seemingly we just happen to live on, and He knows are NAME? The bible even says he knows the number of hairs on our heads. I’m just totally blown away by that.

So, do you still think your big? ARE YOU SURE?… 

Earth is but a dot obscured in a beam of scattered sunlight (pinpointed by artificial blue circle). Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

If that doesn’t just put into perspective Gods amazing love for us, that he would make all this just so we could enjoy it.

I guess the neatest part of it is were all here on earth building our telescopes that see BILLIONS of miles away, and God is holding our universe in his hand saying, “You’re going to have to do a lot better then that!!

Jeffery.

So, my first true stab at my intellectual self.I just got off the phone with a good friend of mine, and I find myself now in thought about where I’ve been over the past several months. I’ve been busy, very busy in fact, the kind of busy where at the end of the day you wonder what you’ve been doing. I’ve definitely been too busy to read. My friend reminded me of this tonight, as we shared our stories of the past few weeks of our lives. About a month prior to my super busyness I started reading Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller.  He has a couple of really good quotes that I could use to serve my purpose, its a great book and I hope that I can finish it soon.

Anyways, he says in the book  ”If he(satan) can sink a man’s mind into habit, he will prevent his heart from engaging God.” My friend and I were talking about a bunch of stuff, but the real important thing that he flipped the light switch on was how, often we get so busy doing the things that we love doing that we lose our intimate connection with God. Yea, I love God and I am a christian but i have been the farthest thing from close to him. I have been serving hand in hand with great leaders and men of God, and all along still not been connected with God. I bought this Message-NASB Parallel bible, sweet bible got a great deal on it but its spent more hours collecting dust then it has been read. I did start re-reading the book of Job about 3 weeks ago, but i think I did that for 3 nights maybe.

 I find myself amazed that I actually have to own my phrase of the month, “the endless circle of screwing yourself over.” I’ve been there… a lot. I’ve discovered that there has been more to my business then even I had realized. I have been hiding from God. WHY? I’m not entirely sure, and thats probably for another blog. For now, I think I’m going to start with some quiet time and prayer. Memorizing  the bible isn’t the end all, but staying connected to God might just be all that matters.

  Jeffery

God always knows where we are. The question is can we find ourselves? 

and so it begins. 12:06 on friday afternoon.  I’m really not to sure I’m going to be good at this, but somehow I feel like if I can fake it. If i can make myself feel like I can blog and type on and on about things that I’m experiencing in life, things I’m learning…etc.  I will in some fashion become a more intellectual being. But since thats not true, I will always be me no matter how much I type or speak. Here lies the end of my first of many.=) Jeffery