I'm a Type "A"

Ok, some of you are saying "You just figured this out!". Very funny. I'm not referring to the personality type here. Although I have been told that I am a control freak at times but I had a good teacher and sometimes that is ok when you are pushing to give your very best. What I am talking about is blood type. I donated blood last week when we had the bloodmobile come to Journey. I haven't been able to this for a while due to some international travel in countries where there is a malaria risk. I think it took longer for them to look up the countries than it did to give blood.

That is not entirely true. I tried a new donation type. It's called a double red. Is that right Ed? or is that just the nickname? In this process they take your blood, separate out the red blood cells from the plasma and give you back the plasma with some saline. They are able to take 2 units of red cells during a single donation time. That is pretty cool. I do admit, the saline feels weird going back in. It was cool. I don't know why it was cool but it was.

All that to say, if you can, give blood. It can help save a life.

San Diego Blood Bank
American Red Cross

JTA Theme

I was able to get into a couple of books on my last trip and one of them was Holy Discontent by Bill Hybels. I got the book for Fathers day from my mom, (Did I say thank you?, thanks mom). It is a really quick read but it did what good books do and made me think. That's not what this post is about. In Chapter 3 Bill is talking about Your "One Thing". Bill goes on to talk about one main verse that talks about "why we are here" on page 51. He quotes Ephesians 2:10, " We are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do!"

That is our theme verse. I think that is cool. It's a good reminder that God has already prepared the way for us. It's also cool to stop and think that we are His handiwork. Created in His image. He created us to do "good works".

I'm glad I'm able to do them with you. I look forward to the road ahead.

Final Word

I came across this recap to our Kiev trip from on the BGEA website. I put it in the last email but I thought it would be interesting to post here as well.

One Week Later...

I think my body clock is back to normal now. I think going to the gym helped out. I was actually looking forward to going, which is a big step for me, right Heather?

I finally got the pictures from Kiev posted. I was having trouble uploading them but somehow everything worked this morning. There are 4 pages. Hopefully a picture is worth a thousand words because there are very few descriptions. I have a few ideas for next time that I hope will give a better overview of the local area.

Click HERE for the link to the pictures.

I was musing about all the talk about food and thought it is about time for a night on the town. Stay tuned... we'll do that soon, as well as a pool party to try to beat the heat.

Rain on, Rain off

The past few days have been a bit of a whirlwind. Long days filled with rain and wind. But the last evening was picturesque.

The photo above is from the alter call on Sunday night.

All of the programs went off without any major glitches. One Saturday night I think we had 4 different bands, 3 of them back to back. Thanks again to Rick for keeping our side of the stage patched correctly and running smoothly.

I'll try to work on a photo page on the plane. A picture is worth a thousand words. Thanks to Adrian Goldberg for sharing some of his pictures from the event.

It was a great week and I have more to share. I just can't think to clearly at the moment.

Stay close, more to come...

Porkchikenflatfish

That is what we have called it. The "other" white meat. We know it's not a beef product of any type but after that, we're not sure what it is exactly. I'm talking about the meat we have had for dinner since we have been here. Our meals have been arranged and as I understand "business dinners" were ordered so we could eat when we returned from the festivals each evening. That is really cool. But we noticed a patter after a few days. The meat portion of the meal looked identical. One night it was chicken, one night fish, and one night it was pork. It was all breaded and pressed real flat. All of them were prepared the same way, without any seasonings of any type. So we coined the term, "Porkchickenflatfish" to describe the "other white meat".

That will help explain the excitement when we saw the sound check schedule an realized we were going to miss our catered lunch. We HAD to send out for McDonalds. Believe it or not, it was the best McDonalds I've had this month. It's the only McDonalds I've had this month so I guess there's nothing to compare it too. In any case, we enjoyed the burgers and fries.

Here to the left is our resident McDonalds expert Paul Hendrix. Paul has eaten at McDonalds on every continent except Antarctica. Paul managed a McDonalds for 5 years. It's a trip to be around him in McDonalds. He has them sized up about 3 steps in the door. The last time we crossed the threshold of a Mickey'D's we were in Norfolk, Va. While we were waiting in line Paul pointed out all the things that weren't up to par with the McDonalds standard. It really is very interesting. Did you know that the bathroom in a McDonalds shouldn't have any type of smell when you walk in. That piece of useless trivia is free.


This blog has taken 4 days to post and to be honest I don't know where my train of thought is. I know that as excited as we were to not eat at the hotel, when we got to TGI Fridays it was closed. We ended up at Arizona Bar-b-que which come to find out is owned by an American and a German. The decor was americana at it's finest and the service was fast, and good. We ended up there again on Sunday night. I apriciated the apple pie and the funny thing was it cost more than my thin crust pizza.

I must say that the breakfast buffet was a very enjoyable part of the day. I enjoyed the fresh tomatoes, hard boiled eggs and English breakfast tea.

I can't believe I spent so much time talking about food.

Hunker Down

Well, today began early and with grey skies. All the free time yesterday came at a price today when we had a lobby call at 7:45am. Day 3 seems to be the worst for jet lag too. In any case, we had quite a bit of work to do to get ready for sound checks. It rained overnight and everything was wet. By 10:30 or so it was warm an humid and things were drying out.

We got everything ready by lunch and had a few minutes to chill. Our first sound check was 3pm and everything was going well. The clouds started moving back in and we started covering everything. By 4:30pm the deluge had begun. Within an hour it felt like the temperature had dropped 30 degrees and I was looking for some kindling to make a fire.

The service started on it's own at 7pm. I know that sounds like a funny line but we don't really know how it happened. Miles, the FOH A2, was at FOH trying to re-patch a line (more on that in a minute). Jeff, the FOH mixer was on stage next to me, as was Rick. Winfrey was under his plastic listening to the mic that we were trying to fix. It is somewhat of a mystery how the track started, but it started on time and the program was off and running.

I need to give kudos to Rick (see photo on right). I took this photo the first time I saw him sit down all day. Actually it was the second time because he got up before I could get my camera out and I asked him to sit back down. He is soaking wet from standing at the podium while we are working on trying to figure out why one of the lecturn mics had some noise on it. Actually, Rick spent the better part of the afternoon working on the 2 lecturn mics trying to get them clean. Something happened while we were at lunch and the mics didn't sound good at all. These happen to be the mics that Franklin and the translator use. The comical part now was that when the CD started we all scrambled back to our positions for the service. Rick and I were trying to get the mic issue finished and I decided to run a new cable. I got all the pieces together and headed out on stage to hook up the mic. I grabbed the loose cable on the stage, plugged it in and the to the cable we had just run and Jeff turned it on so the speaker could talk into it. I know that sounds a little crazy, but it really happened that way. We talked about it at dinner when we got back to the hotel and Jeff said he was watching the channel for the spike when we made the connection, as soon as he saw that, he turned it on and the speaker started talking. I was one of those, "I can't believe that just happened moments".

The rain was off and on for the service and the wind blew really hard. We had to hunker down to keep from blowing away. I'll end with this picture of our work in progress.

Have a great rest of your day. I'm off to grab some shut- eye.

Then came the rain!

And other things we take for granted.

After I finished the last post I had about 30 minutes before I had to come downstairs. I had been sitting in the lounge with Winfrey, Rick and Paul. We were all working on our computers, thanks to the guys who got the wireless connection fixed, and watching soccer. When I got to my room I noticed how dark it was getting outside. A thunderstorm had blown in and within 10 minutes there was thunder, lightning and rain. We still headed over to the venue and started to try to get things done. It rained off and on for the next couple of hours.

I didn't realize how far North we are. It's not getting dark until close to 9:30pm and I could see light outside when I woke up this morning at 4:45am. I don't think the sun was up, but it was light outside. I heard a couple of the guys talking about the winter months. I can't imagine the short days. Sun comes up at 10:00am and sets between 2 or 3pm.

I haven't thought much about the things I take for granted. Here are a couple of examples:
1. Ice for soft drinks
2. Free refills
3. Smoking indoors.
4. Air Conditioning

I know that all of these are really superficial but they have made me stop and think. I thank God for the blessing of being able to be outside of my little world and see life here. I'm grateful for all that He has provided.

Off to bed now. We have an early call (7:45am) in the lobby. It will be a busy day tomorrow.

Enjoy the fireworks.

Happy 4th of July.

Day 2

You may be asking yourself, "Do we ever work?"

Well yes, yes we do. This is my 3rd post today and I'm trying to play catch up. We have 20 minutes until our next lobby call. This time things should be in a better place for us to get some work done. Here is the view from my hotel room: (Click on the pictures to load larger images)
Just got a message that our call was moved back another hour so I should be able to finish this post.

Here is the view from the field:



Ok, one more. This will look very similar, but I have noted the location of my room.

Ok, with the extra hour, it is safe to say that we have to much time on our hands. By the way, this is not the "normal" set up for Franklin Graham. It happens that George Michael has a concert on Monday night, 24 hours after our last festival. The use of some of their equipment was negotiated and they will be setting up at night after we are done with our programs. Sunday night as we are loading out, they will be loading in their 25 trucks worth of equipment.

That's all for now. It looks like I can grab a quick nap before our lobby call.

Hurry up and Wait

I've been in Kiev a little more than 24 hours. I'm a little upside down. We are 10 hours of time change away from home so things are pretty much upside down.

I landed at 8:30 am yesterday (July 3). It took us about 30minutes to reach the hotel after we waited for another person at the airport that never showed up. After checking into the hotel I ran into another crew member who said everyone was meeting in the lobby at 10:50am. From there we went to the stadium to have a look around and come up with a plan. That took us about 2 hours, waiting for all the different departments heads to show up.

After our meeting we came back to the hotel for a little break and got ready to go to the Chernobyl museum.

One of the festival volunteers gave us a guided tour. He was 6 years old when the accident happened and lived in the closest town to Chernobyl. Both his parents worked at the nuclear power plant. I didn't realize that the plant continued to operate for 14 more years after the accident. There were a total of 4 reactors. 3 of them remained operational after the accident. They finally shut down the reactors in 2000.

One of the things that I found most interesting was the fact the total lack of care for the people. There was such a high need to keep the strong image, the government was willing to risk hundred's of thousands of lives. It took 3 days to start evacuations near the disaster site. 4 days later on May 1st there was a big parade planned in Kiev. The government had a chance to call it off, but didn't. Thousands of people were exposed to high levels of radiation.

The picture to the left is used to depict the devastation and lack of life since the accident. There were entire villages that were buried because the radiation levels were so high. They say the radiation levels were 500 times that of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan during World War II. Over 600,000 people, mostly young servicemen, were involved in the clean up of the accident. They were released from 2 years of their mandatory service time if they would spend 45 seconds cleaning up the debris from the core of the reactor. In that amount of time they received a lethal dose off radiation.

It was a pretty sobering experience.

From there we went across the street to a restaurant that specializes in Georgian (Russia) cuisine. It was very interesting. The bread was good, the veggies were fresh.

First Post

Well, here it is. The first post for the Journey Technical Arts page. I think this will be a lot more interactive than the site I was trying to set up with dot Mac. In any case I hope this will extend our community online and be a little more interactive.