November 10 – “Biker Rally ends”

Well, the massive horde of bikers have come to the Island and now are for the most part gone.  The weekend was once again a good one for the Island economy, and from what I have heard not too shabby for the Kingdom of God, either.  I was told that one of the Christian ministry groups on the Island saw quite a few people come to faith in Jesus for the very first time.  Sadly there were a few deaths as the result of accidents as well.   We pray for those families as they work through their grief process. 

Seaside’s retreat center had two or three groups staying there for the weekend so they could minister to the bikers. In fact, the Southern Baptist disaster relief feeding team was camped in our parking lot again, putting out thousands of free pancakes and such.  There are some great folks involved with that ministry.  We met a lot of them last summer when they were here to do some training.  Looks like they may be back again next summer as well.  Oh, and the Wyrick family band performed an outdoor concert for them Friday evening.  They also sold barbeque sandwiches to raise some money for camp.  I think they made almost $200.  Very nice job, guys.

One biker couple decided to stop in at Seaside for Bible Study and worship rather than try to get off the Island.  They live and go to church in the south part of Houston, but they loved our relaxed atmosphere, and even said they might just hop on their bikes and come back sometime.  That must have been a God-thing, because we are still working out the glitches in our new computer and the songs we were singing with kept skipping or going out altogether.  For some reason it just didn’t want us singing How Great Thou Art.  Guess Satan had a bellyful of Jesus praise and was doing all he could to stop us.  Didn’t work, though.  We just kept singing until the verses ended, and then moved on to different song.  Bryan did a great job of putting the whole thing together, and I know his patience was tested when the glitches showed up.  Hang in there, Bryan.  You did some great work.

After working on it for a while after worship, we decided that our best course of action was to bite the bullet and go ahead and buy the upgraded edition of MediaShout software.  That would allow us to integrate the songs and words more easily.  And Dayna volunteered to choose songs for next week.  That will be one less thing for Bryan to have to take care of.  Plus it gets Dayna involved in the worship ministry as well.  Keep on moving, Lord.  We’ll get as creative as we need to get to present our worship to you. 

Psalms 29:2 says, “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness.”

Father, receive our worship, whatever it looks like.  Amen.