Sunday Night with Matt

Hi Kiddos!!!

Steph just informed me that the infamous Matt will be leading on Sunday evening. I don’t know what the topic will be, but knowing Matt, I’m sure it’ll spark some awesome conversation

SO, come on out this weekend and join us Sunday evening for some fantastic fellowship!

Personal Favor

Hi Friends!

I have a personal request to make to all of you in my “tribe.” I recently found out from a very dear friend of mine, Katie (some of you may have heard me talk about her (graphic designer who lives in Brooklyn)) that one of her sisters (Kendra (whom I would also consider a friend)) has been diagnosed with follicular lymphoma. While I am quite certain that I can count on all of you for prayers (which I love), I have another request as well.

Katie has set up an online shop to help Kendra (and her husband Stephen) offset some of the cost of Kendra’s chemo treatments. If you get a chance, please visit wholeheartsforlife.com and consider helping out.

Thanks all

Leader for tomorrow

Hi friends we find ourselves in the same situation we were last week: we lack a leader for tomorrow’s hg Sunday gathering.

So, if you’re willing to lead tomorrow, please let Stephanie or me know or just comment on this post

Thanks!

NO Sunday Service Tonight!

Hi Friends!

 

Jen reminded me last night that we never got the word out about the plans for Memorial Day weekend. As I recall, we decided to cancel the Sunday evening service because we were unsure as to who would be there and didn’t have anyone to lead.

SO… enjoy a Sunday evening off, come hang out at Half-Priced Burgers tomorrow, and we’ll catch you later

 

(If there’s a big enough group who wants to/is able to be there tonight as well as somebody who watns to lead, I’m going to trust you to handle that amongst yourselves )

 

Movie Time!

 

 

Alright Friends… To kick off the next few weeks of super fun moving parties, I propose an entertaining venture. THIS FRIDAY (May 13), let’s go see THOR. I don’t know an exact time yet (Fandango hasn’t released them yet), but I’ll probably be looking at and 8:00 showing in 2D at Hoffman AMC (right off 495 in Alexandria) or Regal Potomac Yard (on Rt 1 by Hops). Let me know if you’re interested in going (lrn.wllms[at]gmail[dot]com), and I’ll make sure to keep you in the loop once I get more details

Rebuilding Together

Ok Everyone, Dave just sent me the details for our April service project. We’ll be getting together to work with Rebuilding Together Alexandria (aka Christmas in April). They’re a really cool organization that works to rehabilitate the homes of low-income homeowners. There are projects happening year round with RTA, but they have a massive Work Day every year in April (hence “Christmas in April).

This year, the work day is Saturday, April 30.

Dave thinks it will be easiest for volunteers to contact RTA directly and let them know that they’re signing up to work the the Holy Grounds/TNT team.

RTA’s POC is Mike Moss (703-93-0164, 571-277-0739 (cell), or cmoss [at] ida [dot] org.

Also, if you know of any Alexandria families that could be served through RTA’s program, please call 703-836-1021.

 

Hope to see you all out there!!!

Adding Security to Your Posts

I’ve heard it a few times from a few different people… There’s a desire for the ability to make posts inaccessible to crawlers like Google and Yahoo. This is specifically desired for posts that include personal information (such as prayer requests).

After a little bit of playing, I think I’ve come up (hopefully) with a suitable solution (at least for now until we can find something a little more reliable).

SO, if you have a post that you don’t want showing up on search engines (but still accessible to any visitors to the site and it will appear in RSS feeds)…

Step One: Write your post like normal

Step Two: Before you hit “Publish,” scroll down on the page (or look to the right sidebar, depending on how you’ve set your page layout) until you find the little box that says “Meta Robots” it should look like this…

Step Three: Find and select the “noindex, nofollow” option on the Meta Robots drop down menu.

Step Four: Publish your post as usual.

 

This plugin should stop crawlers from coming through your post. It will still be tweeted, emailed, and it will still appear on RSS feeds.

Additionally, if you want added protection for your post, you can change the visibility of the post to only include registered users of this site. To do so, edit the “Visibility” options in the “Publish” box. Setting it to “Private” will lock it down for anybody who is not registered on our site.

If you have any questions about this, or if you would like additional tutorials on posting options, let me know!!!

 

Potluck Next Sunday

Pull out your Pyrex and find your recipe for Tuna Noodle Casserole, we’re having a potluck!

Next Sunday is our LAST lunch meeting/study with the Methodists, and we thought it would be appropriate to do something fun.

SO, next Sunday (April 17), we’ll be meeting at 12:15 in the basement of FPC. Bring an empty stomach and a dish to share. The plates/cups/napkins and drinks will all be taken care of

As always, PLEASE feel free to come even if you forget/don’t have time/whatever to bring something. There is always more than enough food when we get together!

Site Maintenance Update

Alright Kids… I *think* I’ve gotten everything sorted out enough that you should be able to fully use the site without any major issues.

If you’re curious about what I did, I’m about to tell you. If you don’t care, stop reading now ;)

In a nutshell, I got rid of some of the extra plugins that we weren’t utilizing, installed a new Facebook login plugin that will hopefully be less glitchy, added a “login through wordpress” option to the sidebar for those who prefer to use their wordpress login, installed a new calendar plugin (and updated it!), added a “Coming up” events list to the sidebar, and tried to clean up a little on the backend of things.

If you have any questions about any of this, please feel free to ask me! The only other (somewhat) major update that I’m working on is ensuring that our twitter account is still linked to the blog (it hasn’t been updating properly), but I’m still waiting on some info before I can check into that. I also plan on looking into connecting to the HG facebook album to add some fun pictures to the sidebar (not sure yet if I’m going to get that to work).

I think that’s it! Please play around, click all the links, and let me know if you run into any issues. I’ll be monitoring the site activity fairly closely for the next few days to make sure I don’t see anything wonky come across

Test Post

This is a test post… feel free to ignore it

 

Site Maintenance

Hi All! In an attempt to get rid of some of the kinks in the HG site as well as get it in a usable state once again, I’m working on a fairly major overhaul of the plugins and widgets (you probably won’t notice a major difference in the face of the page, but you’ll hopefully notice a few upgrades in functionality). What that means is… for a little while (hopefully not too long, but I need some big pieces to come together), the “Login through Facebook” option will not be available.

What that means is, if you need to post something, you will either need to 1) email the full post to me and I can post it for you or 2) let me know if you want me to create a site-specific login for you.

Sorry for the inconvenience! I’ll let you know when everything is up and running again

Are You Ready for Some Football?!

Alright Kids… the Superbowl is this coming Sunday (Feb 6). SO we’re going to party it up!

Thanks to the efforts of Josh and Anthony, we do officially have access to the game (and the commercials!) in the basement! We’ll be meeting at 5:15ish so that we have some time to grapple a little before kick-off. Nancy’s taking the lead on this discussion, so it will be awesome

Please bring your favorite game-day munchies to share.

Ok… RECAP:

SUPERBOWL.

Feb. 6.

5:15ish.

FPC Basement.

Bring yums.

Superbowl!

Alright kids… there have been murmurs floating around about having an HG Superbowl party (YAY!). The original concept was to have the football up on the screen in the basement at FPC, and have games, munchies, etc… HOWEVER, since the church does not have a cable drop anywhere… we would be relying on rabbit-ears to get us the game, so we couldn’t exactly be certain that we’d be able to watch it (and the commercials ).

SO, we thought that this might be more fun at somebody’s home Would anybody love to open their doors and host what will most likely be a seriously wicked awesome party? If you’re up for it, reply to this post, or send me an email at lrn.wllms@gmail.com

If nobody is available to host, we will probably still do something that night, we just may or may not be able to involve football in the fun

CHRISTMAS PARTY TIME!!!

Alright kids, it has been decided that *THIS SUNDAY* (December 12, 2010) instead of “regular HG”, we’ll be having our annual white elephant gift exchange at 6:00pm. As a refresher, everyone will wrap something ridiculous (preferably that you already own), bring it, and then we’ll all sit down and laugh at the awesomeness as everyone unwraps the “gifts”. PLEASE feel free to come even if you don’t have anything to wrap. There are always extras

Also, if you’d like to bring snacks/munchies/drinks, that would be AWESOME!

In addition to that, we’re also adding a little something this year… As a reminder that community is outward as well as inward, we will be collecting non-perishable items to be donated to an as-yet-to-be-determined place of need.

So, to re-cap…

THIS SUNDAY (Dec 12)

6:00 pm

Bring: a wrapped gag gift, some food-stuffs, and/or a non-perishable donation item

Tacky sweaters optional.

Scott & Sasha Send-Off

Hey guys!!!

So… Scott and Sasha will be back in town this weekend, and we’d like to give them an official send-off!

Here’s the plan… we’ll all meet at FPC (3846 King Street Alexandria, VA 22302-1993) in the parking lot at 6:30, and then we’ll all carpool over to Guapo’s in Shirlington. If you want to come, but think you’re going to be a little late or can’t meet at the church, leave a comment here, and we’ll know to add you to the tally at the restaurant.

Hope to see you there

We’ll all miss Scott and Sasha, but we sure are glad that we got to know them while they were here!

Pirate Cruise Anyone?

Hi All!!! Ok, so… this past weekend, I took my family on a “Pirate Cruise” tour of the Potomac (more info @ http://www.potomacriverboatco.com/pirate-cruise.php). While I definitely enjoyed myself, we didn’t get the full effect because their regular pirate didn’t show, so one of the crew members had to step in. Long story short, I now have 8 vouchers to take the tour again for free. SO… if anyone wants one (0r more), or if anyone knows someone who might want one, PLEASE let me know. It’s definitely geared towards kids, but it’s entertaining none-the-less.

The end

Game Night!

Alright Kids… Since I’m pretty sure we haven’t been spending enough time together recently, and since Stephanie and John both have birthdays this weekend, and since it seems like a good idea, I think we should have a game night this Saturday (June 5).

For convenience, we’ll be commandeering the  basement at FPC. So what I’m thinking is we’ll start up the grill with some burgers and brats at about 6. We’ll have the grill by the back door to make things easy. Come and go as you’d like. We have the meat for the grill, but please bring drinks, sides, or desserts as you’d like.

We’ll have a Wii hooked up, so feel free to bring your Wii-motes with your Miis loaded if you want (if you have a Wii but have no idea how to take your Mii with you, shoot me or Josh an email and we’ll take care of you ). We’ll also have a lovely selection of board games and the like. Feel free to bring along your favorite games too

Ok, I think that covers it. So to review… Saturday, 6ish, basement, burgers, fun.

Earth Day at the National Cathedral

Hola Friends

So… as most of you are probably aware, Earth Day is this Sunday (April 25) (yay Earth!). Also (or maybe in celebration), Brian McLaren will be preaching at the National Cathedral as well as participating in/leading a forum entitled “A New Kind of Christianity: 10 Questions That Are Transforming the Faith.” There are two Sunday morning services at the cathedral, one at 8:45 and one at 11:15. The forum will be held at between the two (it starts at 10:10).

Anyway… I’m thinking about going to the first service (at 8:45) (which would give me time to get home and still be ready to roll for the Carpenter’s Shelter Chili Cookoff that afternoon), and I thought some of you might be interested in joining me SO, if anyone wants to go with me/meet me there, let me know!

HG Tonight

Hello Friends!!!

I know this is a little last minute, but I wanted to let everyone know to not worry about bringing food for the potluck tonight! Steph will be bringing dinner, so take the night off from cooking

Also, make sure to come early for the planning meeting

Update from Joanna!!!

It’s about 5:00 PM on Sunday as I make my way across the property to my cottage.  The weather has cooled to the perfect temperature and soon will get rather cold but now it’s calm and comfortable.  I’m followed by one of the dogs but whether it’s Turner or Hootch, I haven’t got a clue.  Actually I wonder if any of us residing here at Baan Nam Jai (Home of the Open Heart) really know which is which.  I was just at the girls’ house celebrating a short term volunteer’s birthday.  It’s hard to believe that I have already been here for over one month.  I love sitting outside at this time but it comes with quite a risk as the mosquitoes start swarming at this time.    One of the moms is raking leaves and soon will start burning them.  I’ve come to love that scent.  It’s a good time to reflect as the sun starts it’s decent and I sit here in my kitchen, which is outdoors and doubles as a back porch, and look at the garden I think about my move to Thailand.

Thailand… Chiang Rai… Baan Nam Jai… It’s a place of tremendous beauty.  Located outside of the city I’m surrounded by gardens, rice paddies, smells and feels of the country in Asia.  The property itself is rather large hosting three large houses, and then an adjoining property with 5 small cottages and the hospice which is still under construction.  One of these cottages is what I now call home.  Thailand has riches for all of the senses and while it can delight the sense it can weigh you down with challenges.  It’s almost hard to explain how you can be totally in love with a place and totally frustrated at once.

The adjustment to Thailand is nothing and everything that I expected.  There have been some things that had I really thought about them they probably wouldn’t have taken me by surprise.  For instance, Google has gone from being a verb to a noun.  I used to use Google maps for helping me get around any new place.  I can’t read the street signs so Google is useless.  Getting used to riding on a motorbike has also proved to be a challenge.  Traffic here is really crazy, I don’t know where I’m going and I’m SOOOO not an experienced rider to be smart and able to react to my situations around me.  All this adds up to, quite literally, a deadly equation.  The language has also proved challenging but that was one challenge that I was prepared for.  I haven’t started learning the language because I’m not ready to get on the death trap highway.  However, all that to say that God’s grace is amazing and have found some things easier then expected.  The kids speak English and there are several “farang” (foreign) staff.  There have been several lovely short term volunteers come that have eased the transition.  However, I have left everything that I do know and many times I feel totally helpless and dependant, which is probably good for me.

Although I still feel like a fish out of water I have hit the ground running when it comes to work!  I have used my past Executive Assistant skills to assist Paul, the Northern Regional Director.  He is new to the position and I’m helping him get organized in his role and help support him as he provides direction to the 11 ministries here in Chiang Rai.  He is also over the whole northern region which includes Chiang Mai and Mai Sai which is much bigger then Chiang Rai.  I haven’t even gotten into that portion.  I am also managing the office here at Baan Nam Jai and working a little bit in the boys’ home.

The kids are incredibly precious and melt your heart the moment you meet them.  One of the youngest boys was very timid about me coming into the house to work with them and was very distressed about my first shift.  I came over the night before to get introduced and just get to know them just a bit before I spent the night in the boy’s house the next day.  The youngest of the boys cried and cried.  He didn’t want me to come and work with them!  When I got back to my cottage I prayed that God would give us both grace.  As I was praying my heart broke for these kids.  It struck me that these kids shouldn’t need to have caretakers in their life.  If everything were as God intended it to be they would be with a Mom and Dad in a loving home.  But we find ourselves in a fallen world and here I am to help care for these kids who have suffered so much.  As I’ve started to work with them more they are very unsettled as several of the caretakers they have had for the past couple years have left and I’ve come in.  I try to put myself in their shoes as they get used to me.  Please pray for God’s grace and that they will start feeling settled, safe and secure with me.  Many of the volunteers have told me that they will keep me at arms length because they worry about how long I’ll be here.  It breaks my heart.

Financially, I am still in need of support.  I need about $600 USD per month to cover my expenses.  Please prayerfully consider supporting me.  If you’d like to support me please send a check made out to “YWAM,” with a separate piece of paper indicating it is for me, to YWAM Montana, 501 Blacktail Road,
Lakeside, Montana,59922 U.S.A.

Thank you so much for all of your support of my ministry.  I truly could not do this without your prayers, encouragement and financial support.  I will send pictures soon!

I pray that you are all blessed richly!

Joanna

If you’d like to pray for me please let me know and I’ll put you on my prayer needs list!

New Mailing Address:

Joanna Geiger

P.O. Box 121

Bandu,

A.Muang,

Chiang Rai, 57100

Thialand

My new mobile phone number is +66.0899.513.044