a very sufjan christmas

In case you haven't seen this, prepare to chuckle and feel warm and fuzzy inside. It's an animation set to Sufjan Steven's 'Put the Lights on the Tree.'

Also, if your Christmas music repertoire doesn't include the EPs from which this comes, check out my LISTENING tab to the right (or click here). Sufjan coincides sentimentality and tongue-in-cheek-ness quite satisfactorily. My favorite track is 'Once In Royal David's City' from volume II; always makes me choke up to think of that child growing up, dying, rising, ascending and returning to 'lead his children on to the place where he is gone.'

podcast

It seems I don't do a post for a while and then I do two in one day. This is one of those days!

I want to remind you all of the H2O MORGANTOWN LIVE free podcast we do of the h2o message each week. It's a great 'audial' way to stay connected with me and my little campus ministry world that's more interesting than just text. Billy Williams does most of the messages, but I have given a few (one of which was podcasted a couple weeks ago) and Brian Shope, our CCO staff guy, gives some as well. If you have iTunes, you can go to the podcast page of the iTunes Store and enter 'h2o morgantown live' into the search field and find it that way. Or you can go to the H2O MORGANTOWN LIVE website (linked on my blog here to the right) and subscribe from there.

Yesterday was our last h2o of the semester (the third service in our Advent series) and we sang carols (including Silent Night by candlelight!) and had a Christmas dinner afterward as per our tradition of the past few years. It was great. We were able to record almost all of the service, including the band doing the carols, and as the band leader I'm really excited about that! I hope we get to do it more in the future with the worship songs we do. Of course you can hear the little mistakes that are inevitable with any live show, and of course listening to it on a recording can never capture the live experience, but I still think it's fun. If we do it more in the future, maybe we'll start stepping our quality even more, but I'm really proud of these guys (and gal) for the quality they bring with only a couple hours of practice a week. Enjoy!