I woke up this morning to the beeping of the alarm on my Casio watch. I staggered over to the bathroom and brushed my teeth with my Colgate toothbrush using Crest toothpaste. After some more necessary steps my morning routine was completed with the  buttoning up of my Tommy Hilfiger shirt. I headed out to the kitchen grabbing my iPod Touch from my nightstand and proceeded to check my Gmail account – my only email was an offer from Starbucks.

Once in the kitchen I poured a bowl of Cheerios (multigrain of course) and just enough Natrel fine filtered milk to make those little O’s float. I sat down at the table to find my son had left his Tony Hawk Tech Deck skateboard ramp on the table – it made me smile.

After eating breakfast and reading my Bible (ESV) for a bit, I jumped back on my iPod to have a quick look through twitter and facebook – to catch up on life.  I grabbed my BlackBerry from it’s charger and headed out to work. I plopped myself into the drivers seat of my Mazda when the thought returned – could I live my life unbranded?

I’ll have to get back to you on that one…

— Andy

Well when I got in this morning my office floor was completely filled with “Women Alive” magazines. Some were in my drawers and even a few in my fridge… Kevin was kind enough to distribute them everywhere he could find space. My other office mate – “crazy” Elizabeth was more than willing to participate in this – her first ever – April fools joke.

Well I thought I would turn it around on them so I cleaned it up real quick and then acted like nothing happened. They were fooled alright and spilled the beans as to who did what. After a while I let them in on the fact that it all happened the way they planned – it was nice to see the squirm a bit first though

Over the past 5 years this dream has seen some success and www.youthpoint.ca has helped may groups and pastors. However over the past year YouthPoint has started to see a slow decrease in use. Other options like Facebook or www.wordpress.com sites have begun to take their place. There are a number of faithful forum posters but they too are becoming more infrequent.

Through the conception, building and running of YouthPoint I have spent a considerable amount of personal time and money to make the project happen. Many others like Will, Fred and Val have been helping all along the way by writing and managing the forums. It is not easy to admit that after all this effort that a project like this may be dying – but reality is starting to set in. The amount of time and money required to put into YouthPoint to make it more like Facebook or a WordPress blog is just too much. After all – the goal starting out was to have the technologies available to pastors for their group to communicate online – if this is being done through these other sites then the goal is still being met – just not with YouthPoint’s help.

What I would like from you is some prayer and some advice. Let me know what you think – let it die – let it ride as is and let people use it for what it is – quit my day job and live on rice while I rebuild YouthPoint? (I’m not real fond of the rice idea). I am ok with it if YouthPoint dies – I will be sad – but ok. Please let me know what you think.

-Andy Smith
Duke of URL – www.youthpoint.ca

You can view some in my footer below or go directly to my Flickr page. I have added some from around Parliament Hill, the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and the Canadian War Museum as well as some others from around the city – enjoy!

Without question, one of the most crucial issues facing Christian organizations and churches today is board governance. How they function can make or break a ministry or church. In fact, it has been said that the key to effective leadership in today’s churches and Christian ministries lies as much with their governing boards as it does with their pastor or ministry director. more…

I serve on the Board of directors of Medeba and hope to gain some good knowlege on board management from this conference. I will try to give an update followinf these two days.

They took the first game with a strong 10-0 win getting them in great spirits. Josh was covering defence (ususally forward) for most of the game for one of our players who was sick. As the game wenton the coach decided he would let Josh play forward – Josh really wanted to score. He scored his first goal on a breakaway and his second from a rebound in front of the net giving his team their 9th and 10th goals. At the end of this game the caoches from each team picked a MVP from the other team. Joshua was picked and given a great plaque. Both he and I were just a little excited

The second and third games were a little tougher but they were victoriuos winning 8-4 and 8-1 repectively. Josh scored 2 goals in game two to bring his tournament goals up to 4.

The championship game was played against another team from Bradford – their arch rivals – Bradford Audiotronics. Bradford seems to produce some great hockey players and was well represented at this tournameent. All year it has been a battle between these two teams. They have tied two games and Bradford Home Hardware has won all the rest – they have always been hard fought games. This final game was no different with some nail biting moments throughout. We had a couple of hit posts/crossbars – some great saves from our star goalie – in the end they came up on top: 5-3

I am really proud of Joshua and how he played – he gave 100% every game. Joshua finished the tournament with 4 goals, 3 assists and a huge smile. I want to thank his coaching staff for always doing a great job and working hard with these boys!