Our stay in Fortaleza on this trip will be life altering for those on the trip and those in the city.

The trip to the interior is going to be mind-boggling.

For seven years I’ve been going to the interior of the state of Ceará and the village of Ubaúna. Each year things have gotten progressively more intense. Just when I think it would be impossible to surpass what has occurred, it gets ramped up another notch.

This year will not only be no different, I think it’s going to jump a couple of those notches.

A large gymnasium has been procured in the town of Ubajara. Multiple churches have come together for the GFB Freedom Tour and, as one of the pastors noted in an email to me, “all hell is going to break loose” (funny that they have that expression in Brazil, too). We’ll be in that gymnasium for two nights and then head for Ubaúna.

You can always expect excitement in Ubaúna!

Cell groups in Ubaúna literally have almost 20% of the town’s population in them. Since our last visit there, a “young people” cell group has started and exploded in attendance and activity right out of the box. Every Friday night hundreds of them descend on the Seed of Hope house, engage in boisterous worship and then hit the streets to serve the town.

We’re going to step into that and hopefully add some gasoline to the fire.

Sobral has always been on our radar as a target for church planting. The largest city in the region, it has been a tough nut to crack. GFB now has a church in the town and we’ll be teaming up with other churches to throw a massive “party” on one of the nights and are being told to expect upwards of a thousand folks present.

Other than that, it should be a relatively calm trip.

This is going to be fun…

I just received an email from my friend and compatriot, pastor Marclei in Fortaleza. He was giving me some of the details of the Fortaleza side of our Brazil trip and I’ll admit that it even caught me off guard just a bit.

We will be at three different churches on three different nights. He said that we should be expecting thousands and that on the last night we could see more than 5,000 present!

Wow!

We will have people from multiple churches present for training the day prior to everything beginning. I’m excited that pastor Ed Rocha of RAGAI (Global Awakening Network International) will be co-teaching with me. It will be our responsibility to prepare a team of almost 100 believers for the intense ministry that will occur each night and we’ll only have one day to do so.

Each night these workers will be besieged by the multitudes present. The way the crowd surges forward for prayer, healing and spiritual freedom reminds me of some of the images of tsunami waves surging onto land; these folks will literally be engulfed and must be ready to do the impossible.

Each afternoon we will be out on the streets, calling on heaven to invade the space we are occupying. This isn’t for the faint of heart! But that will just be a warm up for the evenings.

I’m stoked!

Wait til I tell you what’s waiting for us in the interior…

N.T. Wright is one darn respected, conservative biblical scholar. He was just a young, up and coming whipper-snapper when I did the seminary scene back in the 70′s. He began making his mark at McGill University in the 80′s and that was when he came on my radar.

Whatever you want to say about Wright, you can’t say he is an intellectual slouch. I love his take on this whole stupid (yes, that is how I feel about it) cat fight over Bell’s Love Wins.

Some of you perhaps think I’m a bit smitten (or vexed) by all of this. Au contraire. I love the fact that, whatever Bell really believes, he’s stirred up a hornet’s nest and is getting folks all upset about their faith.

Touché!

So here’s Wright on Bell and Hell…

Wright on Hell & Bell from The Work Of The People on Vimeo.

Sometimes I so feel like Gomer Pyle.

Goooollllly.

I’ve used the iPhone/iPad locator app numerous times to find my wife’s phone when she couldn’t locate it. Is it somewhere in the dark crevices of the pocketbook, at the office, in the car… where in the world is that iPhone?

It’s really quite cool.

But today, oh my, today I used it to give a good morning wakeup to my little queen in her hotel room 4,000 miles away in Brazil! Opened the app and it instantly started searching for all our apparatuses; it told me that her iPhone was turned off (good girl!) but that her iPad was connected to wifi on Beira Mar Avenue in Fortaleza, Brazil. I was so impressed. Seriously! I started giving myself high-fives.

Then, and this is the good part, I sent her a message and had it play a sound for two minutes so she’d know that something was happening. I’ve done that to myself before just to see what it would do and the sound really gets your attention. She isn’t going to have a clue how I did that!

Yeah, I feel just like Gomer.

A duck goes into a bar and asks the bartender if he has any grapes. The bartender says no and the duck leaves.

The next day the duck returns to the bar and again asks the bartender for grapes. The bartender says no and the duck leaves. The duck returns the next day and again asks for grapes. The bartender says “no and the next time you come here and ask for grapes I will nail your feet to the floor.”

The next day the duck comes back and says “excuse me do you have any nails?” The bartender says “no.” “In that case,” the duck asks, “do you have any grapes?”

How insistent are you for Yahweh to show up?

Most times when we ask for something mildy audacious and seemingly get a “no,” we just shrug our shoulders and meekly say, “ok.” In fact, most of us simply ask for the mundane and are not the least bit surprised when it doesn’t happen.

That’s a problem.

I think it’s time we starting asking about the nails.

Joshua prayed to the Lord in front of all the people of Israel. He said, “Let the sun stand still…” So the sun stood still.

Excuse me?

Sun stand still? Yeah, right!

But… what if it’s true? What if, just what if there’s something to this?

We tend to think that it is all suppose to be easy. God is our personal genie; we rub the lamp, out he pops and fulfills our most ludicrous request. If you asked Joshua how that worked, he’s likely tell you that if you ask God to show up to do the impossible, he might just instruct you to do something that is uncomfortable and inconvenient, like march around a city’s wall blowing horns or crossing swollen rivers or even –ouch!– circumcising your shame.

My experience says there’s something to this. I’m just crazy enough to ask Him to make the sun stand still AND rain down massive hail on that which stands in my way.

Any takers?

Cell Groups at The Message Church can get a little bit out of hand…

This is the email and photo I get after one last night:

I was out of town this week.

Really…

I’ll bet you didn’t know that you could buy chicken diapers.

Seriously.

Do a Google search for “chicken diapers.” What is amazing is that there are a lot of sites. The obvious? Chickendiapers.com. Really.

It’s amazing the things that are out there.

It’s amazing the things you learn in a Google Adwords seminar.

Thanks Stasia!

I’m not a music connoisseur. Well, I may be in some respects as it applies to me, but I’m not critically competent to pass judgment on music at large.

I suppose I’m a kind of smorgasbord type of fellow.

Yet, even with that caveat, I want to tell you about some music that has absolutely captivated me. A friend of mine, Timothy Carr, told me about this group several months ago and they’ve been at the top of my playlist ever since. His daughter, Andrea, makes up some of the fantastic vocals they put out.

United Pursuit Band.

On my drive to Raleigh yesterday morning I was so enthralled with their music that I could not believe that I’d just made a two-hour trip in what felt like 15 minutes.

I’ve heard that they are going to be at The Wilmington Prayer Furnace this Friday (the 27th) at 7:00pm. (Actually, it’s not just hearsay… it is going to happen!)

This is a case where I went to Golden Corral and ended up with five-star dining. Check ‘em out. Let me know what you think.

Up before the crack of dawn and on the highway. I’m not to accustomed to doing this any more; but when the proverbial mountain won’t come to Mohammad, ol’ Mohammad has to get on his donkey and head to the mountain.

I’m spending a couple of days in Durham at a Google Adwords seminar (yes, I’m crazy enough to drive back and forth instead of staying in a hotel!). I’ve been an Adwords user for several years in my business and it has radically transformed the way I do business. I want to do it even better. So when Google says they’re sending an expert to within 150 miles of me, I’m on the road at the crack of dawn for a couple of days.

I’m really excited in an ancillary way as to what Adwords might do for The Message Church and Gospel for Brazil. If it can literally put my business on the map and make me money, shouldn’t it be able to do something similar for Jesus?

Yeah, I know. Jesus doesn’t need Adwords. However, he did utilize the Roman highway system to spread the Kingdom; the way I look at it, Google comes close to being the modern equivalent of those Roman thoroughfares.

So here I sit, coffee, Google flash drive, trusty Mac and a bathroom close by.

I’m so glad Jesus allowed computers and flash drives to be invented.

The end has come!

Oops!

Followers of an Oakland radio minister who predicted that Saturday would mark the start of the world’s last days waited in vain for a religious homecoming that never happened.

After driving across country from Maryland with his family in the hope of being taken up to heaven in Rapture with a crowd of fellow believers, Keith Bauer admitted his disappointment Saturday as he stood in an empty parking lot outside the locked Family Radio headquarters in Oakland.

“I was hoping. I think heaven will be a lot better than this earth,” the 36-year-old trucker told a knot of reporters who outnumbered visitors at the grimy hub of worldwide speculation about the world’s end at 6 p.m. Saturday.

San Francisco Chronicle, May 21. 2011

I’ll have to admit that I’m actually feeling sorry for them. How many put all of their faith in this event, endured all sorts of sarcasm and ridicule for that faith and now, since it didn’t happen, will lose that faith.

That has the potential to be a really good thing…