Kicked in the Shinn

If you don't know him, the man on the left is Jason Shinn. I've known Jason for around 6 six years. I met him through the group of youth pastors at Velocity and got to know him even better when he interned at Crossroads while finishing up his degree in youth pastoring. His wife Jess (who also does an amazing job leading our youth ministry) had the joyful experience of living in my basement for a year prior to her marriage to J. When J came to crossroads, he had no idea what he was in for. It was not an easy thing to turn the youth group over to him, but Jay has led it in a great way, discipling and building deep relationships with the kids.

Not too long after he came on full-time at Crossroads he was thrown into the lucky position of having the entire senior staff at the church leave due to infidelity, leaving Jason to help teach and lead throughout some of the debacle. It's been very cool watching him grow over the past years to become the teacher and youth pastor that he is today. I've watched Jason learn to deal with stress and challenges over the years, but this year at camp was awesome to see him in action. If you know J, you know that he wears his heart on his sleeve and and it's not too tough to tell when things are weighing him down.

You see, July 1 marks a tough time for Jay in that he was cut back to part-time in his job due to budget constraints and has to figure out how to feed his family. With all this going on, you'd think he'd be stuck on this fact and not really be there at camp or with the kids. This year at camp, though, Jason was at his best. I got the chance to see him at camp full of life, fully engaged and leading the best I've seen him lead. He had things organized and nailed down like I've never seen, he was full of energy and a blast to hang with. In one particular youth group meeting time at camp that he had with the high school and college students, he cast a vision out there for them on what his expectations are for his leaders and why he thinks they can meet the challenge. I sat in the back of the room smiling as I watched the kids respond to what J had to say. The thing that sucks is that Jason may have to take another job and go lead another group of kids. I'm OK with this on one hand, but on the other hand it sucks. I (and the rest of the families at Crossroads) would hate to lose him, but he needs to take care of his family. It'll be interesting to see what God does in the midst of this whole thing. I just find it ironic that Jay really hits his stride just when he may have to leave.

Fixing the Mohawk

My 'stylist' cleaned up Nate's haircut and then applied some 'product' to get the 'hawk looking righteous. Funny enough, he was the only one in the whole salon with Mohawk. I'm wondering if I've scarred my son by bringing him into a Salon so young in life. My guess is that after having his hair cut by Michelle, he's going to want to keep going back. No idea why.

Explosives Camp

If I'd of gone to this explosives camp, I might never have destroyed my room with an accidental fireworks barrage as a kid.

Bad Choices

If you're getting tattoos like these on your face, head and neck - somewhere along the way you've made a bad choice or two. Hopefully that bad choice wasn't allowing your Uncle Kevin having to shave your head into a Mohawk.

Fourth of July Festivities

Even after spending four days together in Iowa, we weren't tired of each other yet. The weather started pretty nasty but just kept getting nicer and nicer throughout the day. We hung out at my Dad's yesterday, BBQ'd and enjoyed all sorts of different cocktails.

One tradition that my Mom drove over the past 10 years is this kids 4th of July picture. She would get each of the grand kids an Old Navy t-shirt, we'd sit them (or tie them) into a chair and then try and get a picture as my Mom bribed the grand-children and the father's threatened them to smile. As they've gotten older, the pictures have gotten easier (except little Bender on the end).


The undeclared theme of the event was "White Trash" as Sooze and Dan sunned themselves on the deck.

Kevin helped Nate keep the theme going with his haircut. Last year when Nate stayed with Kevin and Susan for the week, Nate called to see if it was okay to get a mohawk. Without asking Cathie, I told him sure. Kevin did a nice job and didn't but to the skin on the sides. Thanks to the cocktails this year, Kevin neglected to put a guard on the razor and cut it bare. Oh well, it's just hair. As Nate says, "I like it. Now I've finally got a real Mohawk."

We went to the Meridian Township fireworks last night in Okemos and they were awesome. I ended up running into a good friend of mine from way back, Matt Tomlinson, and he and his wife and daughter ended up hanging out with us as we got a chance to catch up.

Kevin and his cousin Nate tried to shove glow-sticks up their nose and out their mouths. Nate did it, as you can see from this picture, kind of. It was a little eerie in the dark seeing this worm-like thing coming out of his throat. My brother Dan bought a bazillion glow-sticks off of eBay and the kids enjoyed those probably more than the fireworks themselves. Even though my sister Susan LOVES fireworks pictures, I only took a couple pictures of them - and instead got some cool shots of the kids and their glow-sticks.



You can see the rest of the pictures from the Fourth of July here.

Pugsley and Cinderella

My friend Ted was in Disneyland with his family and spent some time
harassing the characters. I can almost guarantee that Ted had said something right before or after this picture to make this poor girl very uncomfortable, and shortly after received a sharp elbow in the ribs from his wonderful wife Sherry.

If you take a close look at the picture, it looks like he has two giant green bunny ears sticking out of his head. I've got meetings on the West Coast at the end of July and I'm going to meet up with Ted to catch up.

Most honorable Daniel-san

My brother Dan is famous (he's the one on the right with his thumb pointed off to the side). By the best translation I can make on this article, my brother is the next Barry Manilow of Korea. Noel, can you translate this for us? (Many don't know that Noel can read Korean, but not speak the language - one of the signs of the anti-christ based on my translation of Revelations)

Transformers

Nate and I went to see the movie Transformers today. Great flick, especially when you consider how cheesy the original cartoon really was. The switched around a few things, like changing Bumblebee from a VW Bug into a Camaro, but otherwise it was very well done and worth watching.

Happy Birthday Boom!

My baby sister turns 20-something today. Here are some fun facts about Susan:

1. She has more nick names than anyone else in our family. Everytime my parents would outlaw one nick-name, we would come up with a new derivation. We would also find songs that used the nick-name in the words so that we could use the name and not get in trouble, "I wasn't calling her a name. I was just singing a song." Song of those names include: Parade, Rosanna, Red, Boom and Ralphie Baby.
2. Growing up, we all got the Meijer's special Huffy bikes. Susan got the Schwinn bike. My Dad has explained that he learned his lesson from our crappy bikes. As a result of that lesson, I bought Madeline a Giant (quality) recently instead of doing the Wal-Mart special.
3. Susan likes her creative memories scrapbooks more than Will. She chose to go scrap-booking instead of coming to Will's graduation or his surprise Graduation party.
4. Susan is one of the most stubborn people I know.
   
5. Susan's daughter Allie not only looks just like Susan but has Susan's stubborn 'tude to boot. It cracks me up watching this little mini-me version of Susan running around.
6. Susan has the best laugh you've ever heard and she laughs all the time. Susan has a joy about her that is very contagious.
   
7. Susan has the kind of relationship with my Dad that I want to have with my girls when they are her age.
8. Susan is a ferocious-deal-finder. She loves getting a good deal -whether it's from a garage sale or a store. She will travel miles to save a penny.
9. Susan was once banned from eBay for sinister activities that involved her friend Kate.
10. Susan will try and inject herself into every picture being taken. I have hundreds of pictures of Susan sticking her head into them at the last minute.
11. As far as Susan knows, she is not adopted

I'd of done the same thing when I was 10

The good news is that we just got new windows installed in the house. They open easily, in both directions as a matter of fact. The bad news is that one side of the window doesn't have a screen. I heard Nate calling out his window to a friend out in front of our house this evening. I stepped outside to say Hi and found Nate standing on the roof of the bay window under his window. He'd opened his window to the non-screened side, stepped out and was having a nice conversation with his friend Austin. Needless to say, I'm going to figure out a way to lock that side down. Glue?

Bellevue Heritage Days

We headed to Bellevue this morning for Bellevue Heritage Days. It started with a parade that was a lot of fun. ANYONE could be in this parade, and they pretty much were. There were old cars, lawn mowers, tractors, horses - and just some crazy stuff that I couldn't figure out why, but it was fun to watch. My cousins Corey and Cody were in it along with the Shriners doing crazy tricks on their tractors and another bunch playing some odd music. My personal favorite were the guys riding the cooler go-carts full of beer.

The parade was a blast with people coming from all of the neighboring towns to be in this and see the parade. My cousins seemed to know just about everyone in the parade and had all sorts of interesting side-stories to boot. The kids were able to go on high quality carnival rides and we got a chance to watch lawn-tractor pulls. There were all of the typical carnival rides, most of them have been outlawed since the 1950s due to safety reasons. The carnies did a great job rebuilding the rides on the fly with their handy-dandy screwdrivers.

In the Iowa tradition, we hung out in the garage and on the driveway, in lawn chairs. After a long day of Bellevue fun, I figured I was due for a nap. I ended up getting inadvertently posing while getting my nipples pinched, a bow placed on my head a coozie in my lap.

My cousin Connie made these cool custom coozies for the ladies (and my cousin Kurt (yes, his first name is our last name. confusing?). We're trying to convince her to setup sweatshops in china to make them and then sell these things online.

We're heading back tomorrow morning early, around 6am. Should be a fun drive with candy-filled tired kids.

Eating Bugs

Nate ate a live Mayfly for $5. Apparently we wore matching shirts to celebrate the occasion.

Kurt Family Reunion

We met up at my Aunt Lois's farm outside of Bellevue, IA for the family reunion. It's a full-blown farm with lots of cows, which Maddie and I went to check out. It might be just me being a little paranoid, but they seem to stare at you as walk by them. One of my cousins explained that in the same way we look at them as hamburger, they look at us and think what a blast it would be to trample us. We had a photographer there to take pictures of the whole Kurt clan and the smaller groups. We had custom shirts printed for the Michigan Kurts along with custom beer coozies, in the Iowa tradition.

My cousin Jodi and her husband Terry borrowed a party bus which we packed the whole family into and headed off on a site-seeing tour of our family history. We had coolers and lawn-chairs everywhere, babies in laps - you name it, we took the safety precaution. We stopped off at Jodi's and got a chance to see her Mary Kay shrine and her bikes. We drove through Springbrook and got to see the place where Jon fell (he claims I pushed him) off the giant slide and broke his arm.

At Carol's they had a horse and wagon and a pony for the kids to take for rides. Emily was in heaven being able to lead her cousins around. We got a giant game of tag going on these huge hay-bales in their yard as well.

We stopped at my Grandma and Grandpa's old house and my Aunts and Uncles would share a fun fact about the place. It was a ton of fun connecting with all of my relatives and our history. Believe it or not, my siblings and I really dig Iowa. We used to come out here 4 or 5 times a year to see my cousins and the only downside was packing all of us into a car for 10 hours. Our cousins were always super gracious to us when we'd come out and visit, and even as rarely as we see them, there's always this connection, because we're family. As a small token of thanks, we presented Jodi with a custom thong with the Kurt Family Reunion logo on it. I'm pretty sure she'll treasure it forever.

Today we're heading to Bellevue for a parade, carnival and fireworks. We roll out of here tomorrow morning.

You can see more of the pictures here.

Jodi's Mary Kay Shrine

My cousin Jodi is a Mary Kay super-diva and of course, we mock her for it. She's been super successful, and even once was able to put make-up on Susan to make her look girlie. She's won every award a super-manager-lady can win and has the pink coffee maker, motorcycle and caddie to prove it. As we ransacked her house, my siblings and I took pictures of all sorts of amusing stuff, including the stuff below, but not before we all bowed down at the altar.

Is this Heaven? No, it's Iowa?

We went to Dysersville to go to the site where Field of Dreams was filmed. I'd of guessed we'd be the only person there, but believe it or not, the parking lot was pretty full. We played a game of baseball, so we could say we'd done it.

They're everywhere

I've been offering my nieces and nephews $5 to eat one. No takers so far. Gab said he'd do it for $20.

Iowa Family Reunion

We left the house at 5:30AM to meet up with most of the family. Cathie and I don't have the best track record for showing up on time to these things. Last time we overslept by about two hours and due to my travel woes in New York, we were about five hours late arriving at Mackinac Island last week. My Dad had bet $5 with Dan and Jon that we would be on time, and my Dad won the bet. Dan and Kris were actually 11 minutes late.

Mid-way through the trip we pulled off the expressway into some random neighborhood to stop at a park. I asked Cathie why and her answer was, "Your family has a history of odd pit stops." It's true. In the past we stopped repeated in industrial parks and other strange places. We don't need no stinkin rest stop. We met up with Jon and Beth and got to see my new niece for the first time ever. My family seems to really love my Hulk Hogan 'stache. They express that love through repeatedly telling me just how bad it looks on me. Odd family, I know.

We had custom shirts printed for our family reunion to go along with the custom beer-coozies. In Iowa, when you go to a wedding, there are no fancy center pieces - just custom beer coozies. Nice, huh? In addition to the t-shirts, Dan ordered Cathie a custom thong with the family reunion logo printed on the front and back. My wife loves thongs, what can I say? I'm a lucky man.

We got to Dubuque around 3 to the hotel we're at, which is a very nice water park as well. Dubuque is right on the Mississippi - the 'ol Miss, the 'ol lady - and with that we get Mayflies. These things are huge and they are everywhere. They live for a day and die. They end up in piles three inches deep everywhere. Each one is about two inches long and can carry off a small child, or at least you would of thought so from the screaming the girls did. It turns out that my sister Sooze is AS scared of these flies as she is of sea-gulls.

We spent the day swimming and then my brothers and I headed out on a beer run. As is tradition, we got lost again. Even with our GPS systems. We did this last time every stinkin time we went out without my Dad.


The hotel we're at has an arcade, and while the boys competed in the air-hockey championship (Nate came in 2nd) and we ended up torturing Jon on this crazy machine.

Tomorrow morning we're heading to the field where Field of Dreams was filmed (probably even less exciting than it sounds) and then we're heading over to my Aunt's farm for the family reunion. We've got hay rides and even a bus to shuttle us around to all of the different stops at my cousins. My cousins love Busch Lite beer, which we learned last year is basically water and on a hot day you can drink about 20 of these things. We brought Bud to try and be the beer snobs in Iowa.

Emily

I just licked the kitten, because that's what his Mom would do. The kitten probably thinks I'm his Mom. I didn't lick my finger first and then touch the kitten. I just licked the kitten with my tongue. --Emily

My Friend Ken

I got to know Ken Buck about ten years ago here at camp. I'd seen him around and somehow we ended up staying all night and talking. The following night he invited me out with the leaders to play a great game they'd invented. It involved two golf carts with at least eight people crammed on each. Each team had a about 50 boxes of whipper-snappers and we drove throughout the college campus chucking these at each other's heads, trying to crash the other cart. What can I say, we were young, dumb and didn't understand lawsuits.

At that time, Ken was a Youth Pastor in Xenia, Ohio where he pastored a fantastic band of misfits that reminded me a lot of the kids in my youth group at the time. Ken was a philosophy major at Cedarville and thinks deeply about things, but at the same time has a sense of humor that rides dangerously close to mine. Ken has a passion and vision for what the church is supposed to be and has been a huge influence on me in this area and my understanding of the oppressed. Although Ken is a Calvinist, (and one of the few that is actually not pre-destined according to my own prophetic word), he approaches his beliefs with humility and respect and doesn't act like the tool that many of a similar Calvinistic bent seem to enjoy. Ken has a this great ability to humbly listen to others points of view and discuss tough topics, without feeling the need to make their view his. Ken savors learning from others and going deep in relationships. Ken also has a pretty similar sense of humor to me and all of the other youth pastors at camp - sarcastic and at about a sixth grade level. Unfortunately, he also has no problem walking around naked, especially if it makes others uncomfortable. Ken has a man-crush on Noel (who he is more than just camp-friends with) and likes the band Wilco because he thinks Noel does too.

Ken was recently able to give his entire youth group (30 or so people) food poisoning that was traced back to the beef at the Burger King they stopped at on the way to camp. Five years ago Ken and I once emceed the last talent show (there's a reason it was the last) at camp. We spent the entire two hours up on stage saying things that were hilarious to Ken and I while everyone else stared blankly at us. Jason Shinn and Mike Dicurci sat in the back of the auditorium and heckled us with a bullhorn.

Ken recently moved out to Jersey where he's going to seminary and youth pastoring. We get to spend a week together each year at camp, visit as we're in each other's area and we talk on the phone pretty frequently. Since Ken's parents are reading this, it's very important that you know that Ken is in fact heterosexual.

Phil will never read this

This is Phil. As you can see, Phil has a giant paint ball wound on the side of his neck. He's a Youth Pastor out in Livonia. Phil has dyslexia, but most people would have no idea. I always figured this meant that you see a couple letters backwards and it's a little tougher to read. Phil has a very extreme case of dyslexia and can't read at all and never will be able to. When you and I see a stop sign, we think the words stop. Phil sees four letters that don't correspond to anything in his brain. Everything has to be read to him. Stop and think about how many things you read in a day and what the world. This really blew me away. I seriously couldn't imagine never being able to read a book. I read a book a week. I read menus. I surf the internet. I read newspapers. I read directional signs. I don't know what I'd do.

The amazing thing is that Phil runs a construction company, has his Bachelor's degree in Youth Ministry and knows the bible inside and out. He doesn't look for pity and he's able to laugh about it.