Thanksgiving was a blast. Here are a couple of quick pictures we snapped over the past couple of days that I really liked.

I love this picture of my girls. It still sounds weird for me to say that. This picture is so good, my beautiful wife and sweet baby girl. I can't get over how blessed I am to have them in my life.

We incorporated Star Wars into Thanksgiving this year. Ethan loves Star Wars and I've been talking to him about watching the original movies. We were at my parents house on Thanksgiving day and watched Episode IV on Dad's 100" HD screen with the boys. They loved it an we ended up watching Episode V on Friday and Episode VI today. There were many questions asked and answered with puzzled looks, especially regarding the whole Anikin is Darth Vader who is Luke's dad bit since Ethan has been introduced to Star Wars from the Clone Wars. He starting to grasp it though and is really get into it. This picture was taken yesterday evening as him and Cousin Evan watched The Empire Strikes Back.

For those that don't know, I am a huge Heavy Metal fan.  I'm not talking about Motley Crue, Guns N Roses or even Iron Maiden.  I'm talking about fast, heavy, hardcore, melt your skull, start a mosh pit kind of heavy.  I know I am in a very small percentage of the general population in my musical taste, most people question whether the music I play is music at all.  This isn't new to me, I'm used to it.  Over the past few years there has been a huge resurgence in the quantity and quality of metal bands across all genres but especially in the Christian metal space.  The first real concert I ever went to was Stryper, who for their time, was a pretty good band in the glam band, hair metal scene but were still not up to par musically with their "secular" counterparts.  This has been mostly true of Christian metal until the last few years.  It seems like there is a new Christian metal band coming out every few weeks that is not just good in the Christian space, but are as good or better than any metal band from any genre.  I love it, this should be the model for everything we as Christians do.  Too often we end up being the best in the Christian realm but not up to par with mainstream non-Christian counterparts.   Anyway, I am going to start posting some of my top metal picks for the 2% of my readers who also enjoy heavy metal.  Not sure of the frequency, it will probably be as I am listening and a band stands out or song speaks to me.  Comment if you enjoy any of these.

The first song I am going to mention is Redemption by August Burns Red.  They are at the top of the metal game and shred like nobody else on my playlist.  Their music is brutal and the lyrics are amazing.  Here are the lyrics from "Redemption".

I trust in you for life to live, and air to breath.
Purity fills my lungs.
I no longer live in solitude.
No longer bound.
My heart beats with great devotion.
This is the start to a new beginning.
On my knees praying for mercy.
Hands raised high, humble and broken. Wanting your grace.
Wanting your security.
Memories of laying facedown, motionless, with such a hollow feeling inside.
Soon I would end this life I was living.
I am just a man with a heart and sinful hands.
I am a fallen victim.
Lord, show me the way. I ask of you Father, let my words be your words.
Let my thoughts be your thoughts.
To you, I give my praise.
Show me the way. Take me in your arms. Never let me go.
Lord, show me the way, as I give myself to you.
Never let me go.
Hold me with your everlasting love.
Be my strength. Be my voice. Be my glory. Set me free.

Want to listen to the full song?  Here it is from youtube with the lyrics imposed over the music.  This song just gets me going!  Enjoy.

• Service today Fusion rocked the house.  We started Fanatic this week which is a series about worship.  Seth and the band had the place rockin like I've never seen.  It was the most amazing worship experience I've ever seen at our Church.
• Tony did a great job bringing it today too.  I don't think anyone left Fusion today wondering what the importance of worship is.
• Looking forward to Thanksgiving, ready to chow down majorly.
• I finished reading The Shack this week.  It was very good, I highly recommend it.  Listening to the afterward of how the book was written and the chain of events leading to it getting published and becoming such a huge success was as interesting as the book to me.  Check it out.
• I spent the last half of the week with my friend and business partner at his lake house building a boat lift in his boat house for his jet skis.  I considered it a house rental payment as he lets us use the place whenever we want for nada.  The jet skis usually stay on the trailer and have to be shuttled back and forth to the closest boat ramp.  Now they will be safe and secure in covered storage on the water for easy access.  Check out the pictures of our handy work here.  It was a lot of work but we had a great time just hanging out and cutting up.  The funniest part of the trip ended up being the 8 trips back and forth to the hardware store to get all the stuff we needed to finish the job.
• On the way home from the lake house, while in the left lane on I-285 doing about 80 MPH a lady in lane next tom me decided to get over on top of the car in front of me.  It made for some excitement as I tried to slow my truck, watch the pinball car action in front of me, look for people in the lanes next to me who might freak out and ram me and watch my rearview for the 20 other vehicles behind me going 80 that were shooting in different directions around each other trying to stop.  Luckily no one was injured and no additional accidents that we were aware of happened.  We hung out for about 20 minutes waiting for the police to give our statements to and then got back on the road.  Check out the picture of the CARnage here.
• I have started watching The Unit and am disappointed I hadn't watched it before now.  I think it might be my favorite show on TV right now, seriously, it's up there with Heroes.
• I'm excited about 24, I think.  I'm just glad it's not all happening in California, apparently the writers realized things might happen in other areas of the word.  I mean, come on, what area couldn't use a little Jack Bauer?
• Good beef jerky is hard to find, when you do find it, get a lot and don't eat it all at once.  Also, have dental floss handy.
• Chocolate milk should only be made with nesquik powdered mix and mixed to a consistency that makes it crunchy.  Just my opinion.
• This is one of the most ridiculous things I've seen in a long time.  Who is buying this?
• I got some new coffee called Jet Fuel, it's good.
• Got a big short week ahead, plan on cramming a lot into a short time period.  Should be fun.

Lust Vegas Week 2 Promo from Fellowship Church on Vimeo.

This may look like your average hair dryer, but it's not.  It's a secret weapon that produces the exact harmonic frequency to put a crying infant into an instant comatose state.  The effects are immediate once the device is switched on, the infants eyes glaze over and close within seconds.  Switching the unit off will immediately rouse the infant back into a highly irritated state.  There are currently no known adverse side affects to the infant, although many exist for the parents.  These include but are not limited to; irritability, inability to sleep through the constant noise, loss of ability to converse over noise, loss of ability to use phone in vicinity of device and loss of ability to hear other children in the house who may be in need.  Although the risks seem high, they well outweigh the possible alternatives of not using the device, I highly recommend getting one of these!

I'm playing around with my site template and layout.  I like this one better but am not completely in love with it.  I looked for template with a fire, guns and skulls theme but came up empty.  Feedback and suggestions, good or bad on the look would be appreciated.

I'm reading Seth Godin's book Tribes and came across this quote.

This week we made a video for our Fresh series.  We had a blast making it and played it during the service today.  Everyone seemed to enjoy it and it got a lot of laughs and comments.  Enjoy!

· Stephanie and I went to vote at the same time so we could tag team the kid wrangling. Much to our surprise, it took us all of 10 minutes to get in, vote and get out. God bless all of you that went and stood in line for hours to vote early. It made my experience so much better from years past.

· We’ve got some really cool stuff coming up at Fusion. It’s going to be crazy, I am very excited, you don’t want to miss it!

· Our current series “fresh” is amazing and is changing the way people think about their faith, very cool.

· Ethan is really getting into building stuff. He is digging LEGOs and we had a great time playing with my old Robotix toys. It’s cool to see him imagining and building, he comes up with crazy stuff every day.

· We had a great time on halloween trick or treating and enjoyed hanging out with our friends while the kids played afterwards. Ethan got to go as spiderman, Brenna was batgirl, Steph was a doctor and I went as bad santa.

· Brennan has been doing great, she is growing fast and challenging us in new ways that Ethan didn’t. She is pretty well behaved but has a much different personality than E, that’s for sure, follow along at BrennanLowe.com.

· I’ve been eyeing a new piece of “hardware”, I’m even considering selling or trading some existing inventory to make it happen, hmmmmm… decisions, decisions.

· I’m a full on Audible.com junkie now, I finished METAtropolis and it was a bit of a mind bender. Definitely caused me to think about some stuff in a new way.  Some of the technology discussed in the last novella of the book dowsnt seem that far away and the application was mind blowing.  $ permitting I will be listening to a lot more audio books.