Digging Taters

5:47 AM Cannon Beach Conference Center

Time to pack my bags and head for the airport. This will be another long day that starts in Oregon and ends in Pennsylvania. But as I am packing, I am happy and grateful for a wonderful week of ministry at Cannon Beach. 

I am especially thankful for the worship team that made my job so much easier. For the second year in a row, I worked with the father-son team of Mark and Reggie Rice. Mark and Joyce Rice live in Kingman, Arizona where Mark serves as pastor of the brand-new Journey Church. To call it brand-new means that the church didn’t even exist (and Mark didn’t know it was about to start) when we were together last August. Already the church has reached so many people that it has moved three or four times. When Joyce gave me one of their cards, the address on the card was covered with a peel-off strip because the church keeps moving to find more space. That’s a nice problem to have. Mark leads worship with more heart than anyone I’ve ever been around. Or perhaps I should say he wears his heart on his sleeve so that his everyone senses his love for people. When he gets excited (which is often), he waves his arms like he’s winding up to throw a fastball and you think he’s going to jump off the platform. He is fun and gifted and impossible not to like. His son Reggie is a gifted guitarist who last year served as pastor of a church in Sedona, Arizona and now serves as a Children’s Pastor for 1000 2nd-6th graders at a Phoenix megachurch. Together they make a great team.

Cannon Beach is one of the few conference centers that brings in both a worship team and musical artists who provide special music. This week we have been amazingly, abundantly, overflowingly blessed by the music of Jim and Mary Kay Altizer who go by the name of Ivory and Brass. Mary Kay plays the piano, does the arrangements and plays the violin while Jim plays four or five different trumpets plus the guitar plus they sing plus he has some totally unique way of saying, “Hear the Word of God” and then quoting the Word with great power plus their music is performed to magnificent DVD backgrounds. Okay, but that doesn’t even begin to come close to describing what they do. Last night I told the people that it is a rare thing to encounter something and say, “I’ve never heard anything like that before.” But that would be true of Jim and Mary Kay. They take old hymns and do things with them I’ve never heard before. For instance, they did a salsa version of “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus” and they added a Latin beat to “Be Thou My Vision” and last night, Jim played Allegro Maestoso on the trumpet while May Kay played “When I Can Read My Titlte Clear,” the end result being that you hear music that you’ve heard before in a way you’ve never heard before. It reminds of me of watching one of those shows on the Food Network where a world-class chef is given ten ingredients that you would think never could go together and then in 45 minutes prepares a gastronomic feast. It’s something like that, only Ivory and Brass is a feast for the heart.

It’s been quite a week on the worship front as you can tell. Perhaps the best part is that everything has meshed so well. More often the speaker and the musicians are friendly and work together but generally we each do our own thing. This week by God’s Spirit there has been a synergy of gifts and message and music and laughter that has come together in a most unique way. After one message Jim told me, “You’re digging where there’s taters,” meaning the message was hitting home. I told him that you couldn’t say anything nicer to a guy from Mississippi. By God’s grace I’ve been “digging taters” for God’s glory all week long, and my job has been made much easier by Jim and Mary Kay and by Mark and Reggie and by everyone else who came to the conference at Cannon Beach this week.

Now it’s on to Pennsylvania. We leave for the Portland airport at 7:30 AM. Marlene flies from Columbus, MS later this morning. God willing, we’ll meet at the Cincinnati airport and then fly together to Allentown, PA where Davis and Kathy Duggins will meet us about 10 PM. I preach tomorrow morning at Berean Bible Fellowship Church in Stroudsburg and then start speaking at Pinebrook Conference Center tomorrow night.

I’m surprised at how good I feel this morning. It’s always better to start a travel day feeling happy and energetic and positive. I’m sure that seeing Marlene soon has a lot to do with it. Plus it’s been fun being here at Cannon Beach with so many friends who have encouraged me by their response to the messages from Jeremiah 29 and 1 Corinthians 13.

It’s now 6:13 AM and time to get my bags packed.