I can’t wait for this weekend at the Highland Campus as we celebrate the announcement of the Miracle Offering total! Trust me - you are not going to want to miss this announcement. You will be blown away by God’s amazing power and provision. So come excited and full of faith! Thank you for all you do for HPC and the Kingdom of God.

Mike Haman took this picture at 4:30 this morning at the construction site of the new HPC Arena. What a great way to start the day - to see the personal project of Jesus (Matthew 16:18) going forward because of the love of people and His grace. Thanks to so many.

So, for the big part of the past week, my blog went offline due to a freak hardware failure, and thanks to the hard work of Josh Foster and David Song, it is now back up and running.

But even though the website was down, life kept rolling. We had a phenomenal time with our partners in Italy during the recent Equip Million Leaders Mandate training sessions. The folks at Italy For Christ are amazing. Then the Rizzo’s got to hang with the Austin’s for a really cool Thanksgiving holiday in Mississippi. A ton of volunteers with a bunch of huge hearts served it up at our campuses doing free Thanksgiving meals at St. Francisville, St. Amant, Donaldsonville and at Winbourne, too. It was slamming.

Then this past weekend it was really cool to have David Meyer come in from St. Louis for a visit - he has been such a great friend to us - I guess he came to console us here in Louisiana with Missouri taking over the top spot in the college football rankings. It was great to see him.

3 of my favorite men on the planet - me, David Meyer, Dave Ohlerking and Ben Rodgers.

And we’re rolling right back into it this week with the announcement of the Miracle Offering total during our services this weekend. And then on December 6, Natalie Grant and Aaron Shust will be with us in concert at the Highland campus. Be sure to come out for that - bring a friend or two and everyone you can.

Looking back it’s easy to see some great things behind and there are more coming. Great opportunities to reach out to people and connect with family and friends and others you don’t even know yet as we celebrate the holiday season.

I am so thankful today - for a million reasons - here’s a few of them.

I’m thankful that this morning at about 1:30am they started pouring concrete in the HPC Arena. After miles and miles of conduit for media, power, communications, sound, lights, and whatever else needed conduit, we are now getting concrete poured for the slab in the arena seating area. 260 yards of concrete today - and it is just in time, because in just three or four weeks the tilt-up walls are due to be here.

It is a great day to see so much being poured out - concrete is just part of it. I’m thankful for a church that pours out so much of itself - the heart of the people of HPC to serve and to give - it is so cool to see what God is doing. The last two weeks you have given and given - and served in outreaches (already served dinners for Thanksgiving at St. Amant and more to come at St. Francisville, Donaldsonville, and the Spanish campuses)… There is so much of a heart to sacrifice….

So much to be thankful for this week. I’m thankful for God’s plan of salvation for His people. I’m thankful for the precious family He has given me in DeLynn and my three kids. I just spent the last six days in Italy (five of those six without any luggage!) and it is very good to be home to “la famiglia.”

I’m so thankful for the God opportunities all around us - for the region in which we serve… This is what the concrete and steel and conduit is all about - it is about serving the great community here, there and everywhere.

What are you thankful for this Thanksgiving?

It is pretty cool how in today’s high-tech world you can be high-touch and have people who are actually your friends that live all around the globe. Some of our closest friends are the Hillsong Church family - from Sydney, London, Kiev,…

At the same time, it is cool to have friends right down the street, too. Like the great people at Bethany South and ten or fifteen other churches who we are partnering with to welcome Hillsong United and Brian Houston to Baton Rouge tonight. It is cool that we can not just be churches in the same town, but we can also truthfully say we are friends in the same town.

Don’t be late tonight - Bethany South (click here for directions) - doors open at 6. It’s gonna be amazing.

A bunch of the pastors that were at the roundtable in California this week

I just got back from a really cool week in California. It started off in L.A. with a roundtable meeting of pastors with Brian Houston - sharing thoughts, ideas, lessons learned, and unpacking some of the things that we believe are ahead for the Church in general. Rob Ketterling was there and posted a few of his notes from the meetings (click here to read his post about it).

The sign pointing the way to our workshop session

From there Marc and I went to meet Dan and JP in San Diego for the National Outreach Convention and again it was cool to spend time connecting with pastors and ministry leaders from across the country and to share ideas that God has given us for reaching the world by serving one. I was honored to speak at one of the workshops and we also got to spend some time with Lindy Lowry (editor of Outreach Magazine), and Paul Engle, a new friend from Zondervan. And to top it all off, we were able to connect with some of the incredible HPC family from the Danville campus who followed Mark Stermer down after they had spent a few days together up in Danville.

But despite how great all of that was, I’m really excited to be home to my family and this church called Healing Place. It’s gonna be a totally amazing weekend I am convinced. We are trusting that God is going to show up during our Miracle Offering weekend services and we’re gearing up for the Sunday night Fall Fest as well. Free food, funnel cakes, inflatable games and a whole lot of family time for everyone in the church - singles, kids, grandparents, dads and moms, college students, young marrieds… everyone’s gonna have a blast at this celebration.

Come ready… It all starts in just a few hours. See ya there!