A long drive

So here we are in the hospital, we got a bunch of snow and of course Steph's water broke during rush hour on top of that. So it took about 40 mins to get here, but we're here and Steph is in her hospital gown and now she is getting hooked up to the monitors now. Anyways we'll keep you up to date with whats going on.

The Best Laid Plans

So.. about 15 minutes ago I'm working on a paper for my class and I see Stephanie rushing for the bathroom...It seems that her water just broke so we're heading to the hospital now. Not sure what is in store, but I'll keep people informed.

Only Child No More

In 25 hours Dylan will no longer be an only child...At 7:30 this morning I was summoned by banging on Dylan's bedroom door. The next 20 minutes were spent in bed playing, and snuggling with Dylan, when all of the sudden I realized that this was our last day alone with Dylan. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited, but it is going to be a different experience. As an only child myself, I don't know all that comes with siblingness, this is new territory. My sister-in-law flew in yesterday with her youngest, Jovie. One of the first things she said was how nice it was to have just one child for a couple of days. Robb, her husband said the same thing on Skype last night about Brody and how it was nice just for the moment to have just Brody at home. Of course this doesn't mean a parent loves any less, it just helps us refocus. So as we get ready for baby, today I plan on appreciating that special time with Dylan.

The Name Game

Today is Tuesday the 24th of January. If all goes as planned we should have a new addition to our family by about 9:30 A.M. CST on Friday the 27th. Of course we're prepared for surprises, but actually this pregnancy has been surprise free. (Please hear me knocking on wood right now.) So speaking of surprises, since we know the gender (female), and even the birthday (Feb. 27) we're leaving the name for the big surprise, and you'll hear it right here first. So I would suggest checking this blog often on Thursday and Friday as I try to chronicle the first 24 hours of baby right here.

That said things have been busy at home as I try to get caught up on some homework, it never seems to end. And we are trying to do all of our shopping for the next few weeks. With Dylan we told ourselves that we were not going to change our routine of life too much we'd still hang out with friends, go out to eat, etc. I think we did a pretty good job at that, but already the challenge of two kids under the age of two is hitting us. I have no idea how one parent can go get groceries with an infant and a toddler at the same time. I actually don't remember seeing anybody at a store in that situation? Perhaps because it is not possible?

Keep checking the blog, and Keep Jesus #1
Benji

Ecclesiology and Marketing

Just saw this video on the YS website, I'd love to hear your feedback :) Also to those of you who have subscribed to my blog thanks, I'm glad you have done so, but if possible I'd love it if you could post your responses back on the blog to generate some discussion :)





I add this because it is part of a paper I'm writing now on Ecclesiology. When I was talking to a friend of my about the identity of the Adventist church he said that he thought that the church had a weak ecclesiology. What do you think? What makes church ...church? How do we balance our idea of being the remnant people and the true church with any sort of ecumenicism? Or should we just think that we're the best and nobody else has "the truth."

A few months back as I was sitting in a meeting with a bunch of Adventist pastors somebody started throwing around the term truth like... truth was the Sabbath or belief in Ellen White. What would Ellen White have thought of that? I'm no EG White scholar but I think that she would have pointed to only one truth. Jesus Christ. Wasn't it Jesus that said that he is THE Truth? How do we balance and market (see above video) ourselves and our view point without the arrogance of being the only true religion? Perhaps that is what my friend meant by our having a weak ecclesiology.

Keeping Jesus #1
Benji

Not the Caddilac of Computers

So everybody complains about Vista and Microsoft...Let me tell you apple has it's share of issues as well. I bought Stephanie an refurb ipod touch which is a pretty beautiful machine. I was super excited to install some apps but when I hooked it up to itunes I had to pay $10 to install a new OS. Not cool at all, no where on the apple site was I warned about this, I also had lengthy discussions with people at the apple store before I purchaced the ipod asking about the differences between 1G and 2G machines and never was warned about this. I know, it's only $10 but I felt like I was being robbed.

Then on Sunday Stephanie's Macbook crashes. I make an appointment with the genisus at the apple store and they proceed to tell us that the hard drive is toast. All of the data is gone (Stephanie doesn't have an accompanist so we have recorded two versions of all of her choir songs on Garageband...it's all gone) Apple was good enought to do an out of warranty repair and replace the disk as well as upgrading us to leapard and ilife 08. It helped to ease the pain of losing a lot of data. I got the computer back in less than 24 hours however when setting up the computer this afternoon it crashed again! Same thing.

I'm glad (knock on wood) that I'm running my trusty HP. with beautiful windows Vista...I don't understand all of you haters :)

Benji
P.S. after this nerdy post I will hopefully be posting on a fun theological topic in the next day or so.

Sitting in Class at Seminary

Ok, so last week I promised myself that I would post to my blog. Mostly so that Stew couldn't make fun of me about not posting during Intensives. I had this great idea that I would post daily on my progress on my sermon and maybe get feedback that I could incorporate into my sermon. I will do that someday, but obviously it didn't happen last week.

This week I"m sitting in Systematic Theology, which despite me posting during a lecture is pretty interesting. (We are talking predestination right now, which Adventists have conveniently passed over and as far as I know don't discuss much.) This month has been very busy but last Sabbath took the cake, those of you in church know what I'm talking about. I am very much a notes preacher and I lost my notes between services, that was scary, but it went ok.

I posted some new pics of Dylan on Flickr and you need to check them out, I can't you how much Dylan is changing, it's so amazing to watch! Plus we're having a girl end of February/early March!

Hopfully more posts later one some interesting topics, i.e. life and theology
Benji

Renters vs. Owners

It is somewhat funny that I usually blog during some of my busiest times, when I should be doing other things. However, tonight is the Sabbath and I am enjoying just decompressing from a week of intensives at bethel. This weeks intensive was for my measurement based leadership course. Very interesting... I wonder if there are any of you that read the blog that may wonder if measurement and church should not go hand in hand? Here are my major take aways from the class so far...
We have just scraped the surface of stewardship culture in the church. The issues of time/talent/treasure is nice and helpful, but what we have done is created a culture of renters. Part of this goes back to our wonderful Catholic friends and the idea of a priesthood that we as protestants have never really gotten away from. However I think in the Adventist church, along with others who have a structure like ours where the church does not choose it's pastor, we have aided and abbeded in this renter culture.
Think about it...it is only recently that pastors even think of staying in a church more than 3-5 years. How can a pastor really be an owner of that churches vision to fulfill the Great Commission in a community when they are constantly thinking of their exit strategy and the congregation knows that what ever ideas a pastor pushes on them are going to change when the next guy comes anyways. This creates a culture of both renter pastors and renter congregations that are never allowed to have a long term strategy for reaching the lost in their community because of the revolving door of leadership.
So how do we fix it? I don't know about you but as I look at many of the challenges I have at my church many come down to this issue. It truly is an issue of stewardship. How do we get rid of a patriarchical top down system and replace it with one that is more empowering, one that creates a heart of service and one that has the customer (i.e. the people we want to see in our church) in mind.
Random thoughts post by
Benji
p.s. Couldn't post without adding a Dylan picture, this was taken at the Madison Zoo and this lioness had her eye on Dylan...it was actually a little disconcerting.
p.p.s. I finally broke down and got a facebook page, Stephanie is on Myspace, if you know us please check out our pages!

Dylan's One

So it's been a while since I blogged. There were a couple of times in the last few months where I actually started a post here. In fact, this week is so busy that I really shouldn't be on here now. But I wanted to let people know what's going on... My winter quarter started yesterday. Fall was a good quarter with some very intriguing classes, which paired along with a very fulfilling trip to Youth Specialites, I feel that some of the pieces of a puzzle that has been sitting on my table for a while is coming together. Of course the puzzle is far from complete but perhaps I have sorted out teh edges?

This was a wild Christmas, we spent time in Santa Cruz/Bakersfield/College Place and racked up about 7000 miles each in the air...Dylan and I got pretty sick, it was Dylans first illness so it was stressful and we made a few trips to the Dr. :) But he is on the mend now and walking around the house, pulling stuff off of shelves. He's picked up some cool words like "ut-oh" I think mommy taught him that one? And he is just a great blessing for us. I better go and do some of the reading/typing/studing/sermon prep/ that I have to do. Check out the flickr account for some pics of our holiday adventures.
Keeping Jesus #1
Benji

Schools starting againhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

A few of you want up dates on the life...It has been quite a while and I would encourage you to visit our flickr site to see what's up with us over the past few months. Of course most of you know that we had an awesome time in Wales and the UK. In fact right now I'm wearing the Manchester United jersey I got while I was over there! I'd love to see your comments on the photos! Also You can see what's up on stephs myspace account.
So steph started school again today, After hearing the woes that 4/5 boarding schools in Mid-America had decreased enrollement it was a little scary. We actually were a few students over budget with the good adventist number of 144 students! So we'll see how that all pans out but it's good news for MCA!
I'm staying busy, I had the pleasure of doing my first wedding for a student who used to be in youth group on Sunday! I had fun with that and now I'm spending this week with the students at the school and also getting ready for a sermon this Sabbath. School starts for me in a couple of weeks, I'm a little worried for this quarter because I'm really busy with work, but we'll see how that goes.
Also a fun new thing for me is coaching "varsity" volleyball. Our team is brand new and it's fun seeing dramatic improvement in the girls. We got schooled by the Deaf Academy here but I think that by Union Tournament we should be able to hold our own. Anyways thats an update on the Fergusons, if you have skype you can find me there often I'd love to video chat with all of you non-minnesotans and show off Dylan!

Benji
p.s. join my fantasy pickem league! get info how on my youth website/blog

Rock Climbing and some Vintage Dylan

Last week was the annual Rock Climbing Trip... Steph and Mindy were busy with taking caring of the babies while Rob and I, along with some Youth Group alumni did the rock climbing duties. We had a great time with everything, I made my second trip up to the top of spire 4 and all but one of the students made it up to the top of the easy, yet very exposed climb. Anyways Steph and Mindy were very busy during the week too, this is a photo of Dylan taken in Hill City, SD... The other photo is a characture taken at our city festival last week...Wales is only a few weeks away!

Benji

This is a video from campmeeting 07!

Ok so here is a video from campmeeting this year

My kid's a mule!

Well it's been a month since I last worked on this blog...I've been busy. Being a work at home dad isn't all it's cracked up to be. I'll do my best to fill you in. The most fun thing I did was to go over to Wales and help Ed do a weekend retreat for the Welsh/Scottish/Irish Missions. There was about 100 kids there and it was a blast! It's all about international speaking engagements. I'm looking forward to taking kids over there this summer it should be awesome.

Next two weeks I'm in intensives, we'll be out in Cali next weekend for Steph's 10 year at MBA, I get to be a trophy husband for a weekend! Should be fun.

I got guitar hero for my 360 the day it came out...it is very addicting and one of the best things about it is that stephanie likes to play too :) If you are ever interested in playing give me a call and come on over...If you have no idea what guitar hero is...well just come over :)

Tonight we went to Taco Bell for dinner. When I went up to get my order stephanie told me to get lots of hot sauce, our supply at home was getting low. So I grabbed a handful of the good stuff and we proceeded to eat our dinner with Dylan happily sitting on the table in his carseat watching us eat. When we were finished I got up to throw away our trash and turn back to the table just in time to see Stephanie putting all of the sauce packets in Dylan's carseat and covering it with his blanket, like we needed to smuggle out the sauce. I had to explain to stephanie that it wasn't good to make our kid into a "mule" at 3.5 months espeically if there's no money in it for us :)

Anyways that's our fun life. Last time we weighed Dylan about 2 weeks ago he was 14lbs. 2 oz! and he's about 23'' long! The Pic is of Dylan holding his passport, we just got it today so he can go to Wales with us this summer! (Notice the drool on the passport already)

Keeping Jesus #1
Benji

Tourney fever

well I've never really gotten into college basketball, but I decided to try my hand at making picks this year. here's the link to my brackets :) http://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/men/723472/bracketoverview

I went way overboard with picking upsets.

I wrote a few weeks ago about dumb advertising...Has anybody seen the new McDonald's add? It makes McD's look very bad. There is this guy full of energy who gets into a car full of tired and slovenly people who can't function until they get their coffee and breakfast from McD's? The happy guy doesn't get any breakfast and in fact when they get to work he takes the stairs and everybody else looks at him like he's crazy! OK. so isn't advertising supposed to make you want to buy a product? I'd much rather be the happy healthy guy than the zombied out tired people...doesn't make sense...

I'm almost done with my classes for the quarter. Next quarter I take a Gospel's class and also another leadership class.

Dylan is doing great, next week is the big week where mommy goes back to teaching and daddy lugs Dylan around with him for the next 9 weeks...should be interesting, very interesting :)

Keeping Jesus #1
Benji

getting hectic again

Well I just got back from a fun weekend in California. We missed the biggest snow storm of the year and got to enjoy 70 weather all weekend. Dylan got to meet a ton of grandpas and also Grand Jan for the first time! He met some great grandparents and a greatgreatAunt. Good times. The flight home was the red eye and i had to take the school kids to Waterpark of America the next day. wow I was tired. Dylan must have been tired too, because he slept almost all night last night and all day today. We'll see how that goes for us tonight.

Another quarter of Seminary is closing out and I'm franticaly working on the papers I've procrastinated on. One is a history of the youth ministry at our church here for my history class and the other I have to start thinking about but it's not due till next week:)

MCA has spring break next week and for once I'll be around? kinda strange... Other than that just check the flickr account for some photos from this weekend. Oh a highlight of the weekend was that Dylan got to see the ocean and even put his feet in the water, the picture of that is very cute...

Keeping Jesus #1
Pastor Benji

Random Monkey thought

It's time that I add to the randomness of this blog. Those of you in the midwest are aware of the Taco Bell rival Taco Johns. Today as I was eating my breakfast their commercial came on and I was amazed at how ludicris it was....As we get close to Super Bowl adn commercials are the highlight of our lives I would like to pause and analyize this commercial. First of all, some of you will recognize Taco Johns from the news a few months back after quite a few costomers got sick from eating there....Fast forward a few months later and the company is using a burrito delivering monkey that rides on a dogs back to deliver food to costomers stuck in traffic...Does that make you want to eat a burrito? As for me I want my burritos as far away from dogs and monkeys as possible. Especially monkeys! These same monkeys who supposedly are the cause of AIDS and Ebola...Please if you see monkeys anywhere around my burritos let me know, as for Taco Johns you get my vote for the poorest choice of a mascot for your company, perhaps in the histoy of mascots.....

http://www.tacojohns.com/Media%20Files/whiplashrun4.asx


As usual Keeping Jesus #1
Pastor Benji

Ok, Ok I'll Post Something

Well after that first week I've been a bad blogger. But things definitely haven't slowed down at all. I have no idea how big Dylan is now but he's growing and putting on some weight or at least he better be he eats every two hours. We have a slew of visitors. First Jeni (she wants to be called "old lady") came to visit for a while. That was during week one and she ended up staying a couple of extra days. She was a great help and I don't think we'll need to iron or do laundry for the next couple of months!!! I'm not looking forward to that January water bill :)

Then Dave (he wants to be called Papa) came for MLKJr. weekend and we had a great time together just hanging out and doing some shopping. He got us a very cute toy chest for Dylan that I need to get a picture posted of. Oh by the way be sure to check the flickr account as there are new pictures up. Not as many, but there are some quality ones:)

Mindy is our current resident guest, and she brought along Brody as well. (They want to be called Mindy and Brody) She has been a great companion for Steph and the sisters are having fun together, but basically the just sit around the house and try to get some rest between feedings.

I have been pretty busy with stuff here at home and work. I am learning the trade of dad by assembling all of the baby gear, it's definitely a job I can handle. My school work is going well. I'm taking two classes this quarter a Christian History class and a Missions class. I really like the reading in the History class we have just finished reading up to the 6th century. I have a paper due this week comparing some historical accounts of one of the fathers of the monk lifestyle named Anthony... It is also student week of prayer at the school and I'm pretty excited about what's going on there, and last weekend we had 3 students preach for our main services which was pretty awesome as well. My big worries for the next couple of weeks are basically school and getting our mission trip (looks like we're going to Wales) all settled. But as Jesus says, I shouldn't worry to much He's got everything under control. I just need to focus on following the direction He's leading!

Keeping Jesus #1
Benji

This isn't so bad...

Well after many of you have wished us well after those first two night, I have to say I'm getting a little worried. Things are going way too well. We went for a little trip on the town the other day and I found out something wonderful about Dylan! He sleeps on car rides. If he's crying before the car moves, once the car is on the move he quiets down and goes to sleep! Then last night he only woke up twice to eat and poop! Amazing... Anyways things are going so well, I know we must have some tough days and nights in our future, it can't all be this good. By the way at his checkup yesterday Dylan was up to 6 pounds 9.5 oz. The day before he was 6"8oz! the nurse weighed him twice and this was after he had just gone #2! so when we left the hospital on Sat. he was 6 even and on Wed he was 6'9.5 unbelievable.

Belle and Dylan are getting along great. When visitors come over Belle will take them over to Dylan and then stand between them and Dylan until she notices how we react to the people. It's pretty cute.

I start school again on monday with a Christian History class and an Evangelism class. The reading load is going to be impressive but I've gotten a little head start. I guess that's all for now.

People have been asking for more pictures, and they're on the way, but it will probably be the weekend before I get them on the web. I think I'm going to have to change accounts because the free flickr account only allows 200 pics and we have much more than that. So I'm switching over to Yahoo, but it'll take a little work. BOOO Flickr

Keeping Jesus #1
Pastor Benji

Day 5

Well it's a new year, and there's plenty of other new things in the Ferguson house! We brought Dylan home late Sabbath to plenty of rain showers. We walked into the house and Steph started crying. It was a pretty overwhelming experience. Saturday night was rough too, Dylan had a very hard time sleeping and because of that so did we. He was so good in the hospital and he came home and cried all night. Finally we gave him some drops of some stuff that helps with gas (did he get that from daddy?) and he was able to have a little stool in his diaper which seemed to help things out immensely, but he still had to sleep on mom's chest for the rest of the night which was only minimally restful for mom.

Sunday morning, Marie came over and gave Steph a break and watched Dylan so Steph could sleep. While Stephanie was sleeping Marie worked her magic on our house. She got the guest room rearranged and cleaned up so "the old lady" would have a place to sleep. She did a lot of other stuff too and helped me move my desk so that I would have a place to study while we have this influx of visitors over the next few months.

Steph got her wish Sunday and the rain outside turned to snow! We got a few inches and should have some pictures of that up on flickr really soon. That made the ride to the airport to pick up Jeni a long one and Steph and Dylan stayed home since the roads were so messy. But Dylan loves hanging out with Jeni. New Years eve was a better night for Dylan and Dad and mom are a little more rested.

I wish all of you a great new year. May you find a closer relationship with Jesus and the people God puts in your path in the coming year.

Keeping Jesus #1
Benji

Photoshop is a scary thing

This is a note from a good friend of ours that noticed the Yoda reference....
"Wise you look, young Padawan"
"Future bright ahead is"

"Benji and Steph,

Congratulations on Dylan's birth. Enjoy the miracle.

Since you mentioned it, I couldn't help but see what he would look like as Yoda. So... no disrespect to Dylan -- I hope he'll forgive me

See you soon,

B<"