The Flowers and Showers of Spring

This year is really flying by! We had so many great things going on in April and May, way more than showers and flowers! Although we have definitely had our share of showers!

We had an incredible Easter weekend with a Saturday night service and two Sunday morning services. We had four services last year and decided we would try doing three instead this year and definitely regretted it. We will be back on schedule with four services next year for sure! Our sermon series in April was called The Trial and Easter's message was called Pilate, Barabbas and The Cry of the Crowd. Media pulled together some awesome video support and Meghin found great songs to drive the message home. The video clips were really special. We knew movie footage would be limited and dated so we found ways to illustrate the dialog of each piece with really cool graphics and imagery. It was very artistic and creative. We had a huge response with right at 4,000 in attendance and over 40 salvations. 

Once again this year we recognized the Directors on our Lead Team. We have been doing this several years now. Along with honoring the Pastors on the team in October, we love celebrating these incredible members of our team whose responsibilities are more directional in nature. Pastor Matt Ackman and his wife Mariah direct our Leadership College, Holane Davidson directs our offices, Marshal Hunter directs our Media Department and Courtney Lantier directs our Accounting Department. The church really blessed our team this year and showed them a lot of love! 

The first weekend of May we got to honor our High School and College graduates. This is always such a treat! We are so proud of these young men and women. We celebrated 39 graduates this year! We call each one up on stage, announcing their name, their school and any accolades they have achieved and Pastor Matt and his team are there to present them with a nice gift from the church. Once they're all on stage, I go up and lead the congregation in prayer over them. Before and after service they have refreshments in the Green Room and are hosted by representatives from Chi Alpha and CLC. Pastor Matt shared a powerful message that day. I am so thankful for the incredible job he and Mariah do with our students and with the Leadership College. 

Mother's Day is always special at Crossroads. When we first took the church it was one of the least attended days of the year. Everyone went to church with their moms at the Catholic church. However, we got really intentional with it and converted it into one of the largest days of the year! We have a gift for every mom, special music, funny video, message just for moms and great photo opps. My message series in May was Identity Crisis and I kicked it off with my Mother's Day message called A Mother's Identity. We do baby dedications that day and it typically is our biggest response to that ordinance of the church. After service we took Donna to eat Indian food ad she really enjoyed it! 

We wrapped up May with our annual Viva la Serve event where we celebrate over 600 volunteers that serve our church each week. We do great give aways and celebrate the results of the past year of ministry, announcing the numbers of visitors, salvations, baptisms, etc. We share some vision for the coming year and then feed our teams all-they-can-eat boiled crawfish. It is a HUGE hit every year! I am so grateful for all the amazing volunteers that work shoulder-to-shoulder with us as we reach people at the crossroads of life! 

We have enjoyed the spring's flowers and showers and are now ready for a busy summer to begin! 

Life Long Friends

We attended the Lead Conference this past week in Lake Charles. Our dear friends Paul and Cyndi Burke hosted the conference this year at Glad Tidings. The church looked so good! They have made up so much ground since the hurricane and flooding of 2020. So thankful for how God has blessed them and so proud of their leadership! 

The conference was a real blessing. Bryan Jerod was our keynote speaker and he truly came with a word from God! His message on Monday night was about the role of patience in our lives and how the lack of patience is really paganism! It demonstrates a lack of trust in God and a desire to be in control. Ouch! 

Our lifelong friend, Gary Sapp was awarded his 50-year ordination pin. We are so thankful for Gary and Dee. They have been such great friends and they have been so supportive of our ministry from the very beginning. Gary was one of the very first ones to recognize the call of God on my life and God used him to open some very significant doors for us. He gave me oppertunities to play when I first started out in music ministry. He introduced me to Pastor Linney who hired me to be his Youth Pastor here in Lafayette. He got me started speaking at camps and conventions in the 90's. He encouraged me to get involved in Presbytery work. His finger prints are all over the ways God has used my life and ministry through the years and I am so grateful! 

Marching Through March

I love how we do baptisms here at Crossroads. We call it our Submerged Service and we do it 4 times a year. We typically have 50 - 60 people following the Lord in water baptism. So that means 25-30 or more per service, which is a lot to get in. We set up two tanks, one on each side of the stage and spotlight them so we can go back and forth, taking less than a couple minutes for the person being baptized to give us their name and statement of faith. The crowd goes crazy for each one of them! We remind the crowd ahead of time that all of heaven rejoices when one sinner repents so this is our chance to join in that celebration! We will usually feature a testimony in each service, preferably from one of our people being baptized. Our media team will do that on video and again, when the clip ends our crowd erupts! 

A big event in March each year is our Men's Field & Stream Cook-off. We have teams compete with wild game or seafood dishes and the winner gets a huge prize. This year it was a Blackstone grill. The guys that won the prize this year asked if we could auction it off and give the money to Chad Bellello who is battling cancer and has some huge medical bills. I was so proud of those guys! 

We always have Beau Roy barbecue some of his famous pull pork and Chef Troy from Cafe Josephine's will fry up fish and shrimp. The guys absolutely LOVE the event and many will invite friends and family members to join them. This year I brought in my cousin, Rusty Blan to speak at the event as well as our Sunday morning services. He did an amazing job! We also draw names at the event for some great door prizes including the grand prize every year, which is a shotgun! 

I was invited to speak at the 100 year anniversary of Calhoun Assembly of God. It was such an honor and such a full-circle moment for me. My dad pastored the church twice. Once when I was a boy, for over twelve years and again in the early 2000's up until he got sick. The church is currently pastored by a woman who I grew up with there at the church, Pastor Sonya McLure Patterson. Her dad also pastored the church for a season. It's funny what your memory clings to when you're young, but one of my earliest memories is of Sonya's dad, Dan McLure, walking down the aisle of that church one Sunday night. He was a huge man, tall and broad shoulders. He was wearing blue jean overalls as I recall and when he reached the altar he fell to his knees with a loud thud and begin to sob under the conviction of the Holy Spirit!

Our annual business meeting was March 30th. We held board member elections and Doug Polumbo and Ricky Thibodeaux were re-elected to another two-year term.  Glynn Robin completed his second two year term this year and has a mandatory one-year sabbatical before he can serve again. Bryan Tabor was elected to fill that place on the board. Bryan has served many times on my board and does an incredible job. He is a business man, a civic leader and a faithful member of Crossroads for many years. 

I have always been grateful for a wonderful board of directors, however I have NEVER been as grateful as I was this past year with the many challenges our church faced. Our board was such a blessing and so supportive. I don't know how I could have made it through all the difficulties without their covering. God is so good! 

A Busy Month

We continued with the birthday celebrations in February! Ezekiel's birthday is February 8th and Chase's birthday is February 11th. 

Eli's mom and dad had a cruise scheduled toward the end of the month so waited until then to have Zeke's party, but believe me - we celebrated all month long and he loved it! 

On the week of his actual birthday we let him choose the restaurant for our Thursday night family dinner. He got some early birthday presents that night. On his birthday we went by his house and gave him more presents. Then, the day of his party he got even more presents! His birthday party was a Lego party. He loves putting together lego sets and boy, did he get a lot of legos! Ezekiel is such a good boy and we enjoy him so much! So thankful to get to be his Poppy! 

Chase chose to go with authentic Mexican food for his celebration at his favorite restaurant and it was so good! 

Throw Valentine's Day in the mix and it was a month-long celebration for this family! Lovey found some fun Valentine's Day puzzles for us all to put together and she and Ezekiel made cookies! 

My favorite teams didn't make it to the Super Bowl so I really didn't have a dog in the hunt. However, my disdain for the Kansas City Chiefs, who made it to the big game once again, had me rooting for whoever they were playing against. That happened to be the Philadelphia Eagles this year, who they defeated in Super Bowl . That was a close game but this was a complete blow out! The Chiefs were completely unprepared for the butt whipping the Eagles brought to the game. It was very entertaining to watch! 

We had the Davidsons, the Plakes and the Quebedeauxs over for grilled burgers, boudin, King Cakeand the trimmings! So much fun!

We enjoyed a visit from Bubba and Tammy in February. We had lots of laughs and ate lots of good food including burgers at our place, fried catfish at Holane and Danny's, Saturday breakfast at Coffee Depot and Sunday lunch at El Paso's. 

Kicking the Year Off Right!

We have had an incredible start for the new year, but the most exciting thing had to be our big snow event. This kind of thing just doesn't happen in Louisiana! The most snow on record for Lafayette, LA is 14” in 1895. 130 years later, Mother Nature gave it another go! The official record was 10 inches! It was absolutely beautiful. On day one, if you were interested in building a snowman like I was, the snow was too powdery. It would have made great skiing snow, but alas we have no hills! Nevertheless, we enjoyed what Bud Plake is affectionally calling “Snowmageddon!” By day two we were able to build this guy! In addition to the snow, we had a record-breaking low of 4 degrees!

It is always so great having Pastor Denny with us to kick off the new year. I am so thankful for his apostolic leadership in my life and in our church. He always brings such a great word to Crossroads. This year, his message emphasis was on the promise found in John 1:12 that God gives us the power to become. My prayer this year is I will become everything God has called me to be! I am praying that God will empower us to become the church He has raised us up to be in these last days. We hosted our 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting again this year and, until the snow event, we were averaging between 400-500 people joining in online and in person! We also have over 300 people in our church doing The Bible Recap Bible reading plan with us this year! 

We got to bring the family to the rodeo in January! We brought Robin and Chase up attending the rodeo every year and they always enjoyed it. I have been looking forward to introducing the grandkids to this family-friendly event and I think they really got a kick out of it. My parents brought me to the rodeo when I was young and that’s where my fascination with horses began. I would love it if one or both of my grand babies shared my passion for horses one day! They sure looked cute in their cowboy hats we had saved from when Robin and Chase were littles! 

January is always a big birthday month for our family! Robin’s birthday was on the 8th and my birthday was on the 17th. We celebrated Robin’s birthday at her favorite sushi restaurant and celebrated mine at a new Indian place that we LOVED! These are two of our family's favorite types of food and we always each typically choose one or the other! Because of the time of year me and Robin's birthday falls, it's not uncommon for us to choose King Cake as desert! 2025 hasn't completely been without challenges so far, but it really has shown great promise! 

The Elephant In the Room

It’s New Year’s Day, 2025. We have just enjoyed a wonderful holiday season surrounded by family and friends and are now looking ahead to the new year and all the oppertunities that God will bring our way.  One of my favorite moments over the Christmas break was when my son-in-law Eli sent us a video of our little two-year old granddaughter Elsie sitting in the floor with a stuffed Elephant and an opened book, thumbing through the pages. As she turned page after page of this unillustrated novel, she looked at her stuffed Elephant and said, “No pictures Elephant - sorry!” 

This provided us with a good laugh, but it also brought an inspired thought to me. I would like to address the “Elephant in the room” for many. Here you sit at the threshold of a new year and you’ve got no picture - no vision if you will - for what you should be striving to achieve this year. You have no goals, no resolutions, no ambitions for the next twelve months.

I want to challenge you to take this to the Lord. I believe God wants to give you a picture of the things He would like to do in you and through you in the coming days. There’s a wonderful passage of scripture in Psalm 143:10 where the Psalmist prays, "You are my God. Show me what you want me to do, and let your gentle Spirit lead me in the right path.” Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.” This doesn’t mean God will give you anything you want. It means if you seek Him and put your heart in His hands, He will fill your heart with desires that reflect what He is wanting you to do. Treat those things like your sacred assignment and live on mission this year! Let the elephant in the room know you’ve got the picture now!