Since there is NO youth ministry here at all, I am literally starting from the foundation, and that is just building relationships. There are great things in the works, but right now, I am simply focusing on getting to know the students that I have. Once I get in with them, I can start to build on that foundation.

I appreciate all of your continued prayers. The road ahead is a long one, and I know that I am still in the “honeymoon” phase so to speak. Everything right now is very optimistic and cheery, but I know that there is hard work to be done. So here we go!

For a little over a year, I have been looking for a full time pastoring position, with no success. There were opportunities here and there, but nothing definitive. I took call after call, interview after interview, and no real leads. But praise God, during all of this, I continued to trust that He would open the right door at the right time.

And open it He has. Just over a month ago, a pastor from Chico, Ca. called and wanted to setup an interview. I accepted the interview, and the ball started rolling.

The Interview. He wanted me to come up for a whole weekend to meet his family, attend a service and even speak at the evening service. This all came as a shock, as we had only talked on the phone twice before confirming an interview. When I arrived, he told me that he had talked to many of my references, and they all had great things to say about me (I paid them well). We talked about his vision for the church and youth ministry, my call to ministry and experience, giftings and ministry styles. On every item, we seemed to strike a chord with each other. It was awesome!

He did tell me that most of the church was older people, but since he has been there the church has seen a surge of younger families begin to attend. He went on to tell me that since he has been there, he has been promoting beginning a children’s ministry and youth ministry in order for the future of the church to be secured. This really resonated with me, as I really believe that a healthy church is one that ministers to the entire family.

After our lengthy meeting, we all went to lunch (myself, the pastor and his family). At lunch, I had a great time connecting with his three teenage kids and is wife. We all just really connected. It was great! After lunch, the pastor took me around Chico to give me a general idea of the area. For a city of just over 100,000, it felt very “right” for me.

The First Service. I attended the Sunday morning class and service the following day. The worship was mostly hymns (nothing wrong with those), but I still enjoyed it. Granted, a lot of change will have to happen in that service to attract younger families, but they are on their way to doing so. Praise God. To be perfectly honest, I was a little scared, as there really were a lot of older people in attendance. But I was encouraged as many of them came up to me after the service and told me that they knew they needed to bring in younger ministers to ensure the future of the church.

The In Between. We all went out to lunch again, and just had a great time. After lunch, the pastor and I returned to the church and I just spent time in prayer about the service that night (I was preaching) and about the overall opportunity. Part of my prayer was that if God really wanted me in Chico, then He was going to have to put Chico in my heart. After a while, the pastor came in and we just hung out in the office, checking out my Macbook (he had never seen a Mac before).

The Night Service. The pastor had pumped to the congregation that I was going to be speaking that night, so there was a pretty decent turnout at the night service. During the time of worship, it was even more “old school” as more hymns were sung, but there was a definite presence of God in that place. It was during this time that I got on my knees and just worshiped God, and He began to put Chico in my heart.

Moments before I got up to speak, God gave me a prophetic word for the church, which I spoke over them just before I spoke. I then spoke on two types of Christians; those that seek God for His “presence” and those that seek after His “presents.” It was a great word that even melted my own heart. Afterward, the presence of God was all over the people, and many just worshiped Him. It was amazing!

Afterward. After the service, the pastor was very open to the idea of bringing me on, and after much prayer and counsel, I really feel that this is the next step for me in God’s plan. A week later, I accepted the position.

Now, I need to get a few things in order here, and then get ready to move! So that is it! God is definitely a good God!

It’s almost 3 in the morning and I can’t stop thinking about you.
I’m not exactly sure who you are or where you live…
But there are some things you should know…

I love Jesus with all my heart; I know you will too…
When I say I love Him, I mean…
I REALLY LOVE HIM.
And His church.
I plan on loving you like I love His church.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes and I’m not perfect (ha, I guess that’s obvious).
But I will choose to pursue righteousness and holiness in all I do.
I will be man of integrity.
A trustworthy man.
A strong leader.
I promise to be the best husband you could ever ask for in every way.

I look forward to raising little sons and daughters for the kingdom of heaven.
And you can rest assure that I will treat you like a princess.
My name means valiant protector.
I plan on living up to my name and being the valiant protector of your heart and emotions.

I will never cheapen your value by calling other women names reserved for you. Never.
I will not so much think a thought about another woman in a way reserved for you.
I will tell you that you are the most beautiful girl in the world and mean it.
I will tell you that there is no one like you and mean it.
I will never ever cheapen what we have by giving it to others.
I honor you too much for that.
You will know it.

I never plan on making you submit to me.
I only plan to be a good enough leader to earn your honor and respect so that you can trust me even when things are unclear.
I will never abuse you.
I plan on being open and honest about everything in my life.
I know I can trust you.
I know that we will probably have arguments, but no fighting.
I plan on being civil and controlled when speaking, I trust you will do the same.
And if things get a little heated… our love will be too great to let the sun go down on it.
Making up will be wonderful.

I will wait as long as required to find you.
I really mean, until the Lord brings you to me.
I am asking for a whole lot.
I’m not even going try to lie to you.
I’ve known for a long time that my life would never be “normal.”
I know that will excite you.
I feel that we are going to travel together. A lot.
In fact, you are key and essential to what will be our ministry.

I will sing to you. If you want.
I will open your door for you.
I will pray with you.
I will worship God with you.
I will read to our kids and pray with them.
I will do what I say I’m going to do.
I will admit when I’m wrong.
I will do everything I can to help your dreams come true.
I will study the word and share my revelation with you often.
I will be patient with you.
I will ask for directions.

I’ve had these dreams, I’ll tell you about them later, but they make me smile.
Songs, poems… I just want to explode.
There is so much going through my mind… I can’t type it all.
It would take me all night.
Hopefully we’ll talk soon, then it will be easier.

I may not be the best looking guy.
I may not be the richest man.
I may not be the perfect guy.
But no one, I promise, no one will ever love you like I can.
Not on earth anyway.

Well… I suppose I’ll stop here for tonight.
I have church tomorrow morning and I want to be alert for Jesus.
I wish you could be there with me.
Maybe you will be… maybe not.

Maybe you don’t even speak English. Ha. Who knows.
Oh yeah, God knows…
We’ll just wait on Him, ok?
Again, I don’t know who you are or where you live, but I want you to know…

I’m praying for you.
You are beautiful.
Let’s change the world together.

Forever Yours

Tony Mazon

I FINALLY finished the GBM website. Although as time goes by, little tweaks here and there find their way to my desk. This site has kind of a web 2.0 feel with the solid colors, transparent windows, and striped bottom. I’m still using flash, as I am continuing to learn CSS, HTML, Java, and other such things. Eventually, I would love to move away from a flash site altogether. But right now, that is what I know.

Check out the GBM Website

I got an invitation to join “pownce,” the new social networking community of Kevin Rose (founder of Digg.com) and friends. So far, it’s kind of like Twitter and social “sharing” of things lke URLs, files, and common events. I think it has great potential as a collaborative tool, and I definitely see it as being in it’s “infant” stages of learning to walk. I think the minds behind it have great ideas, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store.

Join Pownce

It all boiled down to the fact that with my job and ministry load (the latter of which hasn’t been much, but still), that I need to focus more time and energy on these things. Outside web work and design will continue under the tmazon.com name for now. It has been a fun and educational ride. I shall definitely miss it.

Part 1 – The House. Earlier this month, my parents sold their house. Almost a year a go, they bought a new house in Missouri. They got a sweet deal on it. But now the old house is gone. This is the house that I grew up in. To me, this is the ONLY house they ever had (even though it was their second house after I was born). The deal was supposed to be finished at the end of the month, and then my parents would move out of it then.

Well, the deal with the new owners went much quicker than anticipated, and my parents had to be out by Tuesday, July 3 (only two weeks after the buyers started the process). My dad hadn’t anticipated it to move so quickly, so he hadn’t placed his two week notice at his job yet. That changes a few things, since they can’t just leave town the day they move out. So they ended up making arrangements to stay with my sister until July 16. They frantically began packing what little they still had at the house (most of it had already been moved to their new house in Missouri) to be out on July 3rd. A few things took place, and they ended up not having to be out until July 5th (Thursday)

Part 2 – The Unexpected. On the day that my parents were originally supposed to be out, my dad was getting ready to go to work, when he became very sick very suddenly. My mom found him passed out in the bathroom, and immediately called 911. He was rushed to the emergency room, and they ran some tests to discover that he had a bleeding ulcer. He has been under a lot of stress at his job, and the anxiousness of selling their old house only adds to it. He finally went home yesterday (July 6th), with instructions to rest for about a week.

Part 3 – Conclusion. So with them having to be out of the house this week, and then my dad being in the hospital, it was a pretty crazy week, especially for them. On top of that, the 4th of July holiday fell right smack in the middle of all of this. Of all the times that this could have happened, it was the week they had to move out. Once again, I thank god that my parents are godly, for only He could give them strength to go through all of this.

My dad spent his first of the last two weeks at work in the hospital, then his last week at my sister’s. So his final two weeks he won’t even be there. They fly out on July 16, to arrive at their new home.

To put it simply…I have become busy yet again. April saw a lot of time working on a new site for Pastor Connie, and beginning development on Pastor Berteau’s new website. Both of those have become major projects in themselves.

Gladly, I have finished Knowing the Word’s website AND store. I am very happy with the way they turned out. I admit, I didn’t design them from the ground up. Instead I used WordPress for the main site, since the focus is a radio program with regular updates and with added plugins, I also gave it audio playback and podcasting support. The store was created using the open source shopping cart, oscommerce because of it’s ease of setup and use.

I have been helping Matt get ready for the missions trip to Nicaragua, which they are currently on as I write this. That was definitely a blast, even though I didn’t go this year on the trip. This is the first time I haven’t gone on a missions trip when I was around at the inception of it’s planning. I wish I could have gone, but alas I could not.

The reason is that for almost a year now, I have been looking for a full time youth pastoring job. I had a few openings that I interviewed with. Some in person, some over the phone. But so far, nothing has come about, other than waiting. It’s one of the hardest things having to wait for someone else to get the ball rolling once you go through an interview. But God knows what He is doing and will put me in the right place at the right time. Of that I have no doubts.

In a nutshell, there is the last 3 months. At least the important stuff.

After writing the discussion on repentance, a lot of things got turning in my mind. We look at repentance as this great condemning thing. We think of judgment, death, guilt, shame, etc. But that is quite the opposite of what it really is. Repentance is the door to freedom in Christ. Only the power of Christ can set us free and make us holy and wholly like Him. But we can only gain access to that power through repentance.

Now, repentance is not that time you came to an altar and asked for forgiveness only to go back to those things that you supposedly repented of the very next day. On the contrary, true repentance causes a revolution to take place in your life. If we continue to live as before, then we must question our salvation and question our repentance. True repentance will cause deep change to take place in our lives.

As I got to the end of writing, this part of it really nailed me.

We aren’t ruthless with sin! Many “Christians” spend half of their time sinning, and the other half of their time repenting of that sin! This should not be so. Sin defiles and destroys, it pollutes and poisons, curses and corrupts. Yet we think it’s sweet! We tolerate it because of the temporary benefits it gives us.

The problem is superficial repentance. We repent with our lips, but our heart still longs for the things that sin gives us. We really aren’t free because we really don’t want to be. We still maintain the possibility of committing that same sin. But God will never remove the guilt as long as we continue to entertain the sin. It is deep folly to desire that God forgive us of something that we intend to commit. The Lord is looking at the heart and is more concerned with how we respond to temptation today than with what we promise to do with the temptation tomorrow.

Ouch. God, may I always be a person of deep repentance like David, that repented not because he was wrong, but because it hurt you and put a wedge in the relationship.

Heard about this on a podcast…It basically let’s the world know what I am doing. Do I care? Do I want the world to know what I am doing 24/7? Well, not necessarily…but I can see how something like this can be attractive to teens.

Teenagers are always looking for attention, for their voice to be heard, to be noticed. While I myself may not be into Twitter much, I can only imagine the countless number of teens that would take advantage of such a thing. Plus, it’s kind of a great way to get deeper into the minds of teenagers.

I’m gonna give it a spin for a bit, see how I like it.