A few weeks ago, during the children’s message, a story about a dog’s tail and happiness was shared. My first thought? What a great analogy for thinking of how our actions and attitudes make a difference in the way we approach ministry.

 

When a dog is happy, he wags his tail. The story goes: A young dog wanted to be able to catch happiness so knowing that happiness was in his tail, he spent the entire day chasing his tail. No matter how fast he ran or how hard he tried, he just kept running in circles. He got really frustrated. He couldn’t “catch” happiness.

 

That evening he asked an older and wiser dog how he could catch happiness. He could not reach his tail no matter how hard he tried. The older dog shared his wisdom: “I stopped seeking happiness by chasing my tail a long time ago. I learned that all I have to do is look ahead and stay focused on where I’m going and it just follows!”

 

Our theme for Advent this year is Behold the Signs, Behold the Son. As a gift to you this Advent season, we invite you to download The Christmiss Guest and share the story as a small group devotion for both young and old. Or forward the link to households as a reading to do in the home asking families to read the book, read Matthew 25:40, and process the story with one another.

 

This verse changed the lives of a family in our congregation so much that they wanted to uplift it and invite others to an awareness of the consequences we can face when we ignore the signs around us. Amy and Alec Zacaroli began an organization called 25:40 in the Northern Virginia area in response to the needs of others.

 

I recently received an email from Pastor Nate Castens at Family of Christ Lutheran in Chanhassen, MN asking about how to turn off or delete the notes in the upper left-hand side of many of the Head to the Heart (H2H) confirmation slides.

 

First, why do these notes exist? Good question. The notes are "brain notes" written by Rich Melheim describing a particular brain-based reasoning for the layout of that slide. They do not show up during the show, and are intended simply to be extra information behind why we've developed our slides the way we have.

 

They may show up when you print a slide, but are easily toggled off in your print dialogue screen (deselect "print comments" to make sure they don't print.) If you'd like to get rid of all them at once, there are two different ways of doing it:

 

PowerPoint 2003: Go to the Reviewing Toolbar (I had to call it up to see it – far right of my existing toolbars, click the little black arrow that is pointing down, choose “add or remove buttons” and then choose “customize.” A dialog box will show up with toolbar options. Choose “Reviewing.” (there may be a better way to get to this than I just listed, I don’t know!) Once the Reviewing Toolbar is visible, click on the little arrow by the  X and choose “Delete All Markup in this Presentation.”

 

PowerPoint 2007: Click on the "Prepare" option of your Office Toolbar list, then "Inspect Document." A dialogue box will come up with a few things that the program will look for, including comments. Click "Inspect" and then choose the things you'd like to delete (in this case, "Comments and Annotations")

 

Thanks to Pastor Nate for bringing this up.

 

I also get asked about deals on Microsoft Office 2007. MS Office, of course, includes PowerPoint, which is a helpful piece of software (although keep in mind, not vital) for all Faith Inkubators' materials.

 

NewEgg.com currently offers the Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition, for $79.99. In many cases, this version, which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel only, runs over $125.

 

If you have a student in your life, you can get the full-featured Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition direct from Microsoft as a download for $59.95.