Hey everyone! Thanks to all those who participated in our first annual photo contest! As we’ve said before, we hope to make this a recurring event, so if you’re a photographer be on the look out for good photos.

I would like to introduce you to our finalists. Take a look at each of them, and at the end you will get to choose your favorite one. Whichever picture receives the most votes will win!

If you believe a certain photo deserves the win, then share this page with your friends through facebook, e-mail, twitter, or whatever else you can think of. You can only vote once, but you can get as many other people to vote as you want.

Remember, the goal of this contest was to present a photo that demonstrates the idea behind #LiveFully, and here we go:

Photo 1 – Stephanie: “Being 20 years old and still finding pleasure in the beauty of childhood, the power of a swingset, is what it means to live fully.”
Click to see the other finalists

Jesus is a revolutionary, and it is a revolution of life.  He alone is the source of the most full life, and as followers of Christ, we not only have access to full life here on the earth, but we have hope that life will continue into the future, with a new heaven and a new earth and new resurrected bodies.  We have hope that when the time is right, Jesus Christ will return and establish the fullness of His reign.

German Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it like this…

“the kingdom of heaven descends, the face of the earth will be renewed, and it will belong to the flock of Jesus.  God does not forsake the earth: he made it, he sent his Son to it, and on it he built his Church.  Thus a beginning has already been made in this present age.  A sign has been given.  The powerless have here and now received a plot of earth, for they have the church and its fellowship, its goods, its brothers and sisters, in the midst of persecutions even to the length of the cross.  The renewal of the earth begins at Golgotha, where the meek One died, and from thence it will spread.  When the kingdom finally comes, the meek shall possess the earth.”

Our future as followers of Christ is better than we could ever imagine.  We are not headed toward some condo in a cloud as my pastor often says.  Our souls are not flying up to some super spiritual existence.  Continue Reading…

Every now and then, you read a book that changes your life.  This has been the case for me over the course of the last two weeks.  The book is called “Wisdom & Wonder,” and the author is dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920). Although his “big words” can make it grueling to read at times, it is worth wading through with dictionary close by to mine out the gold he offers.

A major emphasis of #LiveFully is to rediscover a Christian theology that integrates into all of life, resulting in followers of Jesus that are impacting (not escaping) mainstreams cultures of the world. Kuyper was a brilliant mind that lived with the same conviction. Continue Reading…