lifepoint's letters

Fall Fest

smaricelli — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:41:04 +0000

October 8 was our Annual Fall Fest, held out in the country at David & Teresa Mann’s home. It was still a little warm, but we had fun nonetheless. There were crafts, games, bouncing, food, hayrides, wiffle ball games, music, duck feeding, an eating contest, and lots of other fun stuff. Here are a few pictures for your enjoyment. Click to view slideshow.

Back-to-School Blast-Off

smaricelli — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:38:38 +0000

On August 21, we had our Back-to-School Blast-Off here at LifePoint. Denny Jenkins from The Pentecostals of Lee Road in Covington, LA who is planting a church in Loranger, LA was our special guest speaker and did a wonderful job. Several of the Lee Road Church’s children’s ministry team came to help, too. They brought a trailer load of puppets and decorations. We were able to use their decorations to transform the entire church in one day! They also did several black-light puppet songs for us. We had prizes, games, action songs, puppets, magic tricks, and stuff exploding (Don’t worry. No one was harmed!) It was a very fun day for all involved. We hope you enjoy these pictures from that day. Click to view slideshow.

Building Dedication Pictures

smaricelli — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:27:08 +0000

I just realized we never uploaded pictures from the building dedication. Sorry about that! they are on our facebook page, but we forgot about the blog I guess!

We had a great weekend. We kicked it off by having a Ruston-Lincoln Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting on Friday morning.. Pastor Jerry Dean from The Pentecostals of Bossier City spoke on Saturday evening and LA District Superintendent Kevin Cox spoke Sunday morning. Thanks to everyone who helped make it a success, and even more than that, everyone who helped with the building remodel. We had so many wonderful people and organizations give of their time, money, and resources to make it all come together and we are eternally grateful!

Here are a few pictures of the weekend. God bless!

Click to view slideshow.

Mad About Jesus Kids Summer Program

smaricelli — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:05:46 +0000

This summer on wednesday evening, our kids are having a wacky time in kids class! We are having a “Mad About Jesus” summer program where we have all kids of fun and crazy science emperiements and illusions going on to help the kids learn about God and His Word.

We have stuff blowing up (don’t worry-no one is getting hurt!), kids walking on water, objects being controlled by mind-power, and all kinds of other cools stuff!

This is leading up to our annual back-to-school event on August 21st. So mark your calendars, and we will have more information soon.

Get your kids to LifePoint Church on wednesday evenings at 6:30 for lots of fun!

Christmas Party

lifepointruston — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:54:18 +0000

We had a laid-back Christmas party for LifePoint at the Maricelli home this year. It was buzzing with laughter, games, crackling fires, people eating soups and finger foods and making s’mores and jokes around the fire. Lots of fun and great memories!Click to view slideshow.

Wild West Harvest Fest 2010

smaricelli — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:23:08 +0000

Friday, October 22 was our Third Annual Wild west Harvest Fest. We had a great turn-out with 125 in attendance. Thank you so much to everyone who worked so hard to make it happen! Click to view slideshow.

Heritage Day 2010

lifepointruston — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:19:45 +0000

On September 12, we had our 3rd Annual Heritage Day complete with music, food, and stuff for the kids. Here are a few pictures from the event.

Click to view slideshow.

Before and After

lifepointruston — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:55:42 +0000

There are still a few details we are wrapping up, but with the majority of our remodeling project completed, we wanted to show you a few before & after pictures to refresh your memory. Thank you to all who helped in any way! We could not have done it without you!Click to view slideshow.

Building Remodel Update

lifepointruston — Sat, 15 May 2010 21:05:00 +0000

Lifepoint Church of Ruston is right in the middle of a complete remodel of our facilities. This is a video update to serve as a reminder of how much God has done in such a short time and what is going on right now. Many thanks to all of the wonderful people who have volunteered their time, skills, money, and prayer. We are eternally grateful and are expecting God to do even great things in the future!

A Real Failure

lifepointruston — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:10:00 +0000

Have you ever been reading a book or listening to a presenter and all of the sudden this one thing that they say just hits you right in the gut? Recently Steven Pressfield did this to me in The War of Art.

(Check out this excerpt)

The first professional writing job I ever had, after seventeen years of trying, was on a movie called King Kong Lives. And I my partner-at-the-time, Ron Shusett (a brilliant writer and producer who also did Alien and Total Recall) hammered out the screenplay for Dino DLaurentiis. We loved it; we were sure we had a hit. Even after we’d seen the finished film, we were certain it was a blockbuster We invited everyone we knew to the premiere, even rented out the joint next door for a post-triumph blowout. Get there early, we warned our friends, the place’ll be mobbed.

Nobody showed. There was only one guy in line beside our guests and he was muttering something about spare change. In the theater, our friends endured the movie in mute stupefaction. When the lights came up, they fled like cockroaches into the night. Next day came the review in Variety: “..Ronald Shusett and Steven Pressfield; we hope these are not their real names, for their parents’ sake.” When the first week’s grosses came in, the flick barely registered. Still I clung to hope. Maybe it’s only tanking in urban areas, maybe it’s playing better in the burbs. I motored to an Edge City multiples. A youth manned the popcorn booth. “How’s King Kong Lives?” I asked. He flashed thumbs down. “Miss it man. It’s terrible.”

I was crushed. Here I was, forty-two years old, divorced, childless, having given up all normal human pursuits to chase the dreams of being a writer; now I’ve finally got my name on a big-time Hollywood production starring Linda Hamilton, and what happens? I’m a loser, a phony; my life is worthless, and so am I.

My friend Tony Keppelman snapped me out of it by asking if I was gonna quit. No way! “Then be happy. You’re where you wanted to be, aren’t you? So you’re taking a few blows. That’s the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines stop complaining and be grateful.” That was when I realized I had become a pro. I had not yet had a success. But I had had a real failure.

At 33 I can’t say I’ve had a lot of successes but I’ve realized that that’s not really the point. Instead, what we should ask ourselves as we inventory our journey is “Have I had any legit, honest-to-God, failures?” If the answer is “no”, you probably haven’t even started the game. I don’t want to turn this blog into a cheesy, self-help speech but seriously, don’t let fear paralyze you to the point that you never move out of your tracks. Get out there and fail and fail big! Fail in front of peers, friends, and total strangers. Get engaged in “doing what you’ve always wanted to do” even though you don’t even know how yet to do it.

I started my church planting journey over four and a half years ago and have been trying to figure it out ever since. Let’s just say I’ve crammed a lot of public failure into just four short years. Is the humiliation of failure fun? Absolutely not. Do I regret any of it? Not on your life.
What does make me break out in cold sweat, however, is to think of how petty and insignificant my life would currently feel had I not dove in with both hands and feet into what I felt I was called to do and began experiencing failure…REAL FAILURE.

God Bless,

Jathan