Yesterday I confessed that I haven’t done the best job of spending time with the Father. I also vowed to do a better job starting today. Well, my wife did her job in holding me accountable first thing this morning. I thank her for that, too. I made a decent start this morning and hope to do better over the course of the rest of this week.

Today, I’m a sharing about enriching the community around me. This has been a bittersweet topic for me lately. The basis of community for me is being somewhere consistently where people can pour into your life and you theirs. As many of you know, I’ve been all over the place this summer, many times playing in a different church every Sunday of the month. This has taken a toll of my “community building”. Even with all that, I have been completely blessed to be living in community with some great people. God truly knew what he was doing when he sent me to First Free Church earlier this summer. I thought I was just going to help a friend out. I ended up gaining friends for life. Had it not been for my amazing friends across the alley, I don’t know where I’d be right now.

I can only hope that I am able to enrich their lives as much as they have enriched mine. Are there any people in your lives recently that have totally enriched your life? Tell me about it…

I’m conducting a worship180 check-up. I’ve been writing this blog for quite awhile now and I started it because I wanted to think about worship in a different way. Even more, I wanted to share my thoughts about worship with others. So what I want to do over the next couple days is just talk about how these thoughts have affected my life over the past few months and I hope to hear your thoughts as well. With that being said, here’s the first one…

Encountering the Savior

I have been having such a tough time trying to spend daily time with the Father lately. I can tell when I am not spending time with God because my days don’t flow like they should. If you go and read my writing about Encountering the Savior, then you know how important this is for me and should be for you. I am writing to confess that I haven’t been doing a good job of spending time with God. As a matter of fact, I am wanting to start a Bible Study. Who’s in?

I’m asking that you guys continue to pray for me as I try to get better at spending time with God. How about you guys? How are you doing with spending time with God? What have you learned in your time with God? Share your comments…start a discussion. I want to hear from you guys. Tomorrow I will be talking about Enriching Your Community. I will be talking about spending time with members of the body. Be blessed tonight. Thanks to my friends who kept on me throughout the night so I could get this done.

Well, it has been such a long time since I’ve written and I feel horrible for that. As a result this could be quite long. I’m just letting you know. However, this has been such an amazing weekend and I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to get back into blogging. So I will provide a day by day weekend update starting now…

Friday Night

I’m sure that you all know by now about the Chili Dinner and Concert that we had on Friday night. For those of you who may not know that… short recap: My wife had decided that we needed to raise some money to keep our house. I was against it, but a lot of people thought it was a great idea so we went with it. So it happened this past Friday night. We had sold around $1000 in tickets before Friday night. There were a few people who bought tickets at the door, but we didn’t know how many. It turns out that we made another $1000 in tickets at the door. TOTALLY AMAZING!!! We were so blessed by that. We are also SO thankful for everyone who made chili and desserts and gave of their time and efforts to help us pull of such an amazing event. Thanks to Dan Hartke, Liz Hitt and the Redeemer Church choir for doing music. A special thanks to Kim Underwood, Gina Manual and my beautiful wife for singing with me as well. Great times.

After that, I should have gone to bed. However, something crazy happened. I am one of those people who never wins anything cool. However, Friday I won tickets to the Fundamental Elements concerts at the Duck room at Blueberry Hill. I went to their concert at 10. Great times. Great times. I simply love this group and I’m glad that know them. I have declared myself that I am their biggest fan. If anyone denies it, I will fight them. Period! LOL I got the chance to hang out with my friend Charlie. What a great way to end an evening.

Saturday

Saturday I spent a glorious day with the ministry group members at a horse farm in Illinois. We spent some time working on this farm doing lots of odd jobs helping this family out. What a great time of bonding and ministering to each other. After a morning of work and lunch, we spent some time listening to the the farm’s owners sharing their testimonies with us. Then we had a powerful time of worship and prayer. We left MoBap around 8:30 or so and go home around 6. The problem with that was that I had such a long day before that I was about dead when I got home.

I’m so thankful for the opportunity to help these ministry groups. I’m glad they have given me the chance to share what I have learned with some amazing kids. We will see what happens…

Sunday

We were blessed to spend this morning at Cross Keys Baptist Church. I had a fun time leading worship at this church. Such sweet people. The pastor and his wife are quickly becoming good friends of ours. It was fun to be in a church when the people were really singing back. We had such a good time.

We had such a good time that we went back to lead the evening service. That was  a lot of fun even with all of the technical difficulties. Great sermon and good worship time. We finished the evening by eating at Home Town Buffet. I though I was going to wrap it up with a Cardinal beating of the Cubs, but it turns out that we the Cards decided that they didn’t really want to wrap up this evening with a win.

Eva and I have been so blessed lately by the love that has been shown to us. Thanks to everyone who has given to us and encouraged us during this time. We will keep giving updates as we can. Make sure to check in this week as I challenge you guys and myself on what it means to really worship God. Thanks to all my friends and readers and again, I’m sorry that I haven’t written in forever. Forgive me?

So…August…happened…I’m not sure if I believe it yet. I’m totally amazed at how God has sustained my family. Here are a couple things I learned in the month of August…

1. I am not called to work at Wal-mart. I have applied there and haven’t been called back yet. In extension, I’m also not called to work at Sam’s, a place that I worked for previously.

2. McDonald’s doesn’t think enough of me to hire me either. I’m not sure what it is about me that they don’t like. I’m thinking I don’t have enough tattoos…

3. My mom is not the only person that likes the music that I write. I’m pretty sure that musicians fear that no one will like what they write, and we all know that moms are supposed to like everything that their children do. I took my music to a St. Louis area studio and the producer there liked what he heard. He actually offered to produce a CD for free. I’d say that he likes it.

4. People love my family. God has truly blessed us and some kinda way we had more money come in this past month than we have had in quite a while. God’s definitely working.

5. I love working with music groups. I’ve had so much fun this month working with the ministry groups at MoBap. I hope they have enjoyed working with me because I’m here for awhile.

As for this month, God is already starting to do some MAJOR things in our family. The first day of Chili Dinner ticket sales went rather well. I have people offering to help out with gathering money for the CD project. Actually, our new friends at Waypoint Church helped us greatly yesterday. I feel so loved.

I also want to say a special thanks to our friends at Redeemer Church. They have done so much to help out my family this month. We wouldn’t be where we are right now if it weren’t for them. Thanks SO much, Redeemer!!!

We are still trying to find ways to get funds and musicians together for the CD project. I have a place to go, I just have to put everything together to get there. Again, I’m totally amazed at what God has done during this month of August. No one in the world could have orchestrated what God has done this month. Keep praying for us. Even more than financially (although that is still an issue obviously), pray for direction. God has a plan for this family (Jeremiah 29:11), and my prayer is that we start to figure out some of what that is. Be blessed friends. OH YEAH! Come to the Chili Dinner and Concert on September 18th. If you want more information shoot me an email. Tickets are $9 for adults and $2 for kids 6-12. I have some. Come find me. The end.

Things are starting to move. We have been really busy trying to keep our house. It’s been tough, but God has been really working. My wife came up with an idea to help us keep our house. Here’s the idea…

We are have a “Save Our House” Chili Dinner and Concert. I don’t think that’s going to be the final name of it, but that’s pretty much what it’s all about. It is going to be Friday, September 18th from 5:30-8:30. This is what it’s going to look like. We are going to have all you can eat chili throughout the evening. Along with that, we are going to have 3 hours worth of music as well. Yes, I will be a part of that 3 hours. Also included in those three hours are friends Dan Hartke and Liz Hitt. There will be more to come and I’ll be sure to keep you all updated.

Here are some other things that we are working on as well…

There will be a full concert on October 23rd. Where? I don’t know yet. Here are a couple things that you can look forward to. If you come to the September 18th event, you will have an opportunity to win free tickets to the October concert. We also hope to have a website update by then. If not, it will be coming soon. Keep checking in because things are starting to take off. If you have any questions or want to help in any way, please shoot me an email at harry.walls4@gmail.com. We are looking for as much help as we can get. Also, if you want to host a Harry Walls IV concert at your church, you can check with me there as well. We are looking at one in October, November and really taking things forward in the new year.

So that, my friends, is the news. I hope I didn’t disappoint any of you. No, Shannon, there is no other baby. Be blessed!