It’s been a big year, simultaneously one of the most challenging and fruitful years for me and my family. Started the year looking for a job, found one, then ended the year looking for a job and found one. God has been so graceful in how he’s lead our family, matured me as a father and husband and sustained us through many trials.

My wife is incredible and been just a rock of hope in the midst of stress and rough circumstance. We’ve been blessed this year and sheltered by God’s faithfulness and grace. Our family grew by 1 as we welcomed Adia Grace Campos to the family. That was incredible, born the day before Easter. Will never forget or cease to be amazed at the goodness God poured out on us then.

As we start 2010 I begin a new job that will change our family dynamic and rhythm, to what degree I’m not sure. But I’ve worked exclusively from home for the past 6 years or so and now I’ll be venturing back into office life. We trust God to work his goodness here and believe this will be an amazing year for us.

As for Our Rising Sound it’s been a great year. Here are some of the highlights:

• Topped the 300 RSS subscriber mark
• Loops downloaded/played 18,000 times … I’m really astonished at that figure
• Began doing custom loops. Really excited about this and thank you for all the requests that have come in for these. This has been really fun.
• Top post this year is still the dumb church sign debate (37,100 views this year, originally posted in 2008!). Crazy.
• One of my favorite posts from the year was “Worship Leaders: play songs your congregation doesn’t like“
• Most controversial post was probably “Jesus Culture we have a problem…your lyric“
• My favorite blog series of the year was “How worship music can be like bad hotel art“
• One of the most visited posts was John Mark’s explanation of the infamous “sloppy wet kiss”

Yeah you read that correctly. I, Kyle Campos, took a vacation with the family, for a few days at least. Normal posting will resume shortly.

This post was written by Dave Negron. Dave and his wife Denise have been married for 9 years and they have 4 beautiful children. They are both Connection Group leaders at Life Connection Church in Phoenix AZ.

“I WOULD NEVER DO THAT TO MY FAMILY”

Those were the words I said when I was 8yrs old. All I could hear was my mom yelling and my dad yelling back. I remember running to my bedroom, jumping on my bunk bed, and praying, “God please don’t let my parents ever divorce.” Fast forward to Dec. 30 1991 my 14th birthday. I was in Arizona visiting my aunt. When I heard the phone ring I knew something was wrong. My aunt began talking loud trying to calm my mom down. She gave me the phone and my mom said your father has left and is not coming back. The next day I was on a plane back to California. I had front row seats to see what adultery does in a home, a “Christian home” that is. I told myself I would never do that to my family.

April 10,1999 I’m getting married to the most beautiful woman in the world. We were high school sweethearts and I knew this was going to be perfect. I’ve always thought I knew how to be a husband and a father; I just needed to not do what my dad did. Easy.

3 months after getting married we were pregnant. No time was there to be alone for us. After Valerie was born in 2000 we had Alexis in 2002 and Ezekiel in 2004. Everything was going great, at least that’s what I believed.

Marriage troubles begin

In July 2003 I started this cycle of running from my problems and started to disconnect myself from the family. I tried maintaining 2 jobs just to stay out of the house because all I thought was that was my role in the home, bring in the money. During multiple moves back and forth from Arizona and California it became clearer and clearer that my marriage wasn’t right. My wife Denise is not happy. All of our problems or fights were financially based. I didn’t think she should be telling me what I needed to do. I made the money so I can spend it whenever and however I wanted to.

This continued for 3 years. In July of 2006 on my way home from work I remember the Lord speaking to my spirit warning me that if I didn’t repent I was going to lose my family and everything I have. I thought about it but no action took place.

The first week in November 2006 I was stressing out about money. A debt collector just attached my wages and I wasn’t bringing home the money. The night before Denise and I got in a huge fight and she threw out the word DIVORCE. I called her bluff.

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This post was written by Mark and Kendra Rohl. Mark is an elder and worship leader at Life Connection Church in Phoenix AZ and Kendra sings on the Our Rising Sound band. They tell the story below of their struggles to start their own family by having children of their own.

Beginning a family

It was the best of times it was the worst of times.  Those words ring true for us as we have headed down the path towards parenthood.  The last three and a half years have been filled with anticipation, hope, heartbreak, loss, joy and redemption and the story is still being written. The decision to start a family is a scary and exciting decision for any young couple and we were no exception. After 4 years of marriage we felt God was leading us to be fruitful and multiply and we wanted to be obedient to the Lord of course so try we did! The first few months were exciting and with every twinge of nausea we thought we were pregnant. Then a few more months went by but without much concern, everyone told us to just be patient, try eating peanut butter or oysters or any number of strange magic fertility enhancing foods (it’s really quite fascinating how all of a sudden everyone becomes an expert on the subject and has lots of advice to give on how to make a baby).  But we were not worried and continued the old fashioned way with full confidence that at any moment we would be peeing on sticks and seeing pink plus signs.

Approaching the 1 yr mark our hope was turning into frustration so we thought maybe we just weren’t timing things right or taking the right vitamins so we got the gadgets and gizmos that help you to know your cycles and so forth. I won’t go into all the gory details but for anyone who has tried to make a baby you know the crazy lengths you will go to and try every bizarre thing anyone recommends when you get to the point of desperation. After a few more months of that we decided it was time to head to the docs for a check up and see if anything was causing this seemingly epic delay in procreation.

Doctors start testing

Mark was the first to get tested (wow, the process of that was another interesting moment in our marriage we never thought we would experience) and much to our surprise his tests came back as infertile, what, infertile? How can that be we thought. The doctors said there was no explanation for how this could have happened, no hope for any sort of cure and we spent a while reeling from that blow. We went through the cycle of sadness, then anger, then bitterness and finally landed in fight mode. We weren’t going to give up this easy and we knew God could do a miracle so that is what we prayed for. We had prophetic words about God restoring the seed of life in Mark and we clung to that and had our amazing friends and family praying and interceding for that to take place.

In the meantime, the doctors wanted to test me just to make sure we didn’t have the double whammy of infertility happening, and low and behold we did. After a painful procedure and testing that was more like torture than anything else we discovered that a ruptured appendix when I was in high school caused massive scar tissue to form around my fallopian tubes causing them to be completely blocked. Awesome, we now were faced with both of us being diagnosed as infertile in our 20′s with no hope (according to the docs) of ever conceiving naturally. It’s a strange feeling to have someone tell you that you can’t have children, it feels like some right has been taken from you and it all seems so unjust. There was a period of time when we could barely go out in public because of the seemingly innumerable amounts of pregnant teens walking around looking pissed and disgusted at the gift of life inside of them.

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I was asked recently what one thing I would thank God for, other than his Son, when we meet in heaven. My answer was grace. Because of it I’ve received all things and my family is the most precious, beautiful evidence of it. Thank you God for your grace that has given me my family. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Excuse my hair

My dear brother, for reasons unknown to the free world, used to put this sort of underwear and sock helmet on my head as a baby. It looked funny and apparently I didn’t mind. Little did I know how much of a root this would take in my life. I have now passed it on to my son. Pictures don’t lie.

Not the full head gear but close

Now my son enjoys the full headgear

Dads is there anything you do to your son that an older brother or your own father did to you? And maybe my bro will come out from the woodwork and explain how this headgear came to be.

Steven’s youngest daughter was killed Wednesday evening. The details are terrible but you can read those on your own. More important is the need for us to support him in prayer. Absolutely a devastating loss for his family and the church family as a whole. So stop and pray for him and his family.