It would be a shame for me to write about all of our college students and not mention Kevin and Micki Torres.  Kevin and Micki are two of the most amazing volunteers in the history of our church.  They are a true dynamic duo, and are amazing at what they do.  Kevin and Micki host college students in their home for a small group every week, and on top of that, open up their home randomly at times for these students to just hang out in.  Kevin and Micki also lead Journey, which is our Wednesday night college gathering.   Kevin and Micki are regularly taking students who live in town to breakfast and lunch, and staying connected to our college students who are away through the social networking site, Facebook. 

Anyway, I just wanted to brag on Kevin and Micki too, because they play a huge role in helping our college students better understand what it means to love God, love people, and love the world on the journey to life change.

*If you want to know more about our college ministry, Kevin and Micki have even created a website for the college ministry which you can access here.

I’ve thought about this long and hard and there are so many great college students here at Southside, that I couldn’t afford to not comment on so many of them. 

Charlie Campbell is the student body president of Tennessee Temple University, and is as humble a person as I’ve ever met. 

Ricky McGlon is a student at Liberty University and plans to somehow use sports to influence young people all over the world as a missionary. 

Kelly Carter is actually in Costa Rica right now for a year’s worth of training and instruction with one of our missionaries down there.

Lesleigh Mixon and Danielle Gross are two awesome young ladies who not only teach a class of 3 year olds every week, but love those kids like you wouldn’t believe.

Willie Perez is the lead singer of a Christian rock band called, Moment Later, and he’s an incredibly talented singer!

Leah Bedwell, Kenneth Green, Billy Milby, Crystal Jones, and Tim Kasel are faithful in their involvement in our college ministry and are a part of the Fusion volunteer team. 

I could go on and on and on, and talk about Danielle Geiger, Evan Hullett, Beth Hyde, Sarah Kile, Heather McClure, or Kasey Minyard,  but I won’t.  In fact, I’m sure I’ve already hurt someone’s feelings by not mentioning them, but the reality is I just want everyone to know that we have a lot of fully devoted, Christ following college-aged students in our church. 

I’ve talked about some of our college-aged young men the last two days, so today I figured I would mention a couple of our young ladies. 

Christen Cummings and Jaime Russell are two incredible female servants of God.  And while they’ll gladly do just about anything that would help someone else, they especially seem to love working with kids.  Now, not only do they love kids, but kids absolutely love them.  In fact, sometimes I even think that my own kids actually might love them more than they love me. 

While a lot of college-aged students might want to be as far away from the noise children seem to bring with them, Jaimie and Christen are constantly looking for ways to help in our children’s ministries, and more often than not, this usually involves them going the extra mile in some way or another. 

Anyway, these two girls are really amazing and I thank God for young ladies who have a desire at their age to impact little hearts for the sake of the kingdom of God.  And although they’re probably going to kill me, I thought I would post a picture I found of these two awesome girls (Christen is on the left and Jaimie is on the right)

Hoke Bryan is another college-aged student here at Southside who blows me away with his talent.  He is currently a sophomore at Tennessee Temple University and plans on entering into full time ministry when he graduates from college. 

Hoke is one of the most creative, zany, hilarious people you will ever meet.  He can be reserved and behind the scenes when he has to be, but he rarely is.  To me, he’s kind of like Robin Williams.  He’s absolutely hysterical to the point that even when you’re not sure what he said was funny, the way in which he says it makes you laugh anyway. 

Hoke loves kids and we take advantage of his talents and gifts every time he’s home for the weekend by throwing him up on stage to do something.  Of course, the kids absolutely love him (mainly because he sort of acts like a kid most of the time!) 

Anyway, I just want to brag on Hoke and let you know about another awesome college-aged person God has blessed our church with. 

In saying all that, I mentioned yesterday that he and Chris have made a lot of videos together for our children’s ministry.  The following video is one of my all-time favorites.  Check it out.

Over the next few days, I want to take some time to brag on some of our college-aged students here at Southside.  I may get into a little trouble over this, because I won’t be able to mention all of the wonderful young people in our college ministry, but I’m going to take that risk anyway and mention a few that really impress me.   

Specifically, today, I want to brag on Chris Clark.  You probably don’t even know who he is, but Chris takes a lot of the crazy ideas that our staff has and makes them come to life on the big screen. And when he’s not taking our crazy ideas, he is taking his own crazy ideas and creating something brilliant with another college student by the name of Hoke Bryan (I’ll talk about Hoke tomorrow). 

For those of you who attend Fusion regularly, Chris is the director.  Almost everything you see on the screens is the result of Chris’ creative genius, and a lot of what happens on stage happens because of Chris’ input and insight. 

I could go on and on about how valuable Chris is to the Southside team, but I won’t do that on this platform.  However, I do want to share with you one really cool video he put together a while back.  I’ve linked to a lot of his videos before, so I won’t link to all of them today, but I do want you to check one out that I’ve never mentioned.  It’s a really short video, and I don’t even want to try and set it up, but I think it will be clear to you when you’re finished watching that Chris is incredibly gifted and talented. 

Also, for those of you who would like to know what Chris looks like, he is actually the star of this particular video.  Again, just so you know, it is a rather short video, but if you’re like me, you’ll probably watch it again and again and again, amazed at how he was able to pull it off. 

If you ever find yourself in Virginia, specifically on Interstate 64, I encourage you to stop at Exit 16 and enjoy a meal at my favorite restaurant in the whole universe, “Cucci’s”. 

I have had the finest food Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles have to offer and I can honestly say that I have never had anything that was as entertaining to my taste buds as a sausage turnover at Cucci’s.

Anyway, I know that this post is probably not remotely interesting to anyone, but since I’m up here, and I just ate there yesterday, I had to blog about my favorite restaurant, and share a few pics from my recent visit.

This is what my favorite restaurant in the world looks like. 

Me and my sausage turnover

Before & After