kylegilbert

All of these photos were taken within an hour drive of my home.  Coming from the flat lands of Lubbock, Texas, it still blows my mind that I now live so close to this kind of view.

At Faith Promise, we just finished a marathon weekend of five productions of Home Invasion, Sacred Storm, a story of one family’s struggles and the spiritual battle happening around them.

The acting and script was great, and attendance was pretty amazing. All services combined, there were over 5,300 in attendance. From the stories I’ve heard, it’s clear that God impacted a lot of lives.

But not only was it an exciting day on our physical campus, it was also a great day on our Internet Campus as well. Combined online attendance for the day was 504 – a figure that is nearly three times our normal online weekend attendance.

The graphic above is a representation of the 279 connections during our 9:00 broadcast this evening.

Some other interesting stats for the iCampus today:

• Over 600 hours of video were streamed
• People from five countries joined in
• 45 connected in the chat area
• Twelve people streamed the sign language video format

Looking through the kid’s candy today, I was reminded of something.  There’s nothing like the letdown of discovering that you’ve eaten all of the good Halloween candy, only to be left with Tootsie Rolls (in all the assorted sizes).  I like the pops, and some of the new flavors are OK, but I just can’t understand why the chocolate-flavored Tootsie Rolls continue to exist as candy filler.

Does anybody else here like Tootsie Rolls?  Am I wrong here?

Instead, how about little packets of uncooked rice or beans?  Or even Ramen noodles?  That would still be lame, but it would be cheap, and you could at least make a meal when you were done eating all the good stuff.

One of the most anticipated parts of our trip was a visit to the Great Wall.  Rather than going to the area most frequently visited in Beijing, we drove out to a part of the Wall that includes a ski-lift style gondola to get to the Wall and a toboggan slide to get back down.  The view was amazing, and the slide was a lot of fun too.

I thought I filmed my ride down, but I must have accidentally turned off the video.  So, while the video below isn’t mine, it’s a close approximation compared to most of the others I viewed.

I’ll post more photos of the Great Wall tomorrow.

Part of our trip to China included a visit to a Chinese market. It was a lot of fun, especially since you get to bargain with the merchants to try to get a good price.

Most of the time, it was a fairly painless process, but when I was walking around with Josh, things got pretty crazy. Fortunately, I managed to catch some of it on video.

Keri thought I should go ahead and post a couple more photos of my hair on here, so here you go.

I’ll post more photos when I get back into town, but here are a few images from yesterday.

Today, we went to Tianamen Square, the Forbidden City, the market, and a Chinese acrobatics show.