Truth by told – I’m not a big fan of Foxnews or any USA news agency, for that matter.

Yet, towards the end of the day Thursday, I decided to check out Foxnews.com and see what was happening in the good old US of A.

To my incredible surprise the main headline news story was about Ron Luce and Teen Mania!!!

For those of you who don’t know, I have quite the history with Teen Mania starting way back in 1996 (wow – time flies). [@more@]

This is the year that Ron Luce moved the Teen Mania headquarters from Tulsa, OK to East Texas.  Because of this move, several members of the Honor Academy – a college internship with Teen Mania – came to my church youth group and invited us to their Acquire the Fire rally. (Similar to the one described in the news article)

From that introduction to Teen Mania, I signed up and went on my first cross-culture ministry trip to Costa Rica where the Lord met me in a POWERFUL way. It was on that trip that Jesus Christ became Lord of my life with permission to do anything Him wanted with me, my dreams or my actions. But that is another story.

One more Teen Mania story – as part of raising money for the trip to Costa Rica, I used to go to Teen Mania’s headquarters, which used to be owned by Keith Green, and help them mow the lawn, tear down buildings or anything else they needed. One day I was racking leaves on the front lawn and putting them in pills to be burned.

Seeing that we, for I wasn’t alone, were using a lot of energy hauling the leaves to the burn pill, I suggested that we burn the leaves where they lay. The intern in charge of the work team agreed with the idea – paving the way for us to burn the entire front lawn of Teen Mania a day before an important guest arrived. Let’s say that that didn’t end too well…