Hey everyone.  Welcome to the new DanielRenstrom.com.  Take a look around.  I hope you enjoy the new site.

Plenty more to come.

daniel.

My grandparents, Papa and Mama Ward, went to the University of Alabama, so I grew up a huge BAMA fan.  Papa and Mama Ward get tickets for all the football games, and I try to get down to Tuscaloosa for a game every year.  Tomorrow they are playing Clemson in Altanta, so my brother and I are meeting two of my cousins there for the game.  ESPN College Game day is there, so look for us on TV…we’ll be the four guys with crimson red shirts on trying to get on camera.

Any food suggestions?  I know the Varsity is supposed to be pretty good.

One of the main things I’ve been in charge of over the summer for the college ministry is all our communication material for the fall.  We had the huge privilege of working with a designer named Micah Kandros.  I’ve loved his work for a while, so it was cool to get to use him for all these projects.  We’ve got a great communications staff here at Providence…these kinds of projects take tons of coordinating between lots of parties.  They did a great job.

One of the major things we put together was a Visitors website. In the past we have produced a CD with messages and music that allows visitors to get to know us.  However, we couldn’t ever track how affective these CD’s were….or if they were being used at all.  So we decided to make a website that does the exact same thing, only with the ability to track how effective it is.  I got the idea from visiting Buckhead church in Atlanta earlier this summer.  Here’s a picture of the business card that we give out to visitors, and the website itself. 

We’ll see if it works.

…she wasn’t impressed.

It’s been a busy few days for the Providence College Ministry.  All the freshmen for NC State, UNC Chapel Hill, Meredith College and Duke moved in over the weekend, so we had a full house at our college class on Sunday morning.  Then a bunch of us went out to the fall fest at UNC on Sunday night.  Yesterday was the NC State freshman info fair…..we met a ton of kids and had great time.

Here are a few pics from the weekend.

Watch out for the leg kick at 43…it comes out of nowhere.

Raleigh in August is not supposed to be this beautiful.  

I was able to get home a few minutes early yesterday so we could go for a walk.

Hope this lasts.

One of the highlights of my year is the leadership retreat that we go on every August.  I promise that I’m not exaggerating when I say that we have been blessed at PCM with some amazing leaders.  We spent the last couple of days at a camp in Asheboro NC planning out the next year…praying together…singing together.

This is going to be a great year.

Here are some pictures from the weekend.

I know Brody asked you to come by and tell me that you like the song, but it was pretty cool to hear from so many of you. Thanks for your encouragement….

My friends Brody and Randy are working on something right now that requires a test of giving away some music.  So they asked if i would be interested in giving away “At the Cross”, which I was totally happy to do.  Actually I think the link below here will allow you to download the song as well.

We thought it might be cool if I posted something on my blog about the song today, so here’s a little bit about “At the Cross”….

I started writing music for our college ministry (Providence Baptist in Raleigh) about 4 years ago.  Until this point in life I was not a song-writer. I just enjoyed playing music and listening to it. But, our college ministry would go through these studies together and I would have a huge desire to take what we had learned and write a song about it….to help us internalize what we were learning.  

One of those topics was the doctrine of the Substitution.  This doctrine has been so precious to me over the last few years.  It’s been an amazing comfort to me to think that Christ took the wrath of God, which I justly deserved, and, in exchange, God sees and treats me as having the righteousness of Christ.  

A few summers ago I was reading Pilgrims Progress, and loved the vivid image of Christian’s burden being taken away.  So I started forming the song around that idea… that Christ lifts this burden of sin and separation from God, and we get Christ’s righteousness in return.

So, these were my thoughts while writing “At the Cross”…. hope it’s an encouragement.