Category: hmm… thoughts

  • Update on Paul & Becky

    Back in November I posted a prayer request for Paul & Becky. I got an e-mail from them yesterday giving an update on their situation. A couple of praises:

    • Their new baby boy was born with no complications. Mom and baby are doing great.
    • They didn’t have to leave Russia and their son was born right in their hometown.

    Isn’t it cool when God answers your prayers?

    Sidenote: Congratulations to other folks who had babies in the last 48 hours. Jason and Tracy Raitz welcomed Madison. And Brian and his wife welcomed a little girl this week as well. Must have been something in the water 9-10 months ago?

  • Exhausted

    Since I don’t get sick very often I don’t know how to respond “the right way.”

    I probably could have milked being sick to take off 3 or 4 days and no one would have said anything. I took a half a day.

    I had a pretty full schedule and a bunch of deadlines I could have pushed off a few extra days, but I didn’t.

    I told a friend I would help him move, and with being sick and everything else he probably would have still been my friend had I bailed on him. But I didn’t.

    It seems like there are people who can get away with being sick, taking time off, and properly recovering. They get sick with style. But the rest of us struggle to get a moment just to rest before life forces us into a tired dirge of recovering while working.

    The result? While I feel better, I am exhausted. With next week being even busier than this week… I need a break.

  • Brick and mortar vs. Digital media

    barnes & nobleTonight Kristen and I spent an hour walking around our local Barnes & Noble. Each time I go there I have a recurring vision for what I am supposed to do with my life.

    I’m a messenger.

    I believe God has placed me on this planet to convey a message. And the most important part about being a messenger is that you need your message to be heard.

    What’s that got to do with the bookstore? 

    Imagine all the very important messages stuck in books you will never read? People walking around a bookstore pick up books for random reasons. The jacket design. A catchy title. Because the worker turned it out instead of in. Because someone picked it as something interesting to read.

    The point is, with 50,000 titles at the local bookstore… if you’re life’s mission were to convey a message… a bookstore sucks as a place to spread it.

    In my case, that translates into “find a better method to spread your message.“

  • Happy Birthday to Kim

    If you are like me, you are a friend of Kim Porter. And today she is really stinking old, 32. (OK, 5 months older than me.)

    If you’ve got a couple of seconds warm her day up a little and wish her a happy birthday.  Even if you don’t know her, she’s the sweetest person in the world so just stop by to wish her a happy birthday!

  • Lamentations 1:3

    Lamentations 1:3

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  • Who am I?

    adam mclaneI caught this on my vanity search this morning. It came from here. Since I don’t speak that language I have no clue what it means.

    But I am dead sexy, aren’t I?

  • Sick

    sickI don’t think anyone relishes being sick. I hate it. I have so many things to do and I’m sitting here freezing to death in 3 layers of clothes, a stocking cap, and my slippers trying to pound out some stuff I need to get done. I hope I feel better for Sunday and Monday but I have a sinking feeling that I’m just headed into this cough and not coming out of it for a while.

    In other news: I installed Joomla 1.5 today for the first time. I am a huge Joomla junkie. Almost all of my sites either use WordPress or Joomla and switching from version 1.0.13 to 1.5 is a pain in the neck. For example, you have to completely delete your existing site. Which scares the snot out of me when it comes to the church website and YMX.  I spent most of the day installing a site for a friend, getting the template all pimped out, and starting to look for the components he needs.

    easy buttonI have to say that I really like the new version. It is going to rock once I get past the migration issues. I am going to put off migrating YMX for as long as possible. I’m really hoping for an easy button but I don’t think one is coming.

    To make matters more fun, I still have stuff to do to get ready for the services tomorrow. Which means in a few minutes I’ll be making my weekly late Saturday night trip to the church get stuff done.

  • Mercy: Some practical theology here

    Last night at Light Force small groups we talked about the difference between mercy and grace.

    Grace = Getting something you don’t deserve.

    Mercy = Not getting something you deserve.

    I could see the students wrestling with this. Here are students completely covered in both. They have parents who bathe them in both on a daily basis. Yet they don’t see it. I think it goes back, for them, to a fundamental misunderstanding of what “deserve” means. They think that they deserve mercy and grace.

    I left thinking that most of the students expect to deserve grace and mercy. (By their birth they feel they have merited favor with others and even God) And I wondered how I could communicate that they don’t deserve to deserve grace and mercy better?

    What are some practical areas of grace and mercy the students in your life experience but fail to acknowledge?

  • What a day!

    I was having a good day. Really, my new toy arrived and the installation has gone very smooth. I had a good day at work and got a lot done.

    Then I got totally flattered by a post over on the MailChimp blog. (MailChimp is the third party email handler we use for the YMX newsletter)

    Not that they don’t use technology. Youth Ministry Exchange is taking full advantage of a bunch of MailChimp features to spread the word. Here are some things that impressed me:

    * They built an archive of all their past newsletters here. It’s a page they host on their website, then they use MailChimp’s Archive Generator to embed that list. It gets automatically updated whenever they send out a new issue. Learn more about MailChimp Archive Generators
    * They’ve created their own signup form, then pass the data over to MailChimp (insteading of using our default, hosted signup form). Our signup box designer is pretty nice, but it’s always nicer when you host your own.
    * On their signup form, they’re using MailChimp’s Interest Groups feature, which allow subscribers to sign up to receive only specific types of content. Learn more about MailChimp Interest Groups…
    * They’re using MailChimp’s HTML email designer, and they’ve really customized their newsletter design to fit their brand. The content in their newsletters is actually useful! Tips, free downloads, and commentary. Nice.
    * In their newsletters, they link to their blog, and to an RSS feed. More ways to keep your members updated.

    Wow. A Christian ministry getting mentioned as using a lot of technology. I love that.

  • The K List

    The following was posted on Facebook in a group called “Kasper Rocks.” It’s a group dedicated to a beloved high school English teacher. If I can write anything at all it is because of his influence. When I screw up it is due to residual muck from the other 10 years of public school I did not take Dan Kasper. (Coach K)

    Here is his list of writing rules: I’m 31 years old and I still refer to this list. I was happy to find a digital copy as mine from 1994 was getting ugly.

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