• Staycation Success

    Paul was big pimpin' at the vacation house.

    We did it!

    It feels good just to say it. “We had a successful vacation.”

    Last night, Kristen and I went for a walk in our neighborhood and this was really the summary statement of our week in Carlsbad.

    It was nice to get away while only traveling about 40 minutes from our house. I don’t have any fascinating results to reveal… but here is a hodgepodge of things I’m thinking about last week.

    • The rhythm and pace of the week was great. Nearly every day we woke up, watched the World Cup while drinking coffee, went to the pool, had lunch, went to the beach, ate dinner, watched a movie, and went to sleep.
    • Opening up our vacation to a bigger definition of our family made a huge difference. It just wouldn’t have been as much fun without Kristen’s parent, my niece Allison, Erin, and Lisa. While it likely effected the bottom line a little, it was priceless to spend the quality/quantity time with them.
    • It was also fun to bring Stoney, our yellow lab. Renting a dog-friendly house was pretty simple and it was a bonus to have him along. I don’t want to sound like one of those people but he really is part of our family.
    • Kristen likes shells… a lot. One two mornings Kristen went shell hunting. It was almost embarrassing how many shells we brought home. Almost.
    • We learned the playmate lesson. While it definitely helped Megan to have someone her age to play with… we REALLY needed to have a playmate as well. Next time.
    • Have we found a vacation style we all like? Kristen and I like two different types of vacations. I like to unplug and do just about nothing. Kristen finds it very refreshing to explore new places. This really afforded us the opportunity to do either, neither, or both.
    • Turning off the computers and my brain was awesome. I don’t have a single blog post I wrote while on vacation. Nor did I think much about work. I told Kristen last night… generally vacations make me antsy to get hyper productive and this one didn’t. I think it just revealed how exhausted I had been.
    • Our party on Friday night was a blast. More on celebrating our marriage another day.
    • I love hanging with my kids. I know you are supposed to like being with your kids. But I really love being with them. There’s no other way to describe it.
    • I cannot get enough beach. That’s pretty funny for a guy born in Indiana. But it is true. Most of our vacations somehow involve a large body of water… I guess I’m just hard wired to relax by the ocean.
    • Wine has a magical ability to multiply. We started our party on Friday night with 8 bottles of wine. By the time the party was over we had 12. It was an anniversary miracle! OK, I think its just that people like to bring wine to dinner parties. We still got a chuckle out of  that.
    • Our garden didn’t take a vacation. I came back a couple of times to water and drove back up to the house with baskets of tomatoes, squash, and green beans.
    • Every vacation house needs a soaking tub. The bathroom in the master suite had a massive whirlpool tub. And all of us took turns enjoying a nice bath. It’s the simple pleasures in life, sometimes!

    I’ll be getting back to my normal blogging self by the end of the week.

  • Best of 2008

    Best of 2008

    Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

    “Who Are You Anyway?”

    Confession #1: I’ve gotten wrapped up in being called a leader. I fall into the mistake of thinking people want to know what I think. Instead, a true leader defers to the ultimate source of wisdom, thinking, and counsel. The most appropriate thing I can do as a leader is point someone to ultimate truth found in the Bible. And I recognize that sometimes I do that and sometimes I depend on my own talent, experiences, and personal preferences. I used to be so good at saying, “This is what the Bible says: _______. And this is what I would do if I were in your position: ______________.” It seems that the more people want to recognize me as a “leader” the more I want to emphasize the latter instead of the former. The result is that I’m not always the best leader I can be. Ironic, eh?

    Confession #2: I get wrapped up in being called a pastor. I’ve never been comfortable with that title. But as the year’s have gone by I’ve gotten much less diligent in blushing it off when people call me “Pastor Adam.” I don’t know if it’s that I’ve gotten comfortable with what God has done and others recognize that in me or if I just like being called a pastor? Now, it’s true. That is what/who I am. And I am not ashamed of the title. I am not ashamed of my position. And I am not ashamed of my church. It’s not about shame. I recognize that its a sign of respect for my position yet I’ve always been uncomfortable with being labeled any title. Since I entered full-time ministry I’ve always self-reflected and laughed at God’s slapping me… ME… with the title of pastor. Sure… since I was little… even before I was a Christian… I always knew I’d be in ministry. But I also know who I am. I am biblically qualified to be a pastor and yet I know who I am.

    • Above reproach? As far as I know
    • A one woman man? Heck yes!
    • Temperate? I do my very best to not lose it
    • Self-controlled? To the best of my knowledge
    • Respectable? You tell me
    • Hospitable? Check
    • Able to teach? Check
    • Not given to drunkenness? Been good on that one since early teens
    • Not violent but gentle? By the grace of God
    • Not quarrelsome? Not my thing
    • Not a lover of money? How could I be?
    • Manage his family well? Could always do better
    • Not a recent convert? Check
    • Good reputation? Let me know, OK?

    Confession #3: I want to get more wrapped up in my identity as a daddy and husband than as “Pastor Adam.” Closing in on 6 years of working in churches full time and I know well why some denominations don’t let their pastors marry. The demands on the position are over-the-top hard to balance with a family. People think nothing of about calling me late at night or early in the morning to talk to me or ask me to do something. And I’m always tempted to work every day and most nights for youth group, small groups, meetings, and other stuff that lands on my schedule. I really don’t think this is biblical and I should be more disciplined about saying “Can we talk or do this tomorrow?” In the past 6 years we’ve had countless family meals interrupted, countless dates disrupted, dozens of movies put on pause, play time put on pause for other people so many times my kids hate it when I take a call, times with daddy missed for this and that. Spending quality time with other people’s kids while missing the same with my own. Honestly, I hardly ever noticed. But my wife and kids did. It’s tough being married with kids and being married with kids to a church. Only recently have I been doing some studying in the New Testament and I realized… “Wait a minute! These guys weren’t nearly as available as I am and God still thought they rocked as pastors and leaders.”

    Read the rest

    This is one of those blogs posts that has stuck with me. For the last two years I’ve been unwinding myself from being “Pastor Adam” to going back to being “just Adam.”

    I’m thankful for my new life and friendships. And I’m thankful that most of those people know me as Adam and not Pastor Adam. I still don’t know/think that I’m done with being on church staff… but I do know that if there is a next time, I won’t let people call me Pastor Adam. You can have a title with your job. But you can’t ever allow yourself to be that title more than you are yourself.

  • Best of 2007

    Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

    Why Ethnography is Important

    Missionaries know it. Businesses know it. Documentarians film it. Marketers make money from it. But what is it? It is ethnography.

    Ethnography ????? ethnos = people and ??????? graphein = writing) is the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitativefieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system’s properties cannot
    necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other.

    It doesn’t matter if you are a youth pastor in a community. An insurance salesman. A high school math teacher. Or a physician. If you want to succeed in a community,  you need to take the time to understand how the community works. Understanding ethnography helps you understand how the people think, how the politics of both elected and unelected people control things, and understand how cultural phenomenon dictate community behavior. (Holidays, local business practices, etc)

    Here’s the thing. Most doctors, pastors, insurance salesmen, and high school math teachers that fail, do so for cultural reasons and not because they are bad doctors, pastors, salesmen, or teachers. They fail because they failed to grasp the culture they are working in. Yet they blame themselves, their training, or even the people they want to sell to, provide services for, or teach for their failure!

    Success at Romeo depends not just on us teaching doctrine and working hard.     It depends heavily on us adapting and developing methods to reach our community by first understanding how the community works. Stick with me. Read the rest

    Looking through blog posts in 2007, I can see my blog taking a big turn. For years I just blogged about what was going on in my daily life. Occasionally, I tossed in a thought or a principle. But in 2007, posts like this one started to creep up as I found a more comfortable voice.

    The biggest advice I have for anyone who wants to get started in blogging is… write, a lot!

  • Best of 2006

    Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

    The (C)old House

    One thing I don’t like about an old house is that it is very hard to keep it warm. It’s a combination of a lack of insulation and inadequate duct work. If I had to do this house over again I would have installed radiated heat… but instead we have a blended system of forced air and electric heat. The result is that some areas are warmish while other areas are constantly drafty.

    It’s been a joke of visitors that our house is always cold. People say “We’re going to Adam’s house, we need to dress warm.” Or my personal favorite is a friend of mine who says “We McLane their house sometimes.” (Now we’re a verb?) Why? Um, pretty simple… we can’t afford to keep our old house at 72 degrees. Even at 65 during the day and 58 at night, we’re a little worried about energy costs this winter.

    Read the rest

    As much as we love San Diego, we still miss our house in Romeo. It’s a great place to live and I’m happy to hear that someone is finally living there again. I just hope they figure out a good way to heat it before winter!

  • Where to Rent vs. Buy

    HT to Mint

  • Best of 2005

    Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

    Check Out YMX!

    Hey, a buddy of mine and I launched a website lately for youth workers to connect up. This is filling the forum void left behind since YS closed their forums back in June.

    Anyway, check it out at ymexchange.com

    link

    This changed everything. As I look back on the last several years, no event changed my life more than creating Youth Ministry Exchange.

    For years the youth ministry world was pretty self-contained. There were a limited number of players and it seemed impossible to get your foot in the door anywhere.

    So we created a new door.

    Within a month we created massive traffic for our new business. We had some sense that what we were creating was important– but the truth is we had no idea what we were doing. We were even afraid to call it a business. We didn’t have any of the legal stuff done. We never had a business plan. We never spent $1 on marketing. And the two original owners have STILL never met. 3.5 years later I was sitting in an office at Zondervan signing paperwork and waiting for a bank transfer as we sold Youth Ministry Exchange, LLC to Youth Specialties. It’s mind boggling.

    How in the world does a guy go from being a no-name youth pastor at a church of 150 to shaking hands and receiving a check from the CEO of a major publishing company in 3.5 years? Simple: Looking at closed doors and building an open one to walk through.

    Investing $72 in an idea changed my life.

    Want my advice? If you have an idea that you are absolutely passionate about… do it. Do it now. The idea and the opportunity are never going to get better than they are today. But invest less than $100. If it’s a good idea it won’t make a difference if you invest $100 trying it out or $100,000. (Donald Trump may be good, but that guy has led his company into bankruptcy three times! Never finance an idea with debt. Pure and simple.)

  • Best of 2004

    Note: I’m on vacation this week. My family has a rule for daddy– It’s not a vacation if daddy brings a computer. Each day this week I’m highlighting my favorite post from the adammclane.com archives. These are oldies but goodies.

    Yes, I am Wasting My Life

    August 31st 2004

    Again this month we are short financially. Grad school came calling. Preschool came calling. Uncle Sam gets his cut in a few days. A combination of expected and unexpected expenses draws a little more money from savings to checking in a constant game of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Life’s expenses are again expensive. Each time this happens to me I start to reminisce about what life could have been like for Kristen and Megan and Paul. Had we stayed on the path of corporate success in Chicago we wouldn’t have this to worry about. The bills always got paid in full. There was always a little extra at the end of the month. We could always surprise someone with a special gift. Vacation? No problem. New tires? How about the best? New clothes? Why not. Yet in the same moments I recall the emptiness I had as I laid in bed at night, longing for my life to be wasted for something more important than getting richer… or more precisely, helping rich people get richer.

    Read the rest

    It’s 2010. I am still here. I am still wasting my life. And I still love every minute of it.

  • Vacation Reading

    Yesterday officially kicked off my summer vacation. For the first time since I was 24 I’ll only have two weeks of vacation this year, one of which I’ll use for my July trip to Haiti, so I have to make the most of this one.

    My intention is to disconnect as much as possible. (More on that later)

    Last night, Kristen and I went to Barnes & Noble to load up on some books for our trip.

    Here’s my reading list:

    Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

    I am not sure how it is that I lived to be 34 years old without reading the greatest pirate novel of all time. But I have and I am looking forward to diving into this one. If vacations are about mentally and physically escaping from your day-to-day life… I’m thinking this book can take me there.

    If not, then at least I can check it off my list of books I should have read in high school but didn’t because I was reading other stuff.

    Presence, Arthur Miller

    The only other things I’ve read by Arthur Miller were back in high school, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.

    Something tells me that Miller is a master storyteller, and a collection of short stories seems like a winner. And the endorsements on the back used a lot of fancy words.

    Broke USA, Gary Rivlin

    My first and only experience with this game came when I was 23. Hard up for cash and too proud to ask a friend for a few hundred bucks to make it to the next paycheck, I went down to a payday loan place and wrote a check for $400 to borrow $300 for two weeks. Before I walked out of there I realized I’d stepped into a world I didn’t understand. 400% interest… yeah, not cool. It was a lesson learned.

    When the review copy of this book showed up last month, I snagged it and thought it would be a good opportunity to learn more about how people take advantage of the economically disadvantaged.

    Born Standing Up, Steve Martin

    When I think of Steve Martin I think of movies like Three Amigos and Father of the Bride. I’m not quite old enough to remember him from The Jerk or Saturday Night Live. Yet, I still have a fascination with his work. He manages to walk the tightrope between hilariously funny and believable drama.

    I first heard about this book when he made the late-night talk show circuit promoting it. I’ve wanted to read it since than but it never quite climbed into my wishlist. So when I saw it on the bargain rack for $5, I grabbed it.

  • WordPress 3.0

    https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.21

    Any time any type of software goes from one version number to the next, it is significant. WordPress 3.0 brings a few interesting highlights.

  • Theme improvements. (You’ll get better themes as a result)
  • Menu improvements. (Made it easier to add dropdowns)
  • Multi-user, multi-blog administration built in
  • Some cool dashboard improvements, highlighted in the video. Now I can make WordPress act more like a CMS.
  • Even easier to update WordPress software and plug-ins

    • McLane Creative customers: You shouldn’t have any problems with the upgrade. All of the templates/sites I have out there are compliant and should upgrade just fine. To upgrade, open up your dashboard and click the “Upgrade to WordPress 3.0” link at the top of the screen.

    If there are any problems, let me know.

    If you have a WordPress stand-alone blog, I highly suggest upgrading immediately. With more than 1200 bug fixes, there is bound to be a security issue in there you’ll want cleaned up.

  • Possessed

    Clay High School, 1992 | Welcome to the wayback machine

    When someone pitches an idea my mind is running through a matrix of questions. Is this really a good idea? Is the idea even possible? Is this the right person to turn this idea into a reality? Will enough people buy into the idea that it’ll take off? Is this the right time for this idea?

    But the overarching question on my mind is simply, “Has this idea possessed this person to the point that they won’t rest– they will just be driven by this idea for as long as it takes?”

    90% of the time the answer to that question is no.

    “I can teach anyone enough about music to sing in the  choir.”

    This was the philosophy of my high school choir teacher. The woman was possessed. I’m living proof of this truism. I have no musical ability or talent at all and I was taught enough to perform at hundreds of shows, concerts, and competitions during high school.

    This woman was possessed in her belief that anyone could sing and sing well. She convinced more than 50 students per year to take a choir class at 6:30 AM. On top of that she convinced about 25 of us to take an additional music class in the afternoon. Get this, for three of my four years of high school I had two music classes every day. And after school in the Spring almost all of us were also part of a musical.

    It wasn’t unusual for me to leave for school before 6:00 AM and not return home from school until after 9:00 PM.

    How did she do it? She was possessed by her idea. “I can teach anyone to sing.”

    She had that one magical ingredient that most purveyors of ideas don’t have.

    Do you?