This week I’m getting the opportunity to go behind the scenes with Praying Pelican Missions during their busiest week of the summer, shadowing Haiti Operations Director Jim Noreen. (He is overseeing 7 ministry sites around the country with about 170 participants in country.)
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4 Roles of the Youth Worker on an International Short-Term Mission Trip
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Sights and Sounds from Haiti
If you’ve never been to Haiti you need to know that it is a place of alluring beauty. I don’t know how to explain it but I draw energy from being here. It has a pace & vibrancy that’s intense. Everything is just a little bit turned up… noises, colors, humidity, etc. While I can’t share the flavors or the smells… I can certainly share some sights and sounds to give you a feel for what it’s like to be here.
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When Helping Helps
Have you read When Helping Hurts? It’s a powerful challenge to church leaders and short-term mission organizations to think about the unintended consequences of “helping.” [Hint: Stop reading this post and go buy it now. It’s good.]
Short-Term Missions and Youth Ministry
Getting practical, and with an eye on youth ministry, we are often torn.
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Off to Haiti, Again
This morning I woke up at about 5:30 to the sound of Kristen unzipping our tent in Yosemite National Park. That sound was the last breath of my vacation. A week of swimming in mountain streams, playing games with the kids late into the night, campfires, hikes, and a million giggles. It was awesome. But waking up simply meant it was time to start packing.
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10 Awesome Things to Do With $20
Today is the early bird deadline for The Summit. After today the price goes up by a whopping $20. But hey, $20 is $20.
$20 is easy to blow, isn’t it? I’ve always had this mental image that I can hold a $20 bill and not spend it. But as soon as I break that $20 bill it just evaporates.
With that in mind I thought it’d be fun to think about awesome things you could do with $20. Whether that’s $20 saved on The Summit registration or $20 earned while babysitting your next door neighbors pet tarantula.
Awesome Things to Do With $20
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Tribes of Youth Workers I Want to Learn From: Coaches
On August 1st, tens of thousands of whistles will blow on tens of thousands of practice fields on tens of thousands of American high school campuses.
In many states August 1st is the first day of fall practice for football. Beyond football, it marks the officially beginning for tons of other coaches of fall sports. (Yes, many sports actually go year-round. But each sports season has an official practice period.)
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2 New Books Releasing Mid-August from The Youth Cartel
Lately, I’ve been buried in the design and production of three brand new books from The Youth Cartel. This pushes our active catalog to 8 titles and we’ve got a lot more really exciting things coming pretty soon.
Practically speaking, that means that I’ve been heavily involved in designing covers, layout, setting them up to sell, and actually getting them printed and in stock.
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Solo Time
3 hours from now Megan and I are leaving for the airport. We’ll fly to Chicago today where we’ll spend a few days together exploring the city before doing some work Monday through Wednesday.In so many ways the McLane’s are Chicagoans. We both moved to the city in 1994 for college. We met there in 1995. And the first 5 years of our marriage was living in Chicago and later in Forest Park, a nearby suburb. And, of course, Megan was born at Northwestern Hospital in Chicago.
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Man Versus Machine
Man Verus Machine – A Classic Tale
The concept that pro golfer Rory McIlroy, making real time adjustments to conditions, can out compute a machine designed to hit perfect shots every time is a classic one. In 1996 Russian chess champion Garry Kasporov beat IBM’s best computer 4-2. I suppose you can track this legend of man versus machine all the way back to Trojan horse.This is a great commercial. I know it’s a take on the PGA Tour’s These Guys are Good campaign, but it’s a nice iteration of it. Funny and competitive, a lot like two good friends on the course, talking smack and challenging one another.
1984 and 2013
The recent NSA leaks have people thinking a lot about big brother and the power of machines. Some fear the government has gone too far. Others relax are over-confident that all of these machines and surveillance tactics somehow make us safer.
But in the end man always wins over machine. Just like wooden horses didn’t take over military operations, just like computers aren’t chess champions, and just like machines aren’t running the European Tour… we don’t have anything to worry about with machines.
They are just machines.
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The Distraction of Perceived Competition
- “Did you see what ____ is doing?“
- “Did you see what ____ had on their blog?“
- “I heard ____ is going to do ______ next year. Wow. Total game changer.“
- “_____ is kicking butt with ______.“
If you are in leadership, any kind of leadership, you hear this stuff all the time.
I catch myself going there from time-to-time. And I’ve learned that it’s nothing more than a big, fat distraction.