Pride goes before destruction,
a haughty spirit before a fall.
I caught a lament on Rachel Blom’s Twitter feed last night, “One thing I dislike about ‘Christian culture’: you can’t really say you’re proud of an accomplishment without being accused of pride.”
I share the same lament.
Like a lot of people, I’ve been following the news about NSA leaks. And I’ve enjoyed a fair amount of banter on the topic, which leaves me full of contradiction.
We exist for all people to know Jesus.
That’s an oversimplification for most church vision statements. On paper, they are for all people.
But in a brick and mortar reality, churches make decisions every day which largely determine who they reach.
Open is a series of open-source styled events that we do at The Youth Cartel. We shamelessly favor regional trainers, basically turning the normal youth ministry training event upside down. No one gets paid, all of the speakers notes (sometimes audio) are shared on the website, the process for becoming a speaker is open, and we even post the budget online.
Three and a half years ago I got a CSA membership with J.R. Organics for Christmas. We’ve stuck with it and we’re glad we have.
Kristen and I met in late April of our freshmen year at Moody, 1995. We were eighteen years old. For our first date we got tricked into a blind date by a mutual friend. It was fun and awkward and a good story in itself.
Yet our relationship really started on our second date.
Sitting at a stop light.
Mind racing.
Texts flowing in, trying to ignore them.
Kids in the car, not looking forward to school, but not fighting it either.
I’m trying to distract my racing mind by listening to the radio. But that P!ink song is on. And if I hear it one more time my eyeballs may pop out.
In so many ways it’s just a normal day.
Media-centric families (39% of the sample), in which parents used electronic media for an average of 11 hours a day and children averaged 4.5 hours. These families were most likely to leave TVs on most of the time (48%) and put TVs in children’s rooms (44%).
Media-moderate families (45%), in which parents used media nearly five hours a day and children were plugged in for nearly three hours.
Media-light families (16%), in which parents averaged less than two hours and children averaged about 1.5 hours of screen time each day.
“Parents set the family style,” Wartell says. “Children are not the driving force here.”
My kid is wasting time online. All they want to do is play video games. Should I limit their screen time? Video games are so violent today, should I be worried about that?
These are all common questions I get at parent seminars on social media. I get it. I really do. In our own house we face the same questions.
Do you have friends? Maybe that sounds like a weird question.
But the truth is that I know a lot of people who really don’t have many friends.
Scott Rubin summed this up in his rant at the Middle School Ministry Campference last year… “Do you have people in your life with whom you can put your worst foot forward?”
The subtitle of this post could be “The absolute random life of Adam McLane.”
Tomorrow I leave for a 3-day trip. I’ll be flying to Nashville and then driving back in a giant Penske moving truck with my buddy Dave Palmer as part of a theory that you can catch a company doing something good.