• When “Our Dream” is Better Chased than “My Dream”

    A few weeks ago Kristen and I both woke up in the middle of the night. Apparently 2 AM is the only time parents of 3 young kids can have a long talk without interruptions to ask us if it’s OK to watch TV or a dirty diaper or someone getting hungry.

    We talked for about 2 hours. After 15 years of marriage we know that there are times when marriage kind of gets lonely. We were in  that space… doing everything together but never really being together. We recognized that most of our communication throughout the day was logistical. We talked a ton, but more about who was doing what or when we were going to do stuff than we were really talking and listening to one another. It wasn’t that anything was wrong it was just that we had fallen into a military mindset where we talked plans of attack more than we really talked.

    I don’t know why we each woke up in the middle of the night. (Um, equally small bladders I guess?) But I think God was in this conversation.

    We started talking about some of the dreams we are chasing. Big stuff like raising our kids a certain way. Smaller stuff like dreams of connecting deeper with our neighborhood and our vacation to Yosemite and Paul’s birthday party.

    Here’s the kicker. And this was the thing that has really shaped my actions in the past few weeks since this conversation happened:

    I don’t ever want to chase my own dreams so hard that Kristen pays the price. I don’t want “Adam chasing his dreams” to mean that Kristen loses the opportunity to chase her own dreams. It’s no fun to succeed at stuff if we aren’t both excited about it and both winning. And, more importantly, I want Kristen and I to chase our dreams together. I don’t ever want to give up our dreams that we shared as 19 year olds walking along Lake Michigan or when I worked so that she could finish her degree, on and on. I’m willing to give up some of my dreams for that…

    Dreaming with Kristen is what I want. Two people chasing their own dreams but kind of coexisting? I’ll leave that to the Clinton’s. 

    That perspective has changed things. I think it means I do less stuff on my own somehow. And I think it re-orientates how we dream about actually accomplishing stuff.

    There’s no denying it. Launching 2 businesses over the past year has taxed us all as a family. It is beautiful to see this dream become a reality and we are reaping the rewards and Lord willing we’ll reap the rewards of this past 12 months for many years to come. But there has been a very real cost for everyone to pay, as well. (This is a cost hundreds of thousands of small business owners pay. I’m not alone in this!)

    At the same time, Kristen and I need to consistently check-in with one another. (Even if it’s at 2 AM!) Are we chasing our own dreams alone? Or are we intentionally, self-sacrificingly, chasing a better dream together?

    Fellow dreamers: What about you? How do make sure that you dream together instead of chasing individual dreams in your marriage?

  • Scenes from the Revolution

    I’m working on 3 hours of sleep. Again. No eloquence this morning, it’s all pain!

    This is what the front line of a revolution looks like. Tired, exhilarating, fast moving, and sometimes scary.

    Oh baby, here’s stuff that is happening right now.

    • I’m pretty close to helping Parentzilla.com relaunch. Combined with Parentministry.net and another site slated for later this month, Jeremy Lee is making very impressive steps into online ministry this summer. And I’m happy to help him behind the scenes in both strategy and development.
    • Sunday night, I wrapped up a round of edits on a book I co-wrote with Marko, A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media. It was the first time I read it from start to finish. (And first time I’ve written a book of this length!) As reluctant as I was to do the book thing, dang this is such a good resource for parents.
    • I’ve been working with the organizing team for Open Seattle to try to nail down speakers/line-up. When I launched Open I kind of had this wild dream that we could flip the script on youth ministry training events. Yup, verified that.
    • The early bird deadline for the Middle School Ministry Campference is this Sunday. There’s a lot of movement happening behind the scenes on that one. Gonna rock.
    • We’ve begun work on layout and design for a couple Cartel books. I’m enjoying both learning that process and having discussions about how we can revolutionize the publishing relationship. Of course, it helps that the books are really cool.
    • We hired a bookkeeping service yesterday. This is a weird sign of growth… but is reflective of the level of complications things have gotten to, in an absolutely beautiful way.
    • I had some amazing conversations yesterday with folks about everything from small events to big projects that will continue moving this revolution.

    8 hours of meetings and 10 hours of work… didn’t make for a great night of sleep but did make for a soul filling day.

    It’s spreading and gaining momentum. Join us in reimagining youth ministry in new ways.

  • Simple Pleasures

    SAN DIEGO, CA – A 36 year old man was seen in front of his Rolando neighborhood home this morning playing in the sprinklers. Wearing only his pajamas and an ear-to-ear grin the man could be heard giggling for blocks. Neighbors reported that the man is also seen regularly walking with his dog, baby, and a woman they perceive to be his wife in the evenings. The status of the man’s mental health is unknown. 

    Busted. Guilty as charged. I confess. That’s me!

    There are some things in life that I label as simple pleasures. And playing in the sprinklers (er, I mean “adjusting them“) is one of them. As our little garden has expanded so has the need to water things. Almost 4 years ago I installed a simple drip watering system for a small patch of our garden in the backyard. As our garden has expanded so has the drip system. It now covers most of the backyard, delivering prescribed amounts of water to various plants all over. And this spring we decided to try to keep our grass a more socially acceptable yellow/green combo instead of the yellow/gray color we’ve accomplished in previous dry summers. And to make gardening just a little more manageable we installed fancy timers for both the front and back yard which deliver exactly 5 minutes of water to all plants simultaneously every 12 hours.

    So, when the battery on the timer needed to be changed this morning and one of my spray patterns in the front was a little off… it became an opportunity to play.

    Simple pleasures

    • Coffee in the morning, tea in the evening
    • Playing in the sprinklers
    • Walking the dog
    • Holding hands
    • Going to see a movie
    • Wandering through a bookstore
    • That first breath of salty air when you park by the ocean or the deep pine smell of camping in the woods
    • Custom styling the CSS and functionality of a WordPress plugin

    These are some of my simple pleasures. Things that make my soul giggle. Things that, if I stop doing long enough to start being, make life a little more enjoyable.

    What are your simple pleasures? (Um, keep it PG!)

    Photo credit: Summertime in Pig Town by Liz Kasameyer via Flickr (Creative Commons)

  • Going 3 million miles

    Irvin Gordon's 1966 Volvo“I have a feeling I’ll be dead long before the car.” ~ Irvin Gordon

    Mr. Gordon has put almost 3 million miles on his 1966 Volvo. The average person drives a car 15,000 miles per year around where they live.  At that rate Gordon has driven his car 200 years. According to my calculator Mr. Gordon has driven his car, on average, 65,000 miles per year.

    Most people put about 100,000 miles on a car before they get a new one. And if you’re in youth ministry you generally get a car with about 100,000 miles on it and drive it to about 220,000 miles when it implodes into a cloud of rust, dust, and repair bills.

    The story of Gordon’s isn’t just that his car has lasted a long time. It’s that he’s created a way to use his car in such a way that endures, seemingly, forever.

    Create Something Enduring

    As I think about Gordon’s 1966 Volvo I can’t help but think about the things that I care about in my life. I certainly hope my relationships and the stuff I’m doing can last 46 years… and hopefully long after I die. But this story causes me to ask some important questions about getting there.

    • How can I maintain relationships in a way that will endure 65,000 miles of usage in a year?
    • Can I create systems for my life that are seemingly infinitely maintainable?
    • Am I even aware of the engine that makes everything work, or do I just go along until something doesn’t sound right?
    • Is my pace sustainable for the long haul?
    • Are the things I’m creating going to outlast me?

    ht to Detroit Free Press

  • Social Media is Linked to Depression

    Researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology have linked depressive symptoms in college students to their internet usage. It’s a small study, only 216 participants over 1 month, but the correlation quantifies what other researches have hypothesized. This is the first of its kind that overlaid subjects actual internet usage and diagnostic testing. Participants were college students on a closed network. So once they agreed to participate the researchers gained access to their real time usage via the schools network.

    In short, the more time subjects spent checking social media sites like Facebook, chatting online, and shopping– especially late at night, the more depressive symptoms were measured.

    In this paper, we report our findings on a month long experiment conducted at Missouri University of Science and Technology on associating depressive symptoms among college students with their Internet usage using real Internet data collected in an unobtrusive and privacy preserving manner over the campus network. In our study, 216 undergraduates were surveyed for depressive symptoms using the CES-D scale. We then collected their on-campus Internet usage characterized via Cisco NetFlow data. Subsequent analysis revealed that several Internet usage features like average packets per flow, peer-to-peer (octets, packets and duration), chat octets, mail (packets and duration), ftp duration, and remote file octets exhibit a statistically significant correlation with depressive symptoms. Additionally, Mann-Whitney U-tests revealed that average packets per flow, remote file octets, chat (octets, packets and duration) and flow duration entropy have a statistically significant difference in the mean values across groups with and without depressive symptoms. 

    Source

    This fits into the advice I share in my seminar, (and forthcoming book co-authored with Marko) A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media, that parents need to focus less on WHAT their kids are looking at and more on WHERE and WHEN they are using the internet.

    ht to Mashable and Huffington Post UK

    Photo credit: Ars Electronica via Flickr (Creative Commons)

  • Right person, wrong program

    I had coffee with a ministry friend yesterday. His church plant is about 5 years old so they aren’t completely tiny but they aren’t so big that they’ve become a thing.

    He said something pretty radical. Allow me to paraphrase.

    “About a year ago my youth ministry guy started a youth group. I think he thought it was the right thing to do. But it was really unnatural for us as a church, cost him a lot of energy, and took him away from being on campus– the thing thing he’s best at and gives him the most life. So we just agreed to kill youth group so he can go back to what he was made for.” 

    Sssssccccreeeee-aaaacccchhhhh!

    Say what? You mean the church launched something. Then they realized it wasn’t going to work so decided to kill a program instead of fire an employee? Yup, that’s what they did. They didn’t double-down on youth group. They folded and placed a new bet on a different form of youth ministry.

    Bend your mind around that for a second. 

    Building a ministry around the gifts, dreams, and strengths of a minister instead of asking them to conform to a culturally created expectation for what a youth worker does– imagine the possibilities. I’m not trying to sound sarcastic but you have to know that this is a radical concept!

    All-too-often I meet youth workers who feel the program they run, mid-week youth group / small groups and a Sunday morning thing, drains the life out of them. Meetings and planning suck joy from their soul.

    And what they really live for that brings them life? The thing that keeps them in it? It’s something they do on the side. They coach their kids soccer team. They go to conferences to see friends. They volunteer at the high school.

    It makes me wonder if we’re all doing it backwards?

    What if churches hired the right people and asked them to build a ministry around what brought them joy? What if they built their ministry around what they are good at, what they are passionate about, what their spiritual gifts lead them to, and chasing the unique dreams God has called them to.

    Is that even possible? 

  • To be like Joseph

    Mr. Insignificant

    You don’t get much more insignificant in a family of 12 than being number 11. As the 11th born you aren’t the baby of the family. And in this case you aren’t even the last baby boy. You are just number 11 with an abundant allotment of big brothers.

    Joseph was an insignificant son with significant dreams. One night Joseph had a dream that one day he’d rule over his brothers. This was a seemingly impossible dream. And, sophomorically, he told his big brothers about his dream which lead to them hating him.

    All throughout Joseph’s life he lived in the reality that he was chasing his dreams but his anti-dream was also chasing him. Over and over again we see Joseph’s life take wicked turns. His brothers staged his death while selling him into slavery. His slave owners trade him like a camel and he ends up in Potifer’s house. There he becomes the object of a cougar’s affection causing him to flee naked from the house before being caught, accused of adultery, and thrown in prison. On and on this calamity continues– his whole life!

    Life didn’t just deal Joseph lemons. Life dealt him poison.  Joseph was a man with big, significant dreams but a murderous monkey on his back.

    But that never stopped Joseph’s dream. He worked towards that dream, not knowing if it’d ever come true. Until one day it did!

    We are all Joseph

    Most of us are insignificant. By birth, by education, by performance, and by recognition… we are not born rulers or leaders of tribes.

    But we all have dreams. Some are aspirational and within reach. And some are so big that our dreams make the 6 year old who lives inside of us blush to mention them in public.

    We are all driven by dreams while gravitational held back by circumstance.

    Joseph’s Posture

    With all the crap that hit the fan in Joseph’s life no one would have blamed him if he’d defined himself by the poop splattered on the wall of his life. Everywhere he turned there were people sinning against him, seeking to destroy both him and his dreams.

    Instead, Joseph makes a radical choice. He refused to allow the sins of others to define his life and ruin his dreams. No one could have forced him to do that. It came from within. It was a daily posture he took as he continually kept his eye on his dreams. He worked hard, he overcame, and eventually– his dreams came true.

    The Cycle Ends with Me

    When I think about my own life and my own dreams it is easy for me to think of all the obstacles. I can point to specific instances where my dreams were thwarted because someone sinned against me. (In some cases, maliciously intending to harm me.)

    But the choice is mine. I can define my life by taking a victims posture or Joseph’s posture. I could be destroyed, defined, and devastated by the sins against me OR— supernaturally and by God’s grace– I can decide that the cycle of retribution, revenge, anger, malice, and sin ends with me.

    I can’t control my circumstance but I can control my response to my circumstances.

    You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.

    Genesis 50:20

  • Desert Photos and Videos

     

  • You know you’re onto something when…

    • the powers that be (doing nothing for years) are nervous about you.
    • people from the church start leaving tracts and books on your desk anonymously.
    • an old lady cusses at you and about you.
    • country club members decide to worship elsewhere.
    • tattoos and pick-up trucks outnumber lattes and minivans in the parking lot.
    • you get sued.
    • your building gets tagged.
    • you get a “performance improvement plan” and are assigned to take the Strength Finders test.
    • a week later the Senior Pastor confesses that he’s jealous of your ministry.
    • the janitor starts covering for you.
    • a ministry magazine and an investigative reporter want an interview on the same day.
    • you schedule volunteer meetings and everyone shows up.
    • your budget gets slashed.
    • you can’t remember whose graduation party or wedding reception you’re at anymore.
    • the fellowship hall you booked for a fundraiser is suddenly being used for a knitting conference.
    • you get called a heretic.
    • you can’t sleep at night.
    • the discouragement is unbearable.
    • the walls of the church seem paper thin.
    • you are exhausted, weary, blurry eyed, but can’t imagine yourself doing anything else.

    Remember: Discouragement does not come from the Lord. When you’re onto something our enemy attacks. The closer you get, the more you can expect to be attacked.

  • Yosemite in HD

    This video has me all pumped to head up to Yosemite. The countdown is on! 2 weeks.