Category: Travel

  • Coming to Chicago Dec 13-18

    I’m coming to Chicago for a small release party for the Love is an Orientation DVD curriculum on Saturday December 17th… so  I thought I’d expand the trip a little by coming Tuesday night and leaving Sunday evening.

    Here’s what is scheduled so far:

    December 17th – 2 classes now open for registration

    10 -12 pm – Growing Your Business with Mailchimp

    2 -4 pm – Blogging 101

    That’s right. That means I have all of December 14th, 15th, 16th, and most of the 18th wide open.

    I’m spending a couple of nights with my cousin in Oak Park and a couple of nights with Andy in Wrigleyville. Kristen and I lived in Chicago for 8+ years so I don’t really want to fill my days sight seeing or visiting museums, I’d much rather spend my time connecting with you. (Though I am willing to attend the Bears game on December 18th, just tossing it out there!)

    Let me be blunt. Since I’m already going to be in Chicago and I have so many free days, that means that you can get my services pretty cheap. Some things you could have me do at a cut rate.

    • Come to your organization/church to lead a workshop on any variety of things I teach regularly on. Social media for churches, Mailchimp for non-profits, Blogging 101, Creating a sustainable online strategy, Free and awesome communications tools for non-profits, or a hybrid of any of those to meet your needs.
    • Spend a day or half day consulting with your team regarding your website or online engagement strategy.
    • Teach at youth group or even fill your pulpit (free or nearly free)
    • Meet to discuss a possible project for The Youth Cartel or McLane Creative

    I’m open to spending up to a full-day outside of the city, as well. Maybe you live in Northwest Indiana or Southern Wisconsin or downstate Illinois and would like me to come teach my classes? I’d actually love an excuse to spend a day in the South Bend area.

    Of course, if you want to hang out and grab a cup of coffee or an italian beef… let me know. I’m obviously down for that.

    Drop me an email and let’s connect.

  • Mexico isn’t Scary

    Not-so-scary street tacos and real Coke

    I spent yesterday with some folks from Amor Ministries in Tijuana.

    The point of our trip was to visit some recent Amor houses built in a colonia to create a video inviting NYWC participants to spend a day of convention there building a house. The houses we saw were anywhere from 3 days old to 10 months old. If you aren’t familiar with how it works, essentially Amor acts as an agent of blessing for a local group of pastors. Individuals from the community request help from their local church, and the pastor asks Amor to build a starter-house for a family. They intentionally don’t do everything because they want the family to come in and make it their own.

    You aren't afraid of a place where children buy neon colored baby chicks, are you?

    Here’s the reality for Amor (and YWAM, whom I visited last year): Fear of gang violence has lead to tons of people from the States stopping their annual trips down. Conversely, the downward dip in the economy has meant people already poor in TJ are now much poorer.

    All Amor is trying to do is help the local pastor answer the question, “How can the church be Good News so that the community will hear and receive Good News?”

    Let me just say this: Forget what you’ve heard on the news. Yes, there are problems. Yes, drug cartel violence is horrible and deadly. But is Jesus always asking you to do the safest thing? 

    But TJ is still TJ. It’s a border town. And a border town is a border town. (No one ever claimed that Sarnia or Windsor Ontario were the hallmarks of Canada, did they?) If anything it’s much more developed than it was when I first went there 10 years ago. And I don’t think there is anything there to be afraid of for you or I.

    Now, if you’re buying or selling drugs. Or at a club until 2 AM. TJ might be dangerous for you. But so is Carlsbad.

  • The Sea

    ten things i have learned about the sea from lorenzo fonda on Vimeo.

    I was mesmerized by this short film. Like the filmmaker, there is something about the ocean that speaks deeply to my soul.

    If I had unlimited time to travel, explore, and write… traveling by cargo ship would be incredible. Am I the only one who looks at this film and says, 14 days from San Francisco to Xiamen? Yes, please!

    ht to Likecool

  • Book Cover: How to Share Your Faith on a Plane

    [download id=”15″]

    I have a knack for getting an empty seat next to me when I fly Southwest.

    On more than 60% of my 2010 flights I sat in the window seat and had an empty middle seat. In January 2011, I flew with Southwest 11 times and had an empty middle seat 7 times. (The other 4 were completely full flights with no empty seats.)

    As I bragged about this to my friends, they began to wonder: How in the world is Adam doing that?

    I’m not going to share all of my tricks. (Here’s a blog with some decent tips) But one thing that definitely helps looks like this:

    • Make sure you are in the A boarding group
    • Sit in a window seat, then place a book or your iPod/headphones in the middle seat.

    It’s the book detail that my friends bring up and eventually resulted in the graphic you see above. More often than not I am reading a non-fiction Christian book like Kenda-Creasy Deans Almost Christian or John Ortberg’s Faith and Doubt. For some reason those types of titles tend to cause on-coming passengers to continue moving towards the back of the plane more than the latest issue of Sports Illustrated or Wired.

    That’s the genesis of this fake book cover. My friends and I hypothesized, “If people won’t sit next to me because I’m reading a book with a Christian title, what would happen if I made a fake book cover with an overtly Christian title AND made the book about evangelism?”

    That’s how this was born.

    How to Share Your Faith on a Plane: 25 Scenarios for Converting This Flight from Transportation to Transformation

    Instructions:

    • Download the pdf.
    • Print/cut it to the size you need. (The original size is the size of a standard hard cover book with a jacket)
    • Replace the jacket your book came with and follow the tips on the back cover.

  • World Air Traffic (24 hours)

    This blew my mind.

  • Some pics from my trip

    Here are a few iPhone pictures from my trip to the Pacific Northwest.

  • Your story matters

    My drive plan for next week

    Next week, I’m hitting the road and driving from San Jose to just north of Seattle. I guess there are 3 over-arching reasons I’m doing this. Two are a bit secondary and perhaps selfish, which the third is really the justification for everything else.

    1. I love a good road trip. There is something almost magical about driving across our country. If you’ve never done a multi-day drive you won’t understand that statement. My first was “Golf across America” in 2002. My last one was “Travels with Stoney” in 2008. This trip needs a name.
    2. YS is still alive. It’s not that you, my kind reader, doesn’t know that. It’s that a lot of people have an open question… “What’s going on with YS?” And this trip is aimed at answering that question. (This is what’s known as “the business justification.“) Plus, even before all of the changes, I kept begging for this because I knew there was a need to get our staff on the ground talking with youth workers out of the office.
    3. Your story matters. My first two road trips were about my story. (Travels with Stoney was a little more about our families story and our hope for a fresh start.) This trip is about the stories of youth workers. My work has put me in contact with innumerous youth workers… and collectively we have a story to tell. My premise is that as I drive and host these meet-ups I’ll hear (and capture) stories from youth workers which the community will really resonate with.

    What’s fascinating about going out to discover youth workers stories is… it’s all about discovery. I’ve got a rough sketch of who I’m going to meet, but I really don’t have a clue where this is going to go. And what makes a road trip so fun for this format of story discovery is that I probably won’t really get a thread through all of the stories until I’m done. Since I’m telling stories as I go, there’s even a great chance that you will see the thread before I will.

    Another fascinating element to telling people’s stories, one that I’m just learning to appreciate, is that power of telling a persons story to the person whose story is being told. It’s one thing to tell your own story. But it’s an entirely different thing to have someone come into your life and then to other people about you. As I’ve been scheduling my meet-ups and talking to people, I hear them question, “you want to tell my story?”

    You are story worthy.

    Your story is interesting.

    Your story is helpful to you.

    Your story is helpful to others.

    As a child of the King bought at a price, your story has unlimited value.

    “you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.” 1 Corinthians 6:20

  • Back to Minneapolis

    Minneapolis, Minnesota
    Photo by stevelyon via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    This week I’m headed to Minneapolis for a week of meetings and team building. Since YS is a now part of YouthWorks, we get to be a part of their semi-annual gatherings where they come together to celebrate all that God is doing. I’m digging that.

    Here’s a couple of fun things I’ve been learning about YouthWorks.

    1. The missions team has more than 36,000 people registered for mission trips this summer. Most of them are middle and high schoolers.
    2. We are in the process of hiring about 350 summer staff.
    3. We have about 65 full-time, year-round staff. (Including the YS staff)
    4. YouthWorks has a foundation which gives back to the communities which host missions trips.

    This week I’m hoping to connect with some folks and figure out what people do. It should be big fun in the frozen tundra. Since I’ll be back their at least quarterly– my sidebar hope is to find some fun, funky places to explore.

    Yes, more fun than Chingy and Snoop at the Holiday Inn.

  • Off to Minneapolis

    If going to Alabama is the dirty south, does that make Minnesota the “clean north?”

    Regardless, I am missing church this morning as I begin my trip north (and east) to Minneapolis for a few days of meetings with the YouthWorks team.

    Here’s something fun about heading to the clean north. I kind of like the cold. Don’t get me wrong– I love winters in San Diego where people wear ski jackets when it hits 50 and pull their kids out of school because of a rain storm. But I’m not one of those people who hates a hard, cold winter. In fact, there is a freshness to the cold air that invigorates the soul. (That could also be the freezing of ones lungs resulting in a shot of endorphins and adrenaline, but those are little details!) I’m looking forward to a little snowstorm tonight and it getting progressively chilly in my time there this week.

    I plan on laughing and listening a lot this week. As we continue to mix our organizations together into a new organization we are finding that we share so much in common. And we definitely share the “we don’t take ourselves too seriously” quality that is a hallmark of YS. Al0ng the same lines, so much of why we are passionate about what we do lies in our story. So I am jazzed to listen and get to know people beyond the giggles and hear their hearts.

    I’ll leave you with two pictures from my iPhone– the humor is all-the-more funny now that everyone is getting to know one another.

    November 6th – I wore this to work to lighten the mood. The previous day we had been told to dress appropriately when YouthWorks came to town and to make a good first impression. This is about as opposite of YS attire as I could get. Is that enough Bibles? I love the Bibles.
    November 23rd – The YouthWorks recruiting team hung this sign on the bulletin board next to convention headquarters in Atlanta. We were all glad they were hiring for something!

  • Can Yelp Save the Mom and Pop Shop?

    I love mom and pop shops. I can’t quite put my finger for when this affinity began, but I prefer an owner operated business over a chain any day of the week.

    We all know that corporate America has slowly destroyed these small businesses.     One by one, we preferred Home Depot over our local Ace Hardware to the point that franchisees had to give in. The same goes for restaurants, music stores, grocery stores… the list goes on and on.

    The paradox is that the more prevalent big box shops get the more a certain portion of the population longs for the uniqueness and quirkiness of the little guy.

    This is where Yelp is saving the day. Yelp is people powered reviews of local businesses. Users rate all kinds of services within a community– they cut past the marketing and give you the straight skinny. I’ve used Yelp to chose places to eat, doctors, furniture stores, hotels, and even parks!

    Here’s the fun part. I’ve learned that when you give a fair and honest review of a place you often get an incredible response from the owner. The shareholders of Home Depot never wrote me to thank me for spending money there. Nor have I ever received a follow-up note from Chili’s.

    Here’s one I got from the place we bought our bed:

    Thank you so much for your outstanding review!! My wife and I are responsible for many lives who depend on the success of our business and the only way to make it these days is by providing proper service. I want you to know that your review means a great deal to all of us.
    So once again, from me, my wife and the whole crew, we thank you for your business and great review. It was a pleasure doing business with you and we look forward to serving you again in the near future. See you soon.

    It’s good to know that when I spent my money at that place, they not only noticed, but appreciated the connection between my choosing their establishment and their paying their staff. Again, not something you see at a corporate joint.

    Of course, Yelp has an iPhone app. Kristen and I have literally been exploring a city, standing in front of a place reading reviews, and deciding whether or not to eat at a place based on reviews posted that day.

    Here’s my request. If you value small businesses. If you love all things unique and quirky where you live. Please use Yelp. Joining the site is free. And posting reviews and ratings can take just a couple of minutes but help others out a ton. Even if you don’t travel much, just rating the places you like will help your favorite places find more customers. Be kind to the places you like and brutally honest to the places you don’t like.

    This one small act can make a huge difference for some small businesses. Just one additional customer per day is a big deal.

    Of course, feel free to add me as a friend on Yelp so you won’t Yelp alone.