Stumbling Upon Star Wars

I wish I could say every cool experience in my life was a result of good planning. But most of the things I experience are a result of fortunate proximity at the right time. My family was on a vacation to England. That was a cool experience in and of itself. But after leaving a…

White Kids and Hip Hop Dances

I was a scrawny white kid. Not much has changed since childhood. But I was never whiter or scrawnier than when I went to my first rap concert. At the age of ten I was intrigued by hip hop culture. I thought the relationship between swagger and the bagginess of my clothes was directly related.…

Finding Your Rhythm

Echo Conference went phenomenally. There are things we’re tweaking for next year. We have a list of ways we can improve. But it truly went well. It was a very different experience, working behind the scenes. I got to experience so very little of the conference. And I had short bits of time where I…

See You on the Other Side

Today starts my busy week. If you work in a church, you might compare this to your Easter or Christmas week/month. I’m about to learn a lot of lessons really fast. I’ll try to keep them catalogued so I can share them here. And I’ll see you on the other side of this week.

Planning Awesome Things

I got an email a few days ago with this question: We are starting the process of “reinventing” creative planning for our programming team. We just get too far behind to make ideas fully come to fruition. Do you have a suggestion to help us with our creative planning process? It’s a great question. Working…

Good News Morning

There’s one thing that most frequently ruins my day. It’s checking my email first thing in the morning. I know I shouldn’t do it. But to me, my inbox is a bucket full of possibilities. I get so excited with each new “ding”…hoping for great new horizons to unfold before me. Unfortunately, when I get…

I’m Easily Excitable

I’m the opposite of cool. Cool people aren’t supposed to get excited. And, I – I’m very easily excitable. My wife laughs about it. Because she knows me so well, she knows how excited I get. And she’s quick to point it out. “You think that guy’s cool, don’t you?” That’s what she asks me when…

My Injured Shoulder/Pride

It was 3am. The pain in my left shoulder was finally reaching intolerable levels. I tapped on my wife’s shoulder, trying to gently pull her from sleep. “Help me.” She tried massage. We tried Advil. We tried a sleeping pill. Finally we decided on the Emergency Room. She drove me there. We signed in. We…