i started this blog in march of 2009. it’s now four years later and most of the people reading now had no clue i even existed in 2009. on fridays, from now until i run out of posts, i’m going to be reposting some of my favorite posts from when i started writing until i got to knoxville in 2010. it’s my story of growing up. hopefully you enjoy it. originally posted april 15, 2009 so have you ever had that moment in church where it’s like a tv show and everything around you disappears and it’s just you and god? that happened to me tonight and now i’m going to tell you about it. most people reading this know the story of me and my ex and how it ended and all of that good stuff. i’ve written over and over about the process of getting over it, letting…

i started this blog in march of 2009. it’s now four years later and most of the people reading now had no clue i even existed in 2009. on fridays, from now until i run out of posts, i’m going to be reposting some of my favorite posts from when i started writing until i got to knoxville in 2010. it’s my story of growing up. hopefully you enjoy it. (originally posted march 23, 2008) “I’m becoming such a church nerd. It’s really weird.” I said that to Megan tonight. It’s the truth really. For years, I ran away from this idea of going into ministry. I wanted nothing to do with it. I told God I’d go to church and serve and that stuff, but I wanted to work in sports, or I wanted to work in real estate, or I wanted to work pretty much anywhere other than…

if you told me two years ago that i’d be in charge of stage designs and that it would be something that i love to do, i would’ve told you that you were crazy. set designs are a talent that i stumbled upon about a year ago and have been addicted to ever since. a few months ago, right after new year’s was over, i gathered my team together and we started the process of tearing down our christmas set and putting together our new set. we went to the hardware store, bought the materials we needed, and started working on the design. this was tuesday morning. going into the process, we knew that we would have to have some sort of stage ready for our wednesday night service. it didn’t have to be finished, but it needed to at least look presentable. on wednesday afternoon, we were having a…

my current job consists of creating graphics, making videos, producing services, and many other creative and technical things like that. if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you knew that. what you may not have known is that i have a bachelor’s degree in sport management with a minor in coaching. yep, a minor in coaching. no, that’s not a joke. yes, there were real classes. no, i’m not making that up. coaching is one of those fields that is littered with catch phrases and mottos. you could google any successful coach and you would likely find a list of the phrases or sayings that he always used for his teams. when i was in high school, our baseball team’s motto was always, “good is the enemy of best.” we also used “if you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse” quite a bit. in college, when i started…

if you polled 100 people family feud style and asked them, “what’s the hardest thing in a church service to pull off well?” i’d be willing to bed that the answer would be something like this: preaching – 47 leading the band – 21 nursery – 16 usher – 9 parking – 5 guy who unlocks the doors in the morning – 2 (and that’s just him and his wife) i’m here to tell you about something that’s even harder to pull off than those things: announcements. giving announcements in church is a lot like trying the be the guy that tells the rules of splash mountain at disney: you feel like you have important things to say. someone trusted you to make the events of the church sound interesting. there’s pressure to be short because the pastor wants to preach and extra ten minutes and the worship dude wants…

for the last two years, i’ve had the incredible privilege of leading a group of high school guys as one of their small group leaders. this weekend they’re all graduating and moving on to bigger and better things. i’ve spent two years trying to help them not make the mistakes i made, hoping that they understood what this whole following jesus thing was about, and talking about sex. a lot. no, really. in case you didn’t know, 17-year-old dudes really like talking about sex. a few weeks ago i had my last official small group with them. that night we spent about 30-45 minutes looking at a passage of scripture talking about prideful people vs humble people. i think it was somewhere in one of the letters to timothy but i really don’t remember. as our guys were going back and forth, talking about what a humble person looked like,…

when i was a senior in high school, i wrote an e-mail to my school’s marching band director telling him all about how i thought our show for that year sucked and how i thought we should improve on it. (for the record: yes, i just admitted to being in the marching band. yes, i admitted to caring enough to send an e-mail. no, i’m not embarrassed by that.) in the e-mail i wrote about how we were doing things that were boring, how if he would listen to me we would be doing better, and how, in essence, i thought i knew better than he did. i was 16. i was cocky. i was a jerk. the day after he received my e-mail, he pulled me out of the lobby before school started, took me to his office, ripped me a new one and threatened to kick me out…

a few years ago i had a little thing that i did on here called “why not? wednesday.” i would write about things that might be a little embarrassing or personal but that i figured, “why not share them?” they were always things that i figured other people had thought at one point or another and, since no one else was talking about them, i figured i would. why not? today is one of those posts. what i’m going to say may make you think i’m a terrible person. it often times makes me think i’m a terrible person. i completely understand if your opinion of me changes after reading this post, but i figured it was worth sharing. i love god. i don’t love others well. this is something i figured out a couple of years ago. my first two years out of seminary were spent working as an…

about a week ago, i read a tweet from a friend that i thought was funny. i wanted to respond to it, but i knew that my response was one that could offend people, so instead of doing a normal reply, i went to send them a direct message. i clicked on the menu button to send the direct message, but imagine my surprise when i saw that the direct message button was grayed out. there was only one way that this could happen: the friend didn’t follow me back. do me a favor and read that last line again and then gasp. it’ll make it more fun and make me feel better about my story. my friend that i followed had made a decision at some point in time to unfollow me. there was a point in his life where he decided that my tweets weren’t worth the .00043…