the main character in the perks of being a wallflower, charlie, is a kid who is a freshman in high school. imdb describes him as “a high school freshman from western pennsylvania that is suffering through the aftermath of his best friend’s suicide and the death of his beloved aunt helen, all while being a ‘wallflower.’” in one of the final scenes of the movie, there’s a voiceover of charlie writing one last letter. most people remember the famous line at the end of this quote that says, “in this moment i swear, we are infinite.” that line has been tweeted by high school students all over the country as they read the book or watched the movie. there’s something earlier in that letter that stuck out to me though. charlie writes: i just want you to know that i was in a bad place before i started high school…

if you ever get the chance to watch the perks of being a wallflower at 3am on a cross country redeye flight: don’t. let me explain. about a month ago i had the opportunity to go to california with our church leadership to study and learn from another church. it was an amazing trip and we really did learn a lot. with that being said, it completely fried our brains. we asked so many questions and heard so many new things that by the time we got to dinner on the third night, we were walking zombies giggling at stupid jokes. after spending our final day relaxing and visiting some famous landmarks, we made our way to the airport for our flight home. our flight left at 10:30pm california time. 10:30pm california time is also known as 1:30am tennessee time. i had been asleep by 9:30 california time every night…

earlier this week i got a text from a friend that said, “mcdee’s has $2 wraps today. wanna go?” i’m fat. it’s mcdonald’s. of course i want to go. we ended up sitting outside of mcdonald’s for over an hour talking and catching up, throwing out ministry ideas, asking questions, and really just hanging out. at one point, we got on the subject of writing and me having a blog. after talking about the concept of writing and why i do it, he asked me a question that on the surface was pretty simple, but was really packed with what i think many of us struggle with. he asked me if i ever worried that what i was writing wasn’t good enough, or that people would think that i’m wrong, or that they’d see me as not smart enough. my answer to that was pretty simple because it’s a question…

one of my heroes right now is kid president. i’m not even joking. i, like many of you, discovered kid president through his pep talk video. since that video i’ve watched pretty much every video he’s ever done and i can fully admit i’m obsessed. when the pep talk video came out, i watched it four or five times in the same day. i probably watched it ten times within the first couple of days it was released. it completely wrecked me. i know it’s crazy to think that a video of a nine year old messed me up, but it really did. maybe it was because of where i was at the time, or maybe it was god stirring something up in me, but there were some one-liners that reached off of my computer screen and slapped me in the face. lines like: boring is easy. everybody can be…

i observe things in different ways than most people. i took a class during my first semester in college that was basically the equivalent of a creative writing course. the simple fact that i have a blog that i write things on should key you in to the fact that i kind of sort of like to write. one of the first assignments we had in that class was to take thirty minutes andgo to anywhere on campus, observe something, and then write about it. when we came back to class, the professor asked us what we wrote about. most of the people in the class, being typical freshmen, tried to get overly artistic and wrote about the leaves on the trees or some cheesy nonsense like that. i went to a parking lot right next to the main road and watched cars drive by for 15 minutes. then i…

a few weeks ago, while scrolling through twitter, there was one tweet that caught my attention more than any other. it was actually a retweet of some celebrity christian. i’m not sure which one it was. they’re all the same really. random jesus thoughts and leadership quotes. there’s a reason there’s a billion fake accounts saying the same thing over and over each day. and there’s a reason half of the people i follow retweet them over and over each day. that’s not the point of this post though. that retweet on that day from that celebrity christian said something along the lines of, “taking a day off is written right next to don’t kill anybody.” for some reason, that quote stuck with me. it could’ve been because i was in the middle of a marathon month and a half at work. it could’ve been because i can become a…

Today is the first day of series that I’m writing mainly for myself but hoping you’ll come along for the ride. It’s all based off of two words that Jesus said that have rocked me over the past year or so: take heart. It’s the Greek word tharseo and it means to be of good courage, be of good cheer. Jesus gives us a few specific things that we can put our faith in or that can bring us courage. Each one of them is so simple yet we rarely ever think of it. If we did, our lives would be totally different. But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.” – Matthew 14:26 I really could probably just stop with that. There. Done. Bye. This verse takes place in the scene where the disciples are out in a boat without Jesus…

For the four years that I’ve had this blog, I’ve really tried to stay away from turning it into yet another blog about the Bible with daily devotionals and all of that. There are already a billion of those out there and most are better than mine would ever be. I think I’ve used Scripture on here maybe three times. It’s just not what I wanted this blog to be. Over the past couple of weeks there has been this thought in my head that I’ve wanted to delve into and explore. It started out last spring as a teaching series that I would love to see done in a church. I started thinking about writing through it last month and haven’t really been able to get it out of my head. Then, while praying for someone this past weekend at a prayer/worship event at our church called Quiet Waters,…

Yesterday a friend of mine posted a link to a website that analyzes your Facebook data and spits out a ton of data about it. As a stat geek, along with a social media geek, I clicked on it and ran my Facebook posting through it. Here’s the small graphic of what it spit out: Almost half of my posts on Facebook (which include my tweets) are about social media or Christianity. If I would’ve run this four years ago, sports, music, and education would’ve been at the top of the list. Those things all consumed my life. Christianity wasn’t that important to me during that time. What you talk about on social media really says a lot about what you care about in life. I used to get annoyed at people who tweeted Bible verses or talked about God. Granted, I still get annoyed when people do that to…