This blog post is at least a month old. The idea of it has been rattling around in my head for that long and I finally decided to sit down and let it spill out. One weekend in late April early May, I was working in my yard trying to rid it of all the infestation of dandelion's. I was using a new tool that I purchased at Home Depot called the Weed Hound.
In addition to this tool, we for the first time, hired a company to come and spray our lawn so that it might be healthier. One afternoon while I was outside weed hounding, my daughter came outside and wanted to ride her bike, she needed me to walk alongside her for when she gets stuck and needs an extra push. So, I put the "weed hound" down and walked with her. She rode to the neighbor's house got off her bike and walked to their yard and started to collect as many "pretty yellow flowers" that her little hands could hold. She brought her treasure inside so that they could be placed in a vase. Here the thing that I had spent lots of time and money to remove from my yard was the very thing that brought my daughter joy.
A few days after the story mentioned above, my wife joined in the neighborhood garage sale to sell most of our boy clothes that we had kept over the years. When our son was born he was the only grandson on both sides of our family and the result was he had warehouses full of clothes and toys. My wife and mother spent several hours going through these items to prepare them for this sale. Beyond the baby clothes, we are stumped by how we continually collect so much stuff! This is our third garage sale in three years. You would think that we would run out. My wife was aggressive in advertising on Craigs List what was available for the sale. As the sale was about to begin, there were several cars waiting for us to open our garage and haul our junk out for them to rifle through. I gratefully had kid duty for the sale. This means that I need to keep the kids occupied inside of our house, while mom sells our stuff in the garage. I was amazed at the steady flow of people coming to purchase the stuff that we could do without.
And finally, our student ministries team a few weeks ago tackled the daunting task of thoroughly cleaning out our storage area. We did the take everything out and put it all back in. It took us the better part of two days and almost half a dumpster to contain all of the items that we threw away. As I was going through this stuff and throwing most of it away, I couldn't help but think of all of the student ministry pastors who preceded me at Grace Church. The stuff that I saw as trash or worthless at one time was an item that leader thought: "Hey, we might want to keep that we might use it again" And one day someone will be tossing all of the stuff that I am holding onto.
The moral of the three stories is painfully obvious.
I used a couple of sites to come up with the above image describing what I Twitter about the most.
Interesting.
The thing that I will remember the most from this event was the opportunity to meet one of my heroes, Tony Dungy. Tony was the keynote speaker and spoke for about 15 minutes on his new venture from being a prolific NFL coach to building into the lives of young men who don't have fathers and are on a life trajectory towards pain to themselves and others. Tony has always been someone I've respected as I and many others have watched him take his national platform as a NFL (Superbowl winning) coach as a way to influence others with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is evident in how he carries himself and how he communicates where he get's his strength and wisdom. He definitely strikes me as a man of character who lives his faith out loud. As a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan, I see a lot of the turnaround from the Buc's of old to the Buc's of today came from Tony's leadership in the organization. I am grateful for the privilege to be able to meet Tony and will always be a fan of what he is doing to further the Kingdom.
I am taking a week of vacation this week to spend some quality time with my family. Our kids are on spring break so we are all literally spending the entire week together. We have a bunch of fun outings planned all at a low price thanks to my thrifty wife. Anyways, one of the things that I am looking forward to is breaking out a Wii game that my son is going to go crazy over. If you've ever had any sort of conversation with our son, you would know quickly that he REALLY enjoys Lego's, Star Wars and playing the Wii. So later this week, this will be played:
The highlight of my last week was getting two enormous whiteboards for my office. I have been in this office for a year and a half and I have been contemplating buying a large whiteboard for the past year. Last week I was getting to know a new staff member in their office and they said, "look at these great whiteboards that were hung in my office, I found out that there are a bunch of these in storage downstairs". After hearing this, I did not pass go, I did not collect $200, I called dibs on two whiteboards for my office.
While I haven't quite used them yet, I am excited to be able to organize thoughts, create lists, and create an "idea queue's" instead of having a number of post-its and legal pads with random lists and thoughts strewn all over my office. So you might say that having a whiteboard is a step in going "green". Maybe I should call it my "greenboard"?
Here are the whiteboards themselves!:
One great benefit to whiteboards is the artwork that your kids can leave!
