Last weekend, I wrote out my goals for the summer.  They are pretty extensive, some are doable, others may not happen.  However, I don’t really make a list of which ones are easier to accomplish vs others because, as I have learned, some of the biggest projects can be the easiest to do.  I mean, let’s be real, how hard is it to create three big events within a year?

Some other thoughts going on:

• The culture war is really the only hope President Obama has on winning.  He is putting a lot of capital in his support for gay marriage and women’s rights.  While there is momentum for that, social causes tend to take a backseat to unemployment.  It’s difficult to hold a wedding when you don’t have a job.  (Of course, I was the one who said Obama had no chance at winning the presidency to begin with so take my opinion for what its worth)
• The gay marriage issue is certainly bringing out the good, the bad and the ugly in people.  I should probably write a post on this to expand my thoughts because my personal opinion is I believe marriage being tied to the legal system and churches acting as a conduit on their behalf is wrong.  So with that said, I really do not care if it is legalized but I believe with that, there would have to be a sharp separation of church & state in the meantime.  Obviously that statement has a lot more behind it so don’t shout me down yet!
• I am a bleeding, social justice liberal in regards to the workplace.  There is definitely a disparity economically from the top to the bottom in workplace salaries, how employees are treated, etc.  It is really discouraging to be at the bottom and seeing the vast difference to the top.  Wouldn’t that be a fun movement to start? Changing workers rights in the workplace without selling our souls to unions.
• On the other hand, I work at a great place (not just saying that).  But I definitely want to move up.  That tension of loving where you work vs. knowing there is really no way to move up within that department creates an analytical nightmare because the grass is definitely not always greener at the next place.  So before taking that step, you definitely have to put out your pros and cons.
• I am reading Dan Portnoy’s new book The Non-Profit Narrative: How Telling Stories Can Change The World, this is a phenomenal book and if you work for a non-profit or run one, you should get this book.  I really believe it will refresh or encourage your vision.  It really is helping spur on my own visions I would like to accomplish this summer.

I was jealous that I couldn’t afford to buy Facebook stock.  Key word: Was.   Who knows, at the rate things are going, I might be able to get a great deal and pay off my student loans.

So there you have it, another installment of random thoughts.  Comment if you want.

This isn’t a dinner topic or something I bring up openly because when I have it consistently follows with an accusation:

• you’re whining
• you’re angry
• you’re not praying enough
• you’re not worshiping enough
• you’re not serving enough
• you’re not (fill in the blank)

The process of anger and expectations unfulfilled is interesting.  What I expected to happen hasn’t.  What I no longer wanted to struggle with has increased.  Where I thought I would be in life at this point is a joke.

So I’m angry (yes, I am; people accused correctly).

Those emotions do not fit in today’s Christianity.  In a world full of love and grace, there is no room for anger.  People do not know how to handle that emotion when you tell them, “I’m angry with God but we’re working on it.”  They look at you like you’re crazy and slowly step away.

Don’t want to be a buzzkill I guess. 

But thankfully I am not crazy.  Jonah was a pretty angry guy too.  Never wanted to fully embrace the call God placed on his life; never understood why God didn’t do what He initially said He would do; and so he was pissed.

The question I am working through right now is in Jonah 4:4 when the Lord asks Jonah, “do you have any good reason to be angry?“

At this point, I haven’t worked from responding “YES!”

But the beauty of that portion of scripture is the honest dialogue the Lord was willing to have with Jonah and Jonah’s ability to respond back honestly.  We miss the opportunities to have a pure, honest relationship with God because we are attempting to create a Hollywood, politically correct idea of what a Christian personal relationship with Jesus should look like.

I guess I have never wanted an Emmy award from God to perform in front of Him.  So, He gets to see a lot of good, bad and ugly right now and we get to have some pretty intense conversations in the meantime.  But in the end, I love that and I love Him more for it, even if I am currently very angry at Him.

I am not really into the feel-good crap.  If there isn’t any substance to give people, then why even hold the event to begin with?

So here are some ideas that I am working on:

1. Create a TEDxND event for the campus.  Summer’s are great to connect with people who are able to at least think outside of the daily grind of school.  The TED events have truly reopened the door to think big or from a different angle.  The structure to these events allows for concise, well-defined ideas to be communicated vs the everyday bloviation that tends to be part of vision casting.
2. Do a one day summit to pull in Christian thinkers to elevate the dialogue among young adults.  I did this with the Infuse conference a few years back but I really want to get young adults in the room with some of the best thinkers out there.  This could really be a regional thing, pulling from all the colleges and universities in a three hour radius from us.  I believe we don’t think enough and even when we do, we don’t talk it out enough.
3. Plan a getaway for the rest of us.  Conferences tend to be focused on the big stage thinkers.  What about people who simply are going to live normal, everyday lives?  If Malcolm Gladwell’s “broken-window” theory is correct, the windows will be repaired by the people who are present in those situations everyday.  Not the ‘flash in the pan’ person that shows up for a couple of hours to stir everyone in a frenzy.  I think if people could gather to talk about how to simply impact in their present place of reality, it could really change a lot of communities.

So those are the big ideas that I am sketching out on my own and with some other people.  It would be great if all of you participated.  I think they each could be worth the time.  Thoughts?

That alone would make many curl up in the fetal position and slide into a corner.  I just get pissed off.

However, thank God for a mom.  Moms know you the best.  They can hear your complaints, whining, issues or whatever and know how to empathize, sympathize and compare stories.  So even though it was Mother’s Day, I certainly celebrated what my mom does best, help deal with my crap.  That alone I can be thankful for.

Beyond that, many other things going on in the world around us.  Here are some random thoughts regarding that:

• The lack of critical thinking in regards to politics in this country has created subpar leadership.  Starting with Bush’s wooing of naive Evangelicals to Obama’s pathetic support of gay marriage; there will be a lot of people taken for a ride on election day for their votes and will leave empty handed four years later.  Evangelicals learned this after eight years, maybe other ideological communities will learn it sooner.
• Michael Horton takes a look at ‘Muscular Christianity‘.  He doesn’t say this but I will, I think that Mark Driscoll is a prime example of a Christian bully in terms of his views of what males should be and how they should act.  I have seen how some males have taken his philosophies to the point that if you don’t act “manly” enough they do not even respect you.  Maybe someday, if I write a book, I will share how devastating this has been to me personally since fifth grade and how the effects of verbal bullying has created a great deal of struggle for me to this day.
• I want to move to another country.  Why not?
• Summer is here and the people I went to church every week with are now gone.  This makes it even more difficult for me to go to church.  Sunday service is so low on my overall priority list that it takes a great deal of effort for me to go on my own.  Let’s see how it goes.
• A person recently said that he could tell I have been burned by the church.  Meh, I am just tired of the same old crap and really have no energy to want something different so I am looking for other ways to impact.  I would suggest that some of this may be cyclical but I am certainly not unique to this issue.  The growing number of young adults who feel the same way as me is growing and could be the next movement throughout the overall American church.

So there you have it.  Just some thoughts that have been on my mind as of late.

The reality is: your life shared in the raw form is not something everyone needs a front row seat to.

From blogs about complete anxiety breakdowns to when you get up to urinate at night. I simply do not feel that my additions to this world should be about coming off like a crazy person in need of deep cleansing counseling. 

I also think it provides the opportunity to really exaggerate your narrative. Instead of just sharing your simple struggle, it now seems like embellishing, simply so people will either provide a response or simply fill the need for our insecurities to be stroked.

After spending a weekend with friends, I found comfort in delving into my own personal insecurities and walking away refreshed, feeling the pressure released from one honest talk.  Through a medium like this, it creates drama and a good read but no resolution.

Sometimes recognizing what a blog is for is simply good to help use this tool to its fullest extent while not creating a perception that I need to be in a straight jacket.

“It is an honor and privilege to be the head coach at the University of Tennessee.” ~ Pat Summitt

We forget within success, position or the moments of life that it is indeed a privilege to be in any point of time.  True leaders recognize that, poor leaders think they were entitled to it.

• Return to Mt. Pleasant this weekend to see some friends and also have some difficult conversations. Both have to be fully embraced for what they are.
• Planning a “gathering for the rest of us”.  Events, conferences and whatever tend to be for people who want to be big time outside of the normal hum-drum of life.  What about everyone else who simply are called to impact within the everyday grind?  I think the more people who are content with that, the greater the groundswell.  My personal target is to do this in the Summer of 2013.  More details to come.
• Inspired by Justin Wise’s ebook (need to sign-up for his newsletter which is totally worth it) on Social Media that I may try to write my own book and publish it online.  What should the topic be about though? (share in the comments)
• Reading Alice in Wonderland right now.  Great book and it reminds you to now take life so seriously.  Really have enjoyed reading the classics.
• Speaking of reading, if I did not buy my Kindle over a year ago, I wouldn’t have read as much as I have now.  With the amount of free books available, it is like having a personal library at the click of a button.  Get past the idea that it wouldn’t be the same experience as a book cause I got over it after the first electronic page turn.
• I mentor three guys at ND.  Each different but rocks it out in a different way.  I am a better person because of them being in my life.  If you haven’t thought about mentoring, pray about it, it is impacting for them and you.  So proud of each one of them.

Thanks for reading through my thoughts.

Passion is an overused word but highly undervalued in our everyday lives.  Overall, it would be difficult to look at the past ten years of my life and say that I have accomplished much in any of the jobs I have been employed in.  I did a little of this, a little of that but in reality it is nothing more than what another person could have done.  Summitt on the other hand is literally irreplaceable.

In today’s society we work because we need money to pay bills, buy toys and hopefully find enjoyment or put it away for retirement.  Passion has little to do with it.  It is about the bottom line, getting the project done and moving onto the next thing that has a temporary result of benefit or gratification.

Turning this to the spiritual, considering my personal desire to finally burst out the administrative bubble and move into something that is more visionary or creative.  I sometimes wonder if this is a schooling of humility and that God is attempting to crush me so I can do the passionate, visionary and creative thing.  You sometimes figure that after a lot of hard work, a lot of attempts to do the right thing at the right time that it would pay off and then you also have to say what I say all the time, “Life isn’t fair!”

I do feel like Peter many times in John 21:20-22, ‘Peter, turning around, saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; the one who also had leaned back on His bosom at the supper and said, “Lord, who is the one who betrays You?” So Peter seeing him said to Jesus, “Lord, and what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If I want him to remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow Me!”’

It would be an Olympic effort to tell you how many people I have seen and asked, “Lord, and what about this man?”  When I feel that response, “What is that to you? You follow Me!”  I want to yell, “I am, I am but give me even a scrap so I can do these major, awesome, passionate thing that I have in my heart.”

That doesn’t mean I am unhappy or ungrateful with my job because people can read into the inner emotions that I choose to share openly and come up with a lot of crazy things from that.  I think it is just a real piece of me and a reality that I deal with and choose to share through this veiled medium.

Summer is coming and I really have to figure out what I want to do with my life.  Is it graduate school, is it looking for that perfect fit job or what?  The thing is, I want to go into whatever it is that is going to pay my bills fully passionate, fully involved and ready to elevate it.  I just need to figure out what the heck that is.  Am I the only one feeling these things or is everyone just happy with where they are at?

When I retire I don’t want it to be from a position that really made little impact in the greater scheme of things, I want it to be somewhat irreplaceable.  Call it arrogant, call it what you want but I would hope that I could do it with an ounce of the grace that Summitt showed in her exit this past week.

Over the past eleven years, I have followed Summitt, the University of Tennessee program and have taken on many of the things she stood for.  In a time when I could not figure out how to deal with my own personality that errs on challenge first, hug later; I needed to find someone to look up to and learn from.

The stare, shout, determination and expectations were all things that Summitt encapsulates unapologetically while creating an undercurrent of love, trust, commitment and fortitude that only comes when you buy into the system.  She had vision to do whatever it took to expand a sport few cared about to one of the top marquee women sports in America.  It simply wasn’t about her and she proved that time and again.

Her example influenced who I am today.  Who I am as a person, a mentor and a friend.

Even though I have never met Summitt (it is still a bucket list item), I feel like I have been coached by her externally.  In turn, that has affected many others who have dealt with my intensity in life choices or overall expectation that you will elevate and reach your goals.  There are few people I can point to and say that I am the way I am today and Pat Summitt is one of them.

I do grieve because Summitt isn’t going out on her own, she is going out because her mind is failing her.  It is an unfair part of life to see people we adore and respect leave their best days ahead because of sickness.  But even in the moment of her greatest trial, she embraced and ran with it, making this one of the most impacting years of her life and also giving thousands a chance to yell out “thank you, Pat!”

Thanks Pat for impacting me and I hope we get to meet someday.

• I had the privilege to support the “Fight Leukemia” Trivia Night the ND softball team puts on.  The place was packed out with a ton of the ND workforce and community members.  It really shows how cross-supportive the university is towards others programs and causes.  By the end of the night they had already raised more than the previous year, so Go Irish for a great cause!
• The reminder that I am not in Michigan anymore always comes clear when thunder wakes me from a dead sleep at 6:30am on a Saturday.  Blurgh!  The storms in Indiana definitely take time to get used to.
• Not to be late to the party but I didn’t know the David Crowder Band had officially broken up…sigh.  However, their last album “Give Us Rest or (A Requiem Mass in C [The Happiest of All Keys])” is pure genius.  Quite possibly one of the best albums I have heard since Misty Edwards “Fling Wide.”
• What is there to pray about 100 years later with the Titanic?  How does that hold any priority in anybody’s life right now?  Just wondering.
• Thank you Bill Cosby for continually being a voice of reason in the midst of ignorance and chaos.
• I am starting to like it here more. Starting to feel like I could really lay down some roots.  Pray that a change will come to help keep me here for the long term.  I feel like something big could happen here.
• Have a national vision churning in me with another friend of mine, that is hopefully going to come together by 2013 or 2014.  I hope you will participate when it all comes together.

Good stuff.