Franks told us that he flunked out of school at UT in 1967. He then realized that he had two options: either wait to be drafted and go to Vietnam or enlist in the Army. Before he left for boot camp his father shared something with him; that he needed to be feisty. Then he shared this acronym:

• F – focus. Focus on what is important and STAY focused.
• E – energy. Bring every bit of energy that you possibly can to every situation.
• I – integrity. Your most important possession. Never compromise it.
• S – solve the problem. Don’t argue or make excuses. Solve the problem and get on with it.
• T – take the blame. Take it when no one else will. Accept responsibility. Be accountable.
• Y – Yes, I do windows. Never say, “That’s not my job.” Do whatever the boss asks you to do with enthusiasm.

I was recently reminded of this talk by Mac Richard which made me go and re-read my notes. For some reason, the second time it STUCK.

God, help me to remain feisty.

• PUMPED about tomorrow morning! Our second service ever!
• PUMPED about meeting new people and making connections!
• PUMPED about sharing how we can experience a Relationship Revolution!
• PRAYING MY GUTS OUT for our team, our church, and our community this weekend.
• NOT PUMPED that we accidentally chose the weekend of a huge air show on base for our second preview.
• NOT PUMPED about nothing else…double negative…but ask me tomorrow night.

When I served as the Executive Pastor at The Connection Church in Kyle, I worked my tail off. I did things that caused stress, made mistakes, and dealt with every kind of issue you could name.

And because of that, I thought I understood my lead Pastors job pretty well.

WRONGO.

Staff and team members, as a fresh pastor just out of a staff role let me say this: you might think you get it but you just don’t. Trust me.

Your lead pastor experiences stress, emotional struggles, fear, worry, doubt, and a bucket full of other things like nobody else on staff. Its a WHOLE NUTHA LEVEL of nasty, no matter how put together he looks each day at the office.

You can’t possibly understand it. Some of you reading this are getting mad. That’s fine. I don’t expect you to get it. But if you ever become the lead pastor of a church…you will.

Here is something you can do: PRAY. Pray your stinking guts out for your pastor. Pray for his marriage, his kids, his stress levels, his worry, his doubt, his fear, his relationship with Christ, and his leadership.

Then, ask God what you can do to help your pastor the most and go for it.

THAT will build a great church.

(Cole, if you are reading this, I understand now. Love you bro.)

But when I flipped it over I literally almost threw up all over the place. It had the wrong date on it. I immediately retraced my steps through email, etc and found out exactly what I initially thought – that this was 100% my fault.

When you plant a church you have 10,000 times the info that any one person SHOULD  HAVE swimming around in your head. Dates, names, places, times, meetings, orders, prices, and more. And sometimes it gets all jumbled no matter how organized you are.

I barely slept last night because of the stress from my mistake. How could we fix it? The worst option was a sharpie marker, the one we landed on was printing 20,000 labels and sticking them over the mistake and the best was a reprint. But we couldn’t pay for the mailer the first time…how could we ever do a reprint?

At about 2am, I prayed a simple prayer…it went something like this: “God please work a miracle so that we can REPRINT this mailer.”

When I got up this morning a friend called with a $200 donation towards reprinting the mailer. A little later, another $100 was given. Then, the vice president of PrintPlace.com called me. He wanted to help, even though this was 100% our mistake.

He made an unbelievably GENEROUS offer. This was the GOD miracle.

God can do anything you know? Far more than we ever imagined or dreamed.

By the way, I have been using printplace.com for over 5 years now to print everything including custom booklets, business cards, direct mail pieces, rack cards, and postcards. They always have the most competitive pricing and turnaround time. Nobody beats them. I would have recommended them to you years before this week.

Order your next piece from them!

Here’s what I’m thinking:

• Please shoot me in the face. We just got our Dec. 6th mailer. Its the BEST looking mailer I’ve EVER seen…except for that it says Nov. 8th.
• How many times can I choke back the puke in my mouth after seeing the mailer with the wrong date?
• Did I fail as a Dad this week? Was I a loving, attentive husband?
• How can I get everything done this week? What things on the list do I have to decide to kill?
• How can I build our team more effectively so I am not always in scramble mode?
• Did we connect with all of the people we could over the last month?
• Have we really prayed our guts out?
• I wonder if pepto will take away that sick feeling I’ve had in my stomach for a week…
• Do we have enough chairs?
• It would be sweet if we DID NOT have enough chairs…
• Church planting is harder than I thought it would be. I knew it was hard…but sheesh!
• Church planting is more fun that I thought it would be.