Kyle's Random

I’ve been wanting to post something about my game of disc golf with Josh last week, but I’ve been at a bit of a loss of how to put the range of emotions into words.  It was Josh’s first time to ever play and my first time to play in Tennessee.  Though it was small, the course was very well kept.  And like always, there was great joy in being outdoors and walking the course with a close friend.

Outside of that, there were a couple of things that made our game interesting.  First of all (and I’ll leave out the details), I was hit with a sudden upset stomach and barely made it to a port-o-potty before it was too late (never thought I’d ever be so happy to see one of those).  Also, when we got back to the car, Josh realized that his Blackberry Storm was missing.  These are the photos of where we found it after searching in the trees in a couple of places.

This is powerful:

Over the past couple of years, I’ve faced some painful failures.  I poured my heart into a ministry, and I watched it crumble before my eyes.  Despite my best efforts, things did not go as hoped.  People (including myself) walked away disappointed.  And in the end, I really began to question a lot of things.

God, am I just in the way of your ministry?  Do you really have a plan for me?

Through the brokenness, I began to discover that there is a God who delights in our weakness.  He is quite comfortable with us coming to the end of ourselves and facing our fears.

But this time, when I looked at my failure, I realized there was something on the other side.  Failure is a doorway to greater things.

Seth Godin, in his book Tribes, puts it this way, “[They] have actively talked themselves out of the fear.  I mean, the fear is still there, but it’s drowned out by a different story….  The only thing holding you back is your own fear.”

God is teaching me this lesson in a dozen ways at the same time, but especially  through the great leaders around me at Faith Promise.  From what I can tell, I’m beginning to make some solid progress.  I’m turning over a new leaf.  I’m ready to fail, because I realize that failure is a part of making progress.

I put together this design for our marketing campaign for our one-service Easter celebration at the Knoxville coliseum.  We already had a great design for our invite cards, but we needed something a little bit edgier and attention grabbing for advertising to the college and downtown audience. As I was thinking through what we could say that would stand out, I decided that it would be interesting to juxtapose two of the most bold statements that have ever been uttered by human lips.

The first is from Nietzsche’s work called The Madman.  In it he uses these words ( “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”) to say that humanity can no longer justify belief in the existence of  God.  In his opinion, belief in God is intellectually reprehensible.

The second statement is one of many places in Scripture where Jesus asserts his divinity.  He also claims to be the exclusive door to eternal life.

It’s amazing to see these two statements side by side, and I hope that it will compel people to either seek the truth or live out what they believe.

This is pretty bizarre.  I guess it might be nice when you wake up in the morning on a cold camping trip, but I know I would laugh if I ever saw somebody pop out of their tent wearing one of these.

The funniest thing was that one person left a review and mentioned that they liked to wear theirs camping to play guitar at night.  Can’t you picture it?

Maybe we could convince Justin Petrowski to wear one of these up on stage some cold weekend.

Inspired by Jesus’s parable of the “House on the Rock”, my daughter and I decided to build our own the other day.  Unlike Jesus’s, we decided to build in our own hidden bunker in the rock and equip the house with a canon, a couple of armored windows, a hatch-opening roof, and a surface-to-air missile.  She picked out the front door, not me.

Just got notice that my in-laws, who have been diligently serving Christ overseas in a troubled area, were robbed at gunpoint last night.  They were forced to give over everything of value in their home.  Among many other things, they’ve lost everything electronic in their possession – including my father-in-laws dissertation notes, all of their electronic files, and digital photos.

It’s a shocking reminder that all is not well in the world.

But that will not always be the case:

And then at last, the sign that the Son of Man is coming will appear in the heavens, and there will be deep mourning among all the peoples of the earth. And they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he will send out his angels with the mighty blast of a trumpet, and they will gather his chosen ones from all over the world —from the farthest ends of the earth and heaven.  – Matthew 24:30-31 (NLT)

Please join with me in praying for my mother and father-in-law, that God will bring peace, joy, and comfort in this time of adversity.

This video isn’t exactly going to make your day happier (especially if you’re trying to sell a house, like me), but it’s a very nice visualization of what has happened with sub-prime mortgages.

Brands are powerful things.  They give us images and symbols  that help us to connect with ideas and things.  Still, over time, they must change.  Sometimes the changes are subtle, and other times a complete overhaul is necessary.

Here is a very cool visual catalog of the changes to the Hersheys wrapper over the past hundred years.  Their brand is certainly effective; just looking at these pixels is making me hungry.