Friday, September 3, 2010

AWESOME!



Last Spring a very dear woman from my church gave me a copy of Neil Pasricha's book "The Book of Awesome." Neil began writing a blog that has sent him soaring into ROCK STAR status and is the inspiration for the "Awesome" book. Neil simply writes about the little things in life that he finds awesome; finding money in your jeans, fresh-baked bread, snow days. Sometimes he includes a commentary on what makes that particular thing awesome and sometimes it just goes without saying. It's a blast to come up with your own list of "awesome!"







  • Right before you stop at a red light it turns green
  • Your kiddo scores the winning run
  • Having little kids run up to you and hug you for no reason.
  • Special Olympic athletes
  • Getting the final answer on Jeopardy
  • Birthday cake and ice cream
  • Tomato sandwich in the summertime
  • Seeing your 2nd grader get off the school bus for the first time
  • The way a brand new box of crayons smells
  • Percolated coffee
  • Puppy tummies
  • Catching a wave at exactly the right moment
  • Silly Putty
  • Your husband comes home a little early
  • Cutting down your own Christmas tree
  • Sinking the long putt for birdie
  • Hammering a nail in perfectly
  • The sound of snow
  • Hot dogs roasted on a stick around a campfire
  • Riding in a Jeep with the top down in the Fall
  • Funnel cake at the fair
  • Watching your 2 year old try to say the blessing
  • Falling asleep on the way home
  • New socks
  • Knowing all the words to a song
  • Being there when a kid starts to "get it"



Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Facebook Messiah

I've spent the past several days overhauling my church website. Had a technical snafu late last week and since I've been digging and poking around on it anyway I decided to go ahead and give it a facelift in a few places. Then I tackled my youth website ... new graphics ... new fall programming information. Lots of links and buzzing around from site to site. I've got a Facebook page for our youth group too; been trying to make that a place they pop onto while they update their status and stalk their friends. It's got videos, photos, links, likes, events and all the other inane bells and whistles we could possibly want from our social networking sites. I looked for an app like Farmville where you had to build Christianity from the ground up but no luck. I thought it would be fun to look for lepers and prostitutes and bring them to Jesus but there's a lot of kinks I gotta work out first. The sadducees and pharisees are a whole other headache! Anyway, I got this idea about doing an e-newsletter for my youth group so I went on-line to research it. I already send weekly e-mail and Facebook updates in case nobody knows what's going on but that's starting to sound boring and antiquated. Besides, all the youth news can only be found in the weekly bulletin, on the internet, in the monthly snail mail newsletter, on Facebook and via e-mail. I want to juice up my correspondence with RSS feeds or Twitter. I need to maximize COMMUNICATION ... isn't that what every teenager wants; sensory overload that's disguised as information and communication. Anywho, I was surfing around on my MacBook and I happened to stumble upon my blog that I haven't updated since November. Had fun reading all the stuff that I wrote about. Ever do that? Let enough time pass that you're able to read your own stuff and just enjoy it? You're not dissecting every adjective and dangling participle. I digress. So anyway there's all this technology and means for communicating our EVERY thought and action and people STILL don't know what's going on half the time. And then it hit me like SPAM -- with nothing more than the spoken words "Go. Make disciples," one man communicated all that ever needed to be said. How's that for a Facebook status?