This is the latest installment of the “lessons learned from failure” series. You’ll find links to related posts at the bottom of this one. ****** Fifteen years ago I had a story I wanted to tell the world about my life. It was the story of how moved from Texas to the Pacific Northwest to […]
My Failure Was Not As Public As I Thought
Back in October, I sat down and made a list of the lessons I’ve learned in the past year. I’ve been sharing these lessons here on the blog. You can find links to them at the end of this post. I’ve wanted to write about a number of these things for months, but I refrained […]
December 6, 2011 by 12 Comments
Why Public Failure Was Just What I Needed
Perhaps the hardest thing about shutting the church plant down last year was the specter of failing in public. For fundraising and recruiting purposes, I communicated the early successes of our project through every medium at my disposal: blog posts, tweets, status updates, newsletters, emails, and sermons at other churches. I tried to build a […]
December 1, 2011 by 3 Comments
Doubt Your Doubts About Your Future
I remember saying to a friend about this time last year that I wasn’t sure I would ever preach again. Not so much because I was sick of preaching, but because I couldn’t imagine why any church or group would ever want to hear from a failed church planter like me. I believed I had […]
November 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment
My Love/Hate List
Another lesson I’ve learned in the past year is that doing what I love makes me happy. Forcing myself to do what I hate sends me into a depressing funk. So I’m trying to spend more of my time doing what I love and less of it doing what I hate. This is why I […]
November 15, 2011 by 7 Comments
Insight is O-V-E-R-R-A-T-E-D
A second lesson I’ve learned this year is that insight is overrated (I got this line from a friend). Not unimportant, just overrated. I have the kind of personality that craves insight from past events. I want to understand why things happened the way they did, why I responded the way I did, and what […]
November 10, 2011 by 3 Comments
Failure Is All It’s Cracked Up To Be
Last November was the worst month of my life. I was trying to recover from a devastating professional failure, understand how I ended up trying something I turned out to be so ill-suited to do, and figure out what to do next. Can you say Happy Holidays? (As far as tough times go, mine have […]
November 7, 2011 by 7 Comments
Have You Hugged a Zombie Today?
Last fall, because of the Twitter buzz among my friends, I started watching The Walking Dead on AMC. This was a completely new genre for me. I can count on both hands the number of horror films I’ve watched from beginning to end. When I was kid I went to the movies with a friend […]
October 25, 2011 by 16 Comments
Like Sands Through the Hourglass
I love this image from Repacking Your Bags: It begins with an image-the image of an hourglass. Most of us live our lives as if we’re in the top of the hourglass. We’re rushing around trying to build our sand castles, but as fast as we can do so, the sand is running out. The […]
July 14, 2011 by 1 Comment
Regrets of the Dying
A couple of weeks ago I followed a link on twitter to a post written by Bonnie Ware. After years of taking care of people about to die, she lists the five most common regrets she heard from the dying. 1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not […]
June 21, 2011 by 3 Comments
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons