Category: regular

We announced yesterday that we are leaving staff.  The website will start looking a bit different over the next few days, as I make it more current-chapter-of-life friendly.

We are so excited for the clarity God has given us for this transition, and I want to take a minute to clarify something for anyone out there who might be reading this and thinking some variant of the following, which I recieved in an email from somebody I’d been trying to meet with for support:

I’m going to go ahead and assume that my poor communication and slowness in getting back to you this week was not the cause of you leaving staff. That would be sad for me.

My answer to this person was that they were a part of God’s answer to our prayers for clarity.  He sovereignly had folks not be able to meet with us, come off of our team, and decrease their giving in such a way as to make it abundantly clear that we should leave staff.  We are so thankful that folks like her didn’t get back to us.

So if you are reading this message and are sad that we are no longer on staff (effective Sept 2, but please continue donating through Nov 30), and you hold yourself partially responsible, stop it. God is the one who called us off staff.  Rejoice with us that He used you to do it.

If you want to be part of Him calling us to our next job, pass this link on to all of your friends: Resumé.  Or don’t.  Because either way, God’s gonna use you. 🙂

I packed up my laptop, headed to the business office at my apartment complex, and made a plan to get some stuff done on my day off.

But my plans were interrupted when I met Alberto (not his real name.)

He speaks no English, so I thanked Jesus for the dozen-or-so years of Spanish class (now a dozen-or-so years ago) and asked him where he was from.

Venezuela. He is in the states seeking political asylum.

Translation: he had to leave his home, and go to a place where he doesn’t even speak the language, to prevent Hugo Chavez from killing him.

I watched as he Skyped his family through tears, asking them about the violence, and if they were OK.

He ended the call, thanked me for letting him be so loud, and said grinning (pointing at the laptop) “Isn’t this marvelous?”

Yes sir. It is indeed pretty marvelous.

Please pray for my new 60-year-old friend, that he would be granted asylum, and that he and his family would be safe from a ruthless dictator.

It makes all my “productivity” seem pretty frivolous.

I just finished my first week with my new job. I’m sure you’ll skip down to the bottom to read all about that, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

In January of 2011 I met with my pastor to ask his advice on when it is appropriate for a grown man with a family of 4 to ask for financial help from his church or his family. I was a Barista with a new part time gig at AT&T but the commission checks had not arrived and I was panicking.

A large tax “return” coupled with an instant promotion to full time at Ma Bell was enough to render the point moot. I had a real job.

AT&T retail, as entry level jobs go, is phenomenal. Thorough training, free top-of-the-line phone, and a commission structure that makes it easy (with the right effort and focus) to make a great living.

In June of 2011 my benefits kicked in and I was able to quit Starbucks and reduce the amount of time standing up each week from 70 hours to 55.

Retail hours plus the fact that I took over as music guy at my church were the catalyst for beginning a job search in earnest in the spring of 2012.

All along Jacqueline would remind me that she was praying very specifically for a new job on November 1st. I thought it was a bit of a pipe dream, but I kept it to myself.

After a couple of “not a fit” job interviews and even an offer from another company, November was on the horizon. I had interviewed at a company named “Wingswept” in early October, but hadn’t heard much back from them. But a bit of persistence and roughly 5 assessments later, my hiring manager made what turned out to be the deciding gesture by driving 30 minutes to hand deliver the offer letter, on November 2nd.

I just finished my first week as an Account Manager (fancy way to describe telesales) for Wingswept, in their Vertical Markets division. I sell websites to Auto Repair Shops. This company is the real deal. They take care of employees and customers like they are family.

I love it.

Thanks, AT&T, for a great two years. I’ll be a mobile phone customer for a long time. And if you get UVerse in my neighborhood, call me.

I joined Audible.com last month (thanks in part to my new 30 minute commute) to listen to audio books. My first pick was the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. Here’s a crack at a review of it.

First off, it is phenomenally written, and the narration of the audio book is superb. There were only a handful of spots that were not engaging for me, but most of that was around the early diagnosis of Job’s cancer and the intricacies of that. Perhaps it was the medical terminology that alienated me, but either way I found my mind wandering.

What strikes me most about Steve’s life is the polarity. There was no middle ground for him. Something (or someone) was either the best ever, or total [excrement]. Isaacson does a good job of giving insight about Steve that makes it clear that there is deep respect for the man, but that this book is not an “inside job” where faults are whitewashed and successes overblown.

As I’ve navigated the last couple of years of my life through full-time Christian ministry into “secular” work and now this new strange hybrid of marketplace/part time worship leading, it put me in a unique position to receive the content of this book. My perspective on meaning and purpose has been tumble-dried and refolded since 2010.

I don’t care to make this book review a critique of Job’s spirituality, but what I saw throughout the book was a relentless search for purpose. Every product launch, every innovation and invention, every day of his life was spent trying to “make a dent in the Universe.”

And he did make a dent. If the browser window you are reading this post in has a rounded rectangular shape to it, it was Steve Jobs who insisted on that. (even if you are reading it on a PC, they kind of wholesale ripped-off the Macintosh Graphical User Interface multiple times over.) Jobs undeniably made a mark on society and on business.

As any good biography should, this book forces the reader to self-examine, to evaluate, and to a certain extent reorder your life around the framework of a life so well-lived that we write books about it.

It left me wondering if, given the opportunity to speak from the grave in 100 years, Steve Jobs would still insist on “making a difference” in the ways that he did while he lived.

Isaacson weaves together the different segments of Jobs’ life in a compelling way. The book is definitely worth a read. By way of warning, there is a significant amount of foul language throughout the book, as Isaacson quotes Jobs and others who had little regard for linguistic restraint.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that I consumed the entire thing on an Android device. Because I’m a rebel.