jasonackerman.com

In other words, you can actually see his eyes without having to move his hair. Both Sam and Zoe have new haircuts… the cuteness in our house is pretty intense right now.

Welcome to my newfound commitment to blogging! I’m writing today from the brand spanking-new Compuskills facility in Lowry – a reclaimed Air Force base that is a cutting edge urban redevelopment project. So the buildings are old, but the facility is new. I’m teaching a Dreamweaver class… as I have mentioned in the past, I’m not the biggest DW fan, but the second day of the DW class is very fun, because I set the students loose on a project and we just go for it… so I don’t have to be up front ‘teaching’ all day… the students just ask questions, and I get to watch them be creative.

Yesterday was the first day off for me in quite some time- a quick look at the calendar shows 2 full weeks since a day off. I don’t remember what we did that Sunday, so maybe not even that. It was difficult to force the rest when there was much web-designey stuff I could have been doing, but the lazy day was much needed. Of course, then I couldn’t really fall asleep last night. So I pulled into the parking lot this morning, realized how early I was (traffic was minimal), so I tilted back the seat and promptly fell asleep. I awoke to the next hour’s weather report and a very creaky neck.

Played a bit of poker Saturday night after church… I’ve figured this group of guys out pretty well, but they aren’t helping me better my skills. I’ve taken home at least double what I started with each of the last two times I’ve played. (granted, we start with $5, so it’s micro-stakes) I did manage to get lucky on one hand with double me up to $10. I’ll spare you the details, but it involved winning a hand where my odds of winning the hand hovered around 10 or 15%. I’d like to play a game that takes on a slightly more serious tone… this game is a blast, but it is only for nickels and dimes, which makes the quality of the play suffer – mine included.

Very little else on the map for me today. One of these days, I’m going to leave the grid entirely for a day or two. I haven’t done that in a while. Until then, my dependence on the flow of digital information into our house continues (would that be called binary addiction?).

It’s been an interesting day of self-evaluation… not personally so much as on a larger, more family-oriented level. Specifically, trying to figure out what in our family dynamic has changed that has made our kids turn into little monsters (in the monstrous way, not the affectionate way). Trying to figure out what our church-planting journey looks like, fitting the pieces of that together with being at Jacob’s Well… or, more succinctly, knowing that we belong in both worlds, and what that fit looks like. Trying to figure out how on earth we can continue to push the budgetary limits to the very last penny and still come out with our heads above water. Right now we’re underwater, holding our breath and feeling the burn in the lungs. But we haven’t drowned yet, and we don’t expect to.

Taking the issues in order – with our kids, it feels like our free-wheeling lifestyle has let things slowly slip into a state of managed chaos. This is fun for a while, but doesn’t sustain in the long term. Not sure how we’ll tackle that one just yet.

The church-planting stuff is a much more abstract sort of quandary. At times I feel like we’ve lost focus on why we came here to begin with. All these different options that are close to what we’re after, but not quite there. Jacob’s Well has been great, and it continues to be great, and I have no reason to believe it will cease to be great… but along with it comes temptation to just move over to Thornton and live the suburban life. And to be fair, we could probably do just fine with that. We could live in community with people, loving and serving and letting our kids grow up in the town where I spent my childhood. But that’s not where we belong. We KNOW that. We didn’t come here to live the suburban life – heck, we could have done that just fine in Vancouver. We came here to be a part of seeing a community of faith sprout and grow in the urban core of Denver. So there’s that tightrope… that tension of being where we are, and dually focused on where we’re going. And the dual focus is tough to maintain for any period of time. The struggle is how to manage that in a way that honors Jacob’s Well and the relationship and commitments we’ve made, while simultaneously moving toward the task to which God has called us.

That’s been the day… mostly thinking and talking about that stuff. Introspection is fun. But now I need a break.

That picture is a crappy phone-camera shot of a beautiful sight. Last night, we sat on the porch at Lodo’s Bar and Grill in Westminster. The kids were all at a VBS (Free babysitting for multiple dates in one week!), so we hopped up to the patio, took a seat facing the mountains, and drank a Sunshine Wheat. Apparently, according to the New Belgium site, Sunshine Wheat was brewed by the brewmaster as a Wedding beer when he married his wife. Now that’s just cool. It’s a crisp, filtered wheat beer that finished better than it started – which is rare for me.

I’ve been a crappy blogger lately, on all fronts. You might know that I also blog at Metroblogging Denver as well as Pro Sports Colorado, and lets face it… I’ve sucked all along the blogging front. It’s been 38 days since a post here. 38 Days? Yeah, you heard me. 38. So this is likely just to be a brain-dump of goings on, without much structure or thought flow. (No structure or thought-flowing brain dumps kind of defines blogging though, doesn’t it?)

Priscilla was gone for a week after our friend Rena passed away. It was a good time for her to get away from home and really pour herself into processing that. I’m glad she was able to go. I could write all kinds of drama about the rest of us managing at home without her, but we got by just fine. Not that I want to do that very often, mind you, but we survived. There was lots of boot-camp style house cleaning to keep everyone busy. That and we baked some awesome cookies.

Things are going well at the church. Every week that goes by, we’re settled in a little more, a part of the community a little more. I’ve had some down and dirty conversations with Dave about a few issues surrounding the campus/plant/whatever. I call it that, but its leaning more and more towards a campus. I’m ok with the multisite idea (not thrilled, but I think it can be implemented well) … but our deepest conversations revolve around the video-venue idea (piping in video of the sermon from somewhere else), and that’s an idea that frankly makes me throw up in my mouth a little. He comes from a church that does video venues at several campuses, and so we’ve had some fun back and forth on the pros and cons of such a model. Of course, I see gigantic cons and very tenuous pros at best, but that’s what has been fun about our discussions, is the freedom to push on each other a little bit. Perhaps I’ll delve into those issues separately here on this oft-ignored blog someday.

I’m going to update my WP install. I hate doing this, but sometimes it just has to be done. I’m not sure why it HAS to be done this time, but I’m just going to do it. I’ve got the bug to write some custom themes, just for fun and maybe a few dollars if I can do them well enough. I never quite get the time for that though. I will however, be using WP as the CMS for the new church website, so that will be an adventure in some serious theming.

Well, I was going to cover so many other different things, but I have a sermon to prep for this weekend, and 4 different classes to be ready to teach for next week, so I’m going to sign off. Hopefully I’ll reappear again before 38 days has passed…