jasonackerman.com

Traffic - it's crowded around here.

2009 turns into 2010, and I wonder… will ‘10 come in nearly as epic as ‘09 did? I’m not much for big “year in review” posts, and I’m even less for “resolutions that I’ll break before February” posts. But I think this year deserves something of a tip of the hat. Here are the highlights:

April – Disneyland trip. This was the first of our 2 vacations this year – included a quick stop in Vegas, a full-blown Disneyland experience, a little Route 66 driving, and a stop in Santa Fe, which is a new favorite destination for us.
July – PNW trip – almost 3 weeks on the road, including much needed rest at the beach in Bandon, and wonderful time reconnecting with family and friends.

Also during the year, my freelance business made some very significant strides. In fact, as this year wraps up, it is our sole source of income. I never thought I’d be able to grow it into a self-supporting venture, but it seems that has happened, and I’m very grateful. That it supports me and allowed almost 4 full weeks of vacation… unbelievable.

It seems like this was the year that Colorado really became our home. The trip to the PNW was significant because in many ways it felt like a watershed moment for us. Because of various factors, it would have been easy to go back to Vancouver, get all misty-eyed, and decide to move back. But this time, on our drive home, it felt like just that – home. When we arrived, it was good to settle back into life refreshed, and with a renewed vision for what our life here is, and what it will become.

Then to top it off, a little bit of extra work came in around Christmas time which allowed us to enjoy and experience the holidays without the added stress of wondering where our rent money would come from. What began as a year full of uncertainty and stress, still ended with uncertainty but with a level of peace about where we are that we haven’t experienced in a long time.

So what does that mean for 2010? (Two-thousand-ten? Twenty-ten?) First of all, it means that as we approach the three-year mark since we moved here, we’re ready to make some pretty significant decisions that will affect us for many years. Decisions about when/where/how to plant a church. Decisions about how to move forward in business. Decisions about how we approach the kids’ schooling. Things are not the same as when we moved here, and we are not the same. (I’d be disappointed, in fact, if we were the same as 3 years ago)

So with that, since I don’t make “resolutions”, I offer the following as a bit of a preview of what’s to come for us. I’ll be interested and entertained to read this one year from now and see how off-base I was.

In 2010, we will begin our church plant. Not just the “process”, but the community of people will begin to form and we will start journeying together as we discover who God is calling us to be as a church, and how we can together live on mission.

In 2010, my business will take another step forward, finally settling into a company that can provide a more predictable income stream. Health insurance coverage would be a dreamy addition.

In 2010, we will welcome into our family Nick’s new wife-to-be, her 7 year old daughter, and their baby that will come into the world this summer. I have been asked to officiate the ceremony, and for this I’m extremely honored and excited. These events also will bring a stream of family visiting town, and we’ll get to see everyone then.

See, nothing resolute, just a forecast of what’s on the horizon. Like I said, 2009 was epic in our family, bringing travels, changes, growth, refocusing. It’s my hope that 2010 is equally as moving. I’m sure it will be, in its own way. Regardless, we will remember 2009 fondly, and look to 2010 with anticipation.

Normally I’d have some big apology for being such a terrible infrequent blogger, but this time the long hiatus was kindof intentional. Not in a “I’m abandoning my blog” sort of way, but in a “I am choosing to do other things” sort of way. I really did sit down intending to post more than once, but finally just gave in to the pressure and/or desire to put my energy elsewhere. That’s how I’ve felt lately.

There really is a lot going on around here, more than I’ll put into this post. It’s late, and I need to get to bed. I just spent a couple hours playing online poker with a friend from Vancouver… it’s nice that we can still play cards together, even if the cards are pixels instead of plastic or paper. Even better that it’s for play money.

The big thing is that I’ll be wrapping up my time as worship pastor at Jacob’s Well in order to proceed with church planting. Not sure where that goes in the short term, other than we’re going to be looking pretty hard at moving down toward Highlands ASAP. That’s exciting, in and of itself. More on church planting soon – it’s going to be occupying more and more time as the months wear on.

We’ll me making a trip to the Northwest in August. More details on that coming soon. And since the work that looked so steady has pretty much dried up lately, it’s going to be on a shoestring budget. The bright side is that we have plenty of places to stay/eat/mooch while we are there. I’m thinking about popping up a paypal donation button as well, just for fun.

Well– I do have more to say, but I’m sleepy. I’ll have to make this blogging thing a habit.

Inspire me to use a song lyric as a post title. I know that’s not very original – but I do it quite often and have for most of my blogging life. What’s funny, is that I’ve found lately that using song lyrics as blog titles are search engine GOLD. At least 50% of my blog visitors are results of song lyric search queries. I even have tracking data that a few of them came back later! Fun fun. So thank you, Unknown Visitor #143, for your unending quest to find the correct lyric to “Fix You” by Coldplay. I hope the path that led you here continues to be rewarding.

This is a bit of a funky week in business. Lots of customers, none of whom seem all that motivated to pay me … which would be fine, as long as I knew it would all be in by the end of February. But that leaves this week awful tight, and living on the edge and counting pennies is a surefire way to induce an ulcer. So I’d just be thrilled if one of them would go ahead and cut that check today. On the bright side, the end of February bills shouldn’t be too hard to cover.

That being said, it sure provides a hint of tasteful irony that I’m spending most of this week prepping a sermon on the topic of… you ready?… Generosity. Oh yeah. So while I’m figuring out how to inspire our church to give more generously, I’ll be nervously watching the bank account all week. God certainly chooses humorous ways to communicate with us sometimes.

Church things are good — we are slowly starting to put together the details of what our church planting process looks like. I’ll be writing more details here as I have them. Right now there are no details to be had.

Business is also good — I at least have some projects to work on for the rest of this month. I just “launched” my corporate site – www.webacademydenver.com – I say “launched” because there is still a lot of content to enter, but it was nice to finally get the site live, with most of the structure done.

That is all for now. Call this blogging just for sake of blogging.

So the only real meaning in this post title is that it’s from “Dust in the Wind”, and holy CRAP is it windy around here lately. The mountains have seen gusts of 100MPH! Down here in ol’ B-Field, it’s only been sustained winds around 20MPH, but gusts reaching upwards of 50-60mph. The house has been shaking.

So things have been busy enough to curb my already seldom blogging into almost a complete stop. I’ve been blogging now for almost 8 years – since August 22, 2001. So I’ve come to terms with my blogging frequency. It’s remained remarkably consistent. Consistently inconsistent though it may be. That being said, I’m happy that my blog stats continue to stay solid at roughly 125 page views/month. Keep visiting, keep reading, and for crying out loud comment once in a while, eh?

The last month was almost completely overwhelmed with work on a website gig. Between that and just regular life/church/holidays – everything secondary got pushed down the priority list. This site was quite the learning experience. I feel like I learned some harsh lessons in project management. But overall, with Dan’s help, we put together quite the product. It’s a dynamic registration-based site for a national modeling agency based here in Denver – Premier Image Agency. The front end isn’t too much to sneeze at (except the cool little flash flipbook on the media page that Ray did, but the backend is something to be reckoned with. Each model they represent can log on and create their own profile, upload their own photos, and then there’s the whole search and booking engine. It turned into a bit of a time suck – ended up underbidding by probably 40%. But for the first time doing something of that scale, we’re pretty pleased with the outcome.

Now that we’re pretty much done with that, I have a few projects that have gotten backed up on the schedule that I need to wrap up. All of them involve customizing Wordpress in one way or another. Which essentially means that even though I’d really like to finish the redesign and upgrade of this site’s WP install, it probably won’t happen anytime soon.

The holidays were good… very different for our family. It was our first Christmas away from the rest of the family (we travelled back last year – remember?). So we stayed home and had a very quiet, family Christmas. That in and of itself was nice, though we did miss everyone from the NW terribly.

We are really feeling the bug to move down closer to downtown. Pending a successful tax season (we’re still too poor to get hosed by taxes, although that’s getting better by the month), we’re looking seriously to get down there before summer – before spring if the right place at the right price comes our way. The whole church planting thing still feels like something of an enigma right now, but what we know is that we want to live in and be a part of that community – what God does in terms of a church plant, if any, will happen then. It sure isn’t going to happen as long as we’re hiding out in Broomfield. Which is too bad, because Broomfield has been good to us. It’s a nice place to hide out.

I came down to Forza to get a little work done because I was having trouble focusing in the home office. That’s a consistent issue for me. Not having a place to “go to work” is nice at times, but it’s a struggle in other ways. I’m discovering that it’s almost as difficult to focus here as it was there, but I’ve made some progress, thus the break to do a little bloggity-bloggity. Though some of the source files I need I left on my home PC, and didn’t put them anywhere accessible. So I can only do so much here anyway. But another couple hours and I should make enough progress to head home satisfied with my day’s work.

So I’ll be heading back to that. That’s the semi-brief update from Monster-Land.

Zoe is getting her hippie on here. She’s taking a guitar class at her homeschool connection this fall, and so I hit up craigslist, and craig came through by hooking me up with a dude in Boulder selling this little 3/4 classical guitar for cheap. Zoe and I went to pick it up, and she can’t play a lick yet, but just loves sitting for hours and strumming the strings, regardless of the dissonance. It’s fun to hear her ask to play her guitar. For a while, at least until lessons started, I tuned it to an open chord so the constant strumming at least sounded half-way intentional. Her first class was today.

You know, I never would have thought I would be taking on so many teaching projects. It’s odd that teaching web design in a formal setting is never something I considered doing, but seems to be about half of my income right now. Maybe I just didn’t have the chops until now, but there’s plenty of people looking to learn this skill. The beauty of it, is that just like any other discipline, you can’t take a 2-day class and come out the other side an expert. So oftentimes, I still get the design work once the student realizes that to do this right, and to do it well, isn’t as easy as throwing open dreamweaver and calling yourself a web designer. Anyone can write a book… not everyone can do it well enough to make a profession out of it. Although it does make me wonder how professional songwriters must view hacks like me who engage in the craft that they make a living out of, but can’t seem to do it well enough to really take it on as a profession.

Plenty of church planting thoughts in my head. Realizing that now is the time to go through an assessment, and fearing the fallout if we don’t come out of it with overwhelming positive results. I’ve set my eyes pretty firmly on planting a church, and I don’t feel I’ve been short-sighted about it. It would be a hard pill to swallow if it turns out we are still years (or more!) away from that ultimate goal. Not that an assessment is the voice of God… but still.

I’ve been chatting with a friend via email (you know who you are) more about the campus/multisite thing. I’ve kinda wearied of thinking about it, but I have to clarify my thoughts on it because outside of the assessment process that’s the next big question to answer. It’s good to bounce the questions off of someone who is bringing less baggage (or at least different baggage) to the conversation than I am. I like that we can ask the questions, with more regard for the process and less regard for the answer.

And to wrap up my bloggity-bloggarifficness for the day, I am playing a show next Friday at Forza Coffee in Westminster with my good buddy Dan. Dan and I have gotten to know each other playing in the band together at church, and so we thought it would be fun to go all co-op on a show and just work to build up our chops a little bit. So if you’re one my Denver area readers, feel free to come on by… the details are available at my Facebook (see link to the right), or Myspace (see link to the right).

The more time I spend on this blog, the more I itch to redesign it. Because, you know, I really need another non-paying project to dive into. But I did update my design portfolio! Check it out! I’ll leave you with that.

He who hesitates is a damned fool. – Mae West

Yeah, that’s right, I quoted Mae freakin’ West on my blog. Get over it.

Just to lighten the mood of this post, here’s a beautiful shot of the sunset from the 4th of July, taken by my lovely wife.

So here’s the thing… you’d think by that photo that we live all up on the farm, in some rural hicktown where we have to drive 30 minutes to get to the general store and the air smells of cow-generated methane all day. But it’s not true. When I say we live at the very edge of the suburbs, this is what I mean. Turn 180 degrees from the view of this photo, and it’s matching rooflines and manicured lawns as far as the eye can see. We were on our way to the Broomfield 4th of July extravaganza, and this was the sunset we got to see. I love how the clouds obscure the sun, creating the cool ray patterns at the top, and the mountains that just an hour before were in clear focus – trees, snow and rocky ridgelines all easy to see – are just a dark purple silhouette.

More obsessive thinking about the church plant stuff. Not sure why this has taken over my thoughts lately… but it seems like I’m constantly stirring these things around in my head. There are just so many things to consider, I feel like I’m continually trying to sort them out, even if I’m technically doing something else entirely. Right now, I’m mulling over the multi-site thing… the idea of having a “campus”, or secondary location, of the same church. There are some benefits to it… there are also some benefits to planting and growing a new organic church from the ground up. Here’s the angle I’m thinking about the most right now. Since I believe in a new church benefiting from a wider base of support (many churches, individuals, and organizations collaboratively supporting its growth), is it possible to accomplish that wide base of support with a multi-site church? Or, perhaps more accurately stated, will other churches and organizations be as enthusiastic about supporting a campus? Or, restated one more time with my bias fully included, why would they support something that really seems more like an internal initiative than a reproductive extension? I’m not sure if it’s as big a deal as I’m making it. I will say… this combined with concern that a campus brings too much DNA that is geographic and culture specific into a new geography and new culture is one of my major roadblocks toward understanding the value of the campus.

But that’s all I have for now. I’m thinking of starting a new blog (I know, I know. Another blog?) just to explore this issue… simply because I know there are TONS of other people and churches having this same conversation, and I’d like to benefit from experience on all sides of the issue.

Now, I must head out to pick up a check from a client. Payment is good, it makes our world go around.