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I’m sure you really wanted to know the state of my sinuses, but rest assured, to me that’s an important tidbit of information. Above is a photo of me leading worship at Jacob’s Well Church last weekend. It’s been a good few weeks there, except for the cold-induced failure of my voice last night. But that’s secondary.

Went to our last Rockies game of the year Friday night… 250 photos to sort through, so I won’t be getting those up for a bit. Priscilla will probably have a gallery up shortly though. There was an epic fireworks show after the game, which was worth the price of admission. I’m not much for fireworks shows, but this was honestly the best I’ve seen. All in all, a good trip to the city. It’s good for these urban monster souls to get into the city every now and then. Hopefully more now than then.

After a few days of being sick and really unmotivated to do much of anything, ready to settle into a nice busy week filled with more work than I probably have time to do. That’s ok though, it beats the alternative.

Consider this the least informative update in a while. But hey… this also beats the alternative, which is no blogging at all.

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.

It’s official. Summer is here. I was loving spring… but when the 15 day outlook calls for only one day below 90, well… that means it’s summer. And summer here is hot. Not Arizona hot, and not deep South hot… just hot. I think it’s more about the intensity of the blazing sun than the actual heat. A guy can burn awful quick here. But it’s dry, so there’s none of the oppressive humidity of the south. It just hangs out in the 90s with intense sunlight for days and days on end. The short breaks when the thunderclouds roll in are quite welcome.

I always have a weird feeling with the 4th of July. I don’t really care about the fireworks so much… I could take them or leave them. It’s that for some reason, I always get the sense that it’s the middle of summer, and it’s the downhill side to fall after that. That isn’t really true of course, as summer just officially started a couple weeks ago, and in the Northwest, school just got out. I think it comes from childhood, where school ended at the end of May, and started up again somewhere around the 3rd week of August, which does put the 4th pretty close to the middle of summer. But now, I feel like it should just be the beginning. I think part of it is knowing that we’ll hardly blink and it will be September again. It’s also hard to believe we’re navigating our second summer here in Colorado. None of the seasons are new, now… we’ve been through one full cycle and now it’s just life. I’m a much bigger fan of fall and spring around here than summer, anyway.

The photo above unfortunately is not recent, but from an early July trip last year to Estes Park. The Rocky Mountains are something to behold… either in their winter snow blankets, or in their light summer vegetation, as the photo shows.

We spent last night at a neighborhood party/fireworks extravaganza. It wasn’t “our” neighborhood so much, but over in Thornton where all the church folk live. So we dropped in for a few hours of hanging out. For an informal, just come hang with us party, it turned out to what had to be close to 100 people. It was pretty insane – in a good way.

We’ll spend today (hopefully) just hanging out. I do have some more sermon prep to do for Saturday, but I won’t devote the whole day to it. I just need to rewrite a few sections, and start to put together a media presentation. This has been a week where I’ve spent almost all my time on church stuff… it would be so easy to bail on everything else and just focus on this, if not for the income-related issues that go with not doing any other work. Hopefully, that day comes soon.

Enjoy your holiday, don’t get too drunk, and enjoy the sparkly exploding things.

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…

there is for the moment a 5-string bass living in my office. i got it out to noodle with, and sam decided to throw down some smoking bass lines. it was fun.

a good friend is in town for a barista competition. he’ll be judging, i’ll just be going to enjoy the sights/sounds/smells and hopefully the occasional taste. i’ve been trying to keep control on the things that have been triggering my acid reflux for the past several months. it’s been ranging from mild to really painful over the last 12-16 months. i’ve just recently been able to narrow down the triggers, and i’ve been keeping a tight reign (mostly) on those things. thankfully, it seems that caffeine and alcohol (ie, coffee and beer, aka, my two favoritest things in the world) are only triggers when i’ve already pushed the edge with some other things, so if i’m good, the occasional beer or espresso (or pipeline porter, if you want to put those things together) won’t send me crying to my room in pain.

this weekend marks my first official weekend at jacob’s well. there are still some details to work out, and the official meeting with the leadership team, but that will come in time. it’s exciting to get hopping on this. there’s so much to be done. for instance, i currently have a large amount of sound gear, functional and non-functional, living in my garage. they moved out of their office, so i’m hanging on to all this extra stuff until we can evaluate its worth, and either keep it or sell it. i’m aiming to sell most of it, so we can buy an aviom system.

some weird stuff going down at the computer school. without going into details, i’m beginning to see why they cycle through instructors so much. there’s some serious passive-aggressive stuff going on. i think it will all work out ok… but the jury is still out on that.

today is the first full day i’ve taken off since february 10th. for those doing the math, that’s almost three weeks. i’ve had days that had some relaxing time, but it’s been that long since i’ve done all day with no work stuff. being near my computer is bad, i’ve almost worked several times today. in reality, i did send off some files first thing this morning, but outside of that, i’m resisting the urge to dive into some projects. there’s enough going on, that it feels like i should be making more money than i really am. it’s a little discouraging to be working a lot and not making all that much. back when i was not working so much, it felt natural to be broke all the time. it was like a trade-off. yeah, i’m broke, but the relaxed lifestyle is nice… only now i’m working much harder and i’m just as broke. that’s not the way it should be. but, that’s how it is right now. and today, i plan on lounging out on our new-to-us couch and reading a bit. i picked up surprised by hope, the latest book by nt wright. he’s basically laying out the theology of heaven and the resurrection, one that is grossly misundertood by christians in general today. i’m only a couple chapters is, and so far it is a very gripping book. once i’m through it, i think i’ll write a chapter by chapter review… it’s worth it and requires more than a passing paragraph. in something completely opposite to that, i also plan on reading through a bit of super/system (a course in power poker!) today as well.

its taken me all morning to wind down and begin to relax. i hope it stays that way…

that’s how lazy i’ve become. i don’t have any recent photos, so you get a BORING words only post. sorry about that.

things are getting kinda crazy around here. it’s currently sunny and 25, with 3 or 4 inches of snow on the ground. it will be gone in a day or so, and by the weekend it should be 55 degrees. so weird.

i’m currently hanging at this new coffeeshop in town called forza… it’s a franchise from a seattle place. it’s pretty decent, they definitely are better than any of the other shops here in the suburbs. it’s still got that suburban vibe, but i’m enjoying it. the customer service is outstanding… these are definitely the friendliest baristas in town.

speaking of coffee, it looks like ray will be heading this way, as our little suburban enclave is holding a regional barista competition. it’s a good excuse for him to come out. should be fun… hopefully it’s snowy, that would make it even more fun.

the final bit of news is that i’m finalizing some details with a church in the area to do the worship pastor thing, while working towards planting a campus (i’ll write more about the multi-site thing as we move along) in the downtown area of denver in the next couple years. lots of fun to be had. heck, lots of work to be had, but it seems like this is going to be the gig for us. i’ll write more about it in a couple weeks. and since i only write every couple weeks, it might be in my next post!

so for now, i’m just sitting at forza, writing in the ol’ blog, wrapping up a website design proposal, and generally enjoying the fact that i can sit at a coffeeshop and call it “work”.