Monthly Mash Up (January 2017)

We've reached the end of January. I’d like to take a moment and share with you what I'm reading, pondering and enjoying. This has been something I’ve regularly shared with email subscribers but will now be sharing as a regular post on the blog. I’m still tinkering with exactly what it will look like, but it will most likely be a monthly post. It is my sincere hope that the resources I share with you here will be helpful and that you enjoy reading it. If you do enjoy it, I’d love for you to share it with family and friends. 

Verse I'm Chewing On

 “I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” John 15:15

I need to recall this verse a thousand different times a day. There are far too many instances in which I try to do things myself. When I do, it rarely turns out the way I’d planned. This verse serves as a real and vigilant reminder that I must remain connected to Christ.  

What I'm Reading

1. Church History: In Plain Language by Bruce L. Shelley - My mentor and I started reading this one a few weeks ago and I’m enjoying it deeply. Day by day I’m learning new things about church history and seeing God’s sovereign hand moving across page after page. Do I agree with each and every conclusion Shelley comes to? No, but I appreciate his attempt to condense two thousand plus years of church history into a style and presentation that helps people understand and appreciate all God has done these last two millennia. 

Favorite quote: "The Christians, on the other hand, were always talking about their Jesus. They were out to make Christians of  the entire population of the empire, and the rapidity of their spread showed that this was no idle dream. Not only did they, like the Jews, refuse to worship the emperor as a living god, but they were doing their utmost to convince every subject of the emperor to join them in their refusal." 

2. The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller - Our community group is reading this together. We are focusing in on our marriages as we kick off 2017. Can’t wait to see what we learn and how reading along in the context of community helps grow our understanding.

3. Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon - My sister-in-law gave me this one for Christmas and Hannah and I are taking it slow. We are reading just a few short page each morning and it’s been a fun read chalked full of interesting and inspiring quotes and one liners.   

4. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens - I started this one the week of Christmas, and have really enjoyed how Dickens frames a scene. He can be a little wordy at times, but this one is a classic for a reason.

What I’m Listening To

1. James Emery White on the Rise of Generation Z: A Post-Christian, Post-Millennial Generation - I listened to this podcast episode just after the new year. It was interesting and thought provoking. Most of all it made me think about the world my son will grow up in and how different it will be from the one I knew as a kid. He will have totally new and different experiences, and they’ll shape him in ways I don’t fully understand. That’s ok because the Lord does.

2. Psalms Live by Shane & Shane - I picked up my first Shane & Shane album as a college freshman in 2008. I remain just as hooked on their mad vocal and musical stylings almost ten years later. More importantly, I am encouraged by how these two men have lovingly worshiped the Lord night in and night out on stages all over the world and invited all of us to join in. In a world full of pretenders, fakers and people in it just for the money, these two men named Shane are a bright light pointing to Jesus. Grab this album, find a quiet place to stick in your head buds and try not to let everyone see you belting it out. If you’re anything like me, you just won’t be able to sit still.

3. Blueprint for Armageddon - I listened to Dan Carlin dive deep into the plotting, mud, inhumanity and swift moving change that characterized World War I in December of 2015. I found it not only entertaining and informative but find fascinating parallels between our present day and the events now a century past, that I decided to give it another go this winter as well. Perhaps it will become an annual tradition.

Helpful Resource

1. Jesus, The Only Way - In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had some pretty interesting conversations. In a few the assertion that you can be a Christian without holding to the exclusivity of Jesus Christ has popped up. In this extremely helpful packet you’ll find over 100 verses in the New Testament that destroy this notion. We might misinterpret one verse, maybe two, but Christian’s aren’t whiffing on over 100 verses. The orthodox Christian doctrine that Jesus is the only way to right relationship with God, is the biblical teaching. Perhaps you’re like many of the folks I’ve had the pleasure of talking to of late, and you question this aspect of Christianity. I’d lovingly encourage you to go the Stand to Reason website and collect this immensely helpful resource. Scroll to the bottom of the page, subscribe to any of the Stand to Reason newsletters and receive your free copy of this awesome pdf.

From the Internet

1. What’s The Best Way To Start Off A Marriage via Real Truth Real Quick - I love being married and marriage in general. I know of few things the Lord uses daily to shape and mold me like He does my marriage. In this quick video, Todd Wagner gives some great advice to help kick off marriage on the right foot. Regardless how long you’ve been married, there’s something here for you. If you haven’t taken the plunge just yet, grab a pen, and listen up as Todd sets you up for major success.    

2. God Hates Sexual Immorality via Tim Challies - This post from Tim hits hard. I’d be absolutely shocked if anyone made it all the way through without some twinge of guilt. I certainly didn’t and that’s why I found it helpful.

3. Corporate Worship Saved My Marriage (Video) - I found this encouraging. “Corporate worship,” Piper says, “is one of the best remedies for our sin-sick souls. Without fail, trials and troubles renew every week. Big or small, they draw our gaze away from Jesus and distract us from God’s amazing mercy and grace. Instead of resting in the gospel, we frantically look elsewhere for help.”

4. Tricked Into Playing The Wrong Game - I need helpful reminders every day. Usually these reminders come from God’s word and His people, but every now and again I find a helpful reminder in a blog post I read. In this post, Godin takes on the idea that we must always be growing and growing; reaching a bigger audience. “Bigger,” Seth Godin said, “isn't better. It's merely bigger. And the mass market might want what the mass market wants, but that doesn't mean that it's your market.”
 

5 Ways to Make More Happen in 2017

'Get stuff done.' That's the mantra of the daily grind that is America 2017. You drag yourself out of bed earlier than anyone else. You stay late at the office three or more nights a week. You bust your butt and stockpile vacation days like they're going out of style. You do all this and more under the guise of getting stuff done. It's as if you believe he who gets the most stuff done wins.

You do this ever year, yet reach December with unfinished projects and unreached goals. Amidst all the grinding discipline on display in your daily routine, things fell through the cracks and the goals that meant the most to you were neglected for more urgent things. We recently discussed setting goals and I'm sure you have tons of them for 2017. Today, I'd like to share with you five things that help me keep my priorities in line and give me more time to work on my goals. 

1. Write Things Down. 

You have a ton to keep up with. Most of the time you can remember it all without trying or thinking anything of it. When it comes to important things however, you write them down. Your wife doesn't send you to the store without a grocery list. You have a to do list and hopefully a don't do list at work. You use lists to run the important areas of your life. What could be more important than achieving your annual goals?

Write down your goals. Find a nice quiet spot, free from distractions, and spend some time writing out all you're committed to achieving this year. This one simple act makes you 42% more likely to reach your goals. Write them down and put them somewhere you'll see them every day. I have a friend who puts his in his closet. Every morning as he gets dressed for the day, he looks at his goals and every night before bed he does the same. It helps him ensure that he is taking concrete steps towards them each and every day. Do something similar. 

2. Rig The Game

People who want to get to Disney World don't simply get in the car and start driving, hoping the road will somehow get them there. Instead, they look at a map and chart their course. They do this in advance, rather than waiting until they arrive at the wrong destination or discover they've spent three days driving the wrong direction. If you want to get somewhere, guesswork is a poor strategy. Just like you planned a route for your last road trip, you need to decide how you are going to reach your goals.

Regardless of how strong your will power or how committed you are, there are going to be days where you don't feel like working on your goal. Imagine your goal is to run a marathon in 2017. Reaching that goal will require you to go run everyday. If each morning you have to convince yourself you really want to do this, you're in trouble. It's a huge obstacle to overcome. Over time, it will wear you down, and could derail your goals. The solution is to remove that daily decision by rigging the game in your favor.

"You will never change your life," John Maxwell said, "until you change something you do daily. The secret of success is found in your daily routine." Get over the hump and assure yourself success, by finding a way to make your goal a habit. It can be as simple as, "When I get up each morning, I sit down to write for thirty minutes." Building small daily habits like this, makes it as close to impossible to fail as you can get. It forces you to be consistent and consistent action over a period of time is the surest route I know to achieving them. 

3. Focus On The Right Things

"What is important," Dwight Eisenhower said, "is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important." Many of the tasks you spend time on each day don't get you any closer to reaching your goals. They come to you with sirens and horns blaring demanding your attention, but offer little in return. These urgent deadlines, and problems have to be dealt with but pull you away from other important things. Likewise interruptions and time wasting activities draw your attention away from productive endeavors. With emergencies, interruptions and problems coming at you left and right, how do you continue to move forward on your goals? The answer is found in a helpful decision matrix popularized by Steven Covey in his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.     

When tasks cross your path, run it through the matrix above. If it lands in quadrant four (not urgent, not important), do it later. If it belongs in quadrant three (not important, but urgent), delegate it to someone else. Obviously, the urgent and important tasks need to be attended to immediately, but don't forget to make time for quadrant 2 (important, but not urgent). The more time you can focus on this quadrant, the better off you'll be. It will allow you to deal with important things before they become urgent. 

4. Get Up Early

If you want to get a lot done while avoiding the time wasters, interruptions and all the things that keep you from working on your goals, get up earlier. This isn't a popular suggestion. Most people scoff at the thought, and that's exactly why you shouldn't. You don't want to settle for average, you want above average. Average people sleep in as late as possible, while the above average person gets up early and gets to work on their most important projects.

As you read about focusing on those tasks that belong in quadrant 2, you wondered where the time to do that is going to come from. The early morning hours are the perfect solution to that quandary. If you made the decision to rise one hour earlier, you could gain five extra hours of productive time per week. That's roughly six plus weeks over the course of a year, while still taking two weeks off for vacation. This is how you get your goals done.

5. Don't Throw In The Towel

No one ever achieved more by quitting. Your greatest weakness is listening to that voice in your head telling you to give up when things get hard. When you find yourself on the verge of giving up I want you to give it one more try. There is so much value in staying in the fight.   

3 Things Goals Should Have

You've read and heard a thousand different things about goal setting. You know how important it is, yet the majority of you don't have written goals. Far too many of you are playing around when it comes to your goals. You have a few nice ideas about where we want to go and what you want to do in life, but you haven't committed to them enough to write them down. The upside is you aren't discouraged when things don't pan out. We never put ourselves out there and as a result we think we're safe from the pain of failure. 

The down side is, that its an illusion. Not committing to something, is a type of failure all its own. "Its hard to fail," Roosevelt said, "but it is worse to have never tried to succeed." Its' a failure in courage and it leaves you even more defeated than they guy who dared to take on the mountain and failed. Your neither hero nor villain. Instead, you're irrelevant. No one will remember or pay attention to the things you never dare to try. Should you live your life begging for the attention and appreciation of others? No, but we weren't put here to stay on the sidelines either.

Daring to do great things is about more than deciding to give it a shot and see what happens. Achieving great things is all about setting the right type of goals and pursuing them with everything you've got. As you sit down and hammer out what you want out of 2017 ensure your goals include at least three aspects.  

1. Energizing

Whatever it is you want to get done in 2017, make sure you're focusing on things that fill you with energy. You want them to cause you to leap out of bed each day, ready to get after it. Many of the goals you fiddle around with each year don't inspire this type of want to and energy. No wonder 92% of Americans fail to achieve their new years resolution. That's a an utter shame. If you're going to have any shot at reaching your goals in 2017, you can't afford to waste your time on things that don't get you out of bed before the sun, or keep you up long after its set. If they don't make you want to get after it, you need to set some bigger goals. The first step to making big moves in 2017, is to set your sights on mega goals.  

2. Measurable

How do you know who wins the Super Bowl each February? That's not a trick question, you look at the scoreboard. The team with the most points, walks away with the Lombardi Trophy. If you're going to make big changes in 2017, you have to define exactly what a win is going to look like. Be as specific as you can. You've got to find a way to turn that energizing goal into something tangible, something that can be measured. It's hard to hit a target you can't see. The second step to a great 2017, is making your goals something you can measure. 

3. Time Bound

You don't have forever to get things done. Life doesn't work that way. It might make you feel good to set goals without a definite time table, but it doesn't help you achieve much. How many of your friends have goals to "some day" do this, or that? Ask yourself how likely it is they'll ever get them done. If your not introducing time to the discussion, your not serious about the goal. Give your goals deadlines that make you uncomfortable. This will motivate you to work harder and get it done. Step three is to ground your goals in time, while remembering that if you don't get there you can always reevaluate and set a new time table. 

Tall Tales, Spinning Yarns & Telling Stories

Writing is nothing more than thinking another’s thoughts after them. Perhaps it's for the second time, but more often than not, it’s for the hundredth time. Writers rarely get it right the first time. They plod, meander and sometimes even stagger from time to time. It’s hard stuff. They agonize over word choices, sentence structure, and every detail of how they’re communicating. They wrestled their scattered thoughts into submission and trapped them on paper and you’re now getting to come along for the ride.

Isn’t it fun to set off without a destination in sight and nothing to guide but the moonlight above? You get to hop in the car and drive fast, for the thrill of it all. You don’t have to worry about the road, pack a lunch or pay for gas. You simply have to hang on tight as you turn page after page. One moment you’re cruising down the 101, beach on your left taking in the beauty of another sunset, and the next you’re soaring through the clouds on a jet bound for a far off destination.

Have you paused to think about how magical it all is? Somewhere on this scattered mess of a planet, another human sat down to put ink on page to create the very thing in your hand that’s transporting you all over the universe without your ever having moved. To top it all off, it’s putting ideas in your head. Silently, and unnoticed it’s at work causing thoughts, emotions and all manner of things to come bubbling to the surface. Perhaps you’ll dream about some adventure you joined because of a good piece of writing.  

Imagination is one of the greatest gifts the good Lord has given us, and good writing uses it to perfection. Amidst all the hustle and all the busyness of life, imagination comes riding in on a blue horse to save us. Its tales and adventures pick us up when we’re down, encourage us to try new things, and push us to dare greatly into the unknown.   

The world would be a much more dreary place without it. Stories and books put color and zest into a world often considered gray. What would the world be without the wackiness of Alice in Wonderland, the adventures of Curious George or the triumphs of Sherlock Holmes? What would we understand about the deeper struggles of mankind without Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby or Of Mice & Men. Or of man’s inhumanity to man if not for Anne Frank’s Diary, George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird? These take truth, wrap it in language and then etch it into our hearts.    

Storytelling—it’s mankind’s longest running tradition. Man has been gathering to listen and share tales as long as he’s had breath in his lungs. Whether it’s around a fire, transistor radio or farmhouse dinner table, it’s what we do. We recall episodes long past, spin yarns about the victories we’ve won and put lipstick on the underside of life.

Telling a good story takes more than interesting prose or vivid imagery; it requires timing, emotion and rhythm just like your favorite tune. It builds and builds towards the payoff—be that a laugh, outrage, or a tear. As Hank Williams asks the Drifter in “The Ride” by David Allan Coe:  

"Drifter can ya make folks cry when you play and sing?

Have you paid your dues, can you moan the blues? Can you bend them, guitar strings?"
He said, "Boy can you make folks feel what you feel inside?

Anyone trying to entertain and regale you with a good ol’ fashion story is engaged in one of mankind’s grandest ideals. Go along for the ride.

“Stories,” Stephen King said, “are found things, like fossils in the ground.” So grab your shovel and get to digging. There’s no telling the whopper of a tale we’re likely to find.

I'm going to try several new things on the blog this year.  Some of them will work and some of them won't, but we're going to give it a go anyway. Each month, I will share some variety of short fiction with you here. Be it a short story, a scene I'm working on or some rambling prose I found enjoyable to write. Regardless of the shape it takes, or its quality I hope you come along for the ride.   

Guest Post: Where To Begin Your Photography Journey

Today I'm sharing something I've never done before—a guest post. This post was written by my lovely wife, Hannah. Hannah is the creative vision behind our photography business, Cottonwood Road Photography. In this post she addresses the question of where to begin your photography journey. If you or a someone you know, wants to start a photography business and aren't sure where to start, this post is for you.

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One of the highest joys of my job is the opportunity to help other aspiring photographers develop their skills and start their own photography journeys. It is stressful and overwhelming to figure out how every aspect of your camera works, how to compose and use light and everything in between. As a result, people reach out regularly in search of help getting their head around things. What follows is a collection of resources I share with those just jumping into photography.   

Running a photography business can be incredibly hard. Long shoots, responding to inquiries, hours of editing, and travel are more than enough to keep you busy. Despite the difficulty, it is super rewarding to work with couples leading up to and celebrating the biggest moments of their lives.

Whether you're interested in starting your own business or just want to learn how to use your camera, I highly suggest taking a photography course. You can take one online or attend a class of some sort. Focus on mastering the art of photography, and learning your equipment. I took years of classes in high school & college to learn the basics. However, my real break through came when I started teaching myself. Here are a few resources that helped me personally grow and develop as a photographer once I got serious about developing my skills. 

Photography Information

Digital Photography School - explore the whole site! This is a great place to begin learning the technical side of your camera, from lenses, settings, lighting conditions and more. If you are a beginner, they will help me learn how to manipulate your camera so that you get the shot you envision.    

Justin & Mary Pancake Sessions  - Who doesn't love pancakes? Explore everything they have for photographers! These short and sweet posts cover everything from their favorite equipment to how to host a client meeting in your home. They were instrumental as Preston and I started our business.

Jasmine Star - Excellent videos from another photographer on how to run a wedding photography business. I used to watch her short videos nonstop as I sought to learn everything I could about how to be the very best photographer. 

Psychology for Photographers - This was extremely helpful in learning how to manage client relationships, how to have hard conversations, the why behind pricing and value, among many other things. This helped me learn how to mentally handle all of the challenges that came my way. 

Creative Live - You can find an answer to almost any question somewhere on their site. They cover a ton. This is the next step in learning not just the technical aspects of shooting, but building a portfolio and running a business as well. Careful, you could get lost in all the helpful resources they offer. 

Equipment

B&H Photo Video - We order all of our camera equipment through B&H. They have great prices, their site is easy to navigate and they take the stress out of the equipment buying experience. 

Ken Rockwell - Before you purchase another piece of equipment, check out Ken. He does some of the best reviews on all different kinds of equipment! In the process of making an excellent decision about what to buy, Ken serves as our ace in the hole. 

Once you've done the hard work of nailing the art form and how your specific camera works, you'll be ready to start narrowing down what field of photography you're interested in pursuing. But that's a post for another day.    

Hope this is a big help as you get started! :)