So I have a rule….don’t blog just to blog. Blog because you have something to say.
The past month I haven’t had much to say. I’ve been working, I’ve been getting ready to go home for vacation and in the process wasn’t doing much to enrich my mind until this happened….
On the Tuesday before Christmas, I wrote an article for my church’s weekly enews deal. I was really digging it because I felt I had a perspective that people would feel strongly about either positively or negatively. In the article I wrote about how foolish it seemed that when something bad happens at Christmas we always say things like “it’s a shame for something so bad to happen at Christmas”. I’ve always given them the sideways head tilt and thought “what does Christmas do to enhance the horribleness of a situation? It would be just as painful no matter what time of year it was.” How little did I realize the bomb was about to drop on me.
I won’t go into the specifics, but the conversation that ensued not an hour later rocked my foundation and made several things brim to the surface. There were feelings of anger, resentment, sadness, and fear. Fear because a situation hadn’t changed that I hoped would. Fear because I didn’t have the ability to tell anyone why I was so down. I went home and cried. I cried harder than I had in years. The tears I didn’t have at my grandmother’s funeral finally broke through. All the fears, anxieties, and anger finally broke through. In that moment there was no one that could comfort me. No one…
So I did something that even to this day baffles me, I pulled out my guitar and started playing a song and singing. Oddly it wasn’t some lover’s lament crap, it was the Fee song “Glory to God”….Fighting through tears trying to sing a song that in my mind was the last I thought I would play was oddly healing. I was able to worship and let the innermost sadness in my spirit get through…instead of pushing it down and ignoring it, walking through life and letting it build…I finally let it out.
Two days later I went home and didn’t know what to say. There was pressure to do something else, throw in the towel, and move home. I almost did it…then I went to a conference in Atlanta and two revelatory things were said that is making me hang in there even though there is a heavy sadness engulfing my spirit….
The word “equip” in english comes from a greek word that means “to prepare and repair” simultaneously. This brought to light the idea to me that when God is equipping you for something He’s not just preparing you for the journey ahead, He is repairing the parts of you that hurt. The parts of you that don’t fit right….
When I heard this I got angry again…I’ve felt like I’ve been prepared a lot but there hasn’t been a lot of “REpairing”. Then someone said this:
” Before we decide what we want to do we must first decide who we are going to be.”
I immediately went OH SH*T in an audible whisper that made many people around me looked at me like I was a leper…
I wanted to jump from my chair and scream at them “DID YOU NOT JUST HEAR THAT? THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!!!!!!”
All my life I’d been told you have to decide what you are going to be. There was a sense in me that this was false. At age 22, I certainly didn’t know what to do so I finally picked a major in history because I didn’t know any better and thought it would be cool. It later became a major in political science too because I couldn’t pass advanced college spanish. Then I graduated college with a piece of paper that said I was smart enough to get out of Florida State. Then the question became what are you going to do for the rest of your life? Granted, a degree is important but the fact that this piece of paper changes everything is a lie. You are no smarter when you enter college than when you exited. All the papers I wrote are meaningless two years out. I am grateful for what I learned and what was taught but nothing in college prepared me for life. Nothing….
Nothing fit for me but helping others.
I was reminded of this again. I’m ready for a new journey and the next trip in that journey is forthcoming soon. I can feel the aching in my bones….
Now I just have to figure out who I want to be…because that will determine what I will do and who will be around me…

What a lot of these brands do not realize is that by playing it safe they will never recover. The brands that take a risk and try something creative to jump start their business will survive and prosper. Look at the decline of magazine sales for one. Before the Internet age, magazines sold by the truckload. I remember being in middle school and having to go to three different places the day the new Sports Illustrated came out. It was that hard to find in my small town because demand was so high. Now, you can find it anywhere. The proliferation of the Internet has made MOST magazines useless. Blogs, espn.com, etc. have made it easy to find articles people are interested in hours, and sometimes minutes, after it is over. Most magazines have had to move to online formats and lower their circulation on newsstands everywhere in order to compete and survive. However, one magazine has seen their circulation go up and that is Wired magazine. Their editor decided that moving to an all online format would be following the crowd and would render them one of many with a smaller market share. He also said that to keep the same format in the print version of their magazine would pigeonhole them. So what did they do? They made a visually interesting magazine. The articles, opinions, etc. were all still there but how they were laid out visually in the magazine made it unique, appealing, and most of all, stood out. They took a risk. They didn’t follow the crowd.