Oregon Stand-up Paddle Boarding

My wife was quoted in this Oregon Coast Today article on the emerging sport of Stand-up Paddle Boarding. Donna and I have paddled the Ocean (on calm days), up deserted rivers, and across shallow tidewater bays. The scenery is surreal but the excercize us very, very real.

The article starts on Page 12 .

A Definition of Wealth

The work day was nearly done. My 19 year old son, Joel, stopped by the house and busted through the front door with enough energy to light the neighborhood.
"Dad, let's go surfing. Its goin' off," the universal surf phrase meaning the surf is really good. And it was.



So we did. We surfed for almost three hours. Snagging waves, riding them through 3 - 5 - or maybe 8 turns if we were lucky. As one of us was paddling back out, the other was riding one in. We shared the glassy head high waves with only one other surfer right out in front of the house.

I couldn't escape the deep sense of wealth, a notion I had during the entire session. It is the ancient Hebrews, I think, and other ancient cultures, who defined wealth as not what you possess but rather whom you have around you. The ancient world defined wealth in the number of healthy family members, extended family, farms and cattle, and relational connections with influencial and healthy people. It was never about stuff. It was never about the size of my 401k or the the number of homes I own or how fat my eTrade account is. It was always the extended network of who a person was connected to.... who they are "with".

Tomorrow I will feel sore and creaky from the paddling. Today I feel wealthy. I am wealthy.

Neue Quarterly Article - The Hero Culture

Here's a link to a recent story I wrote for Neue Quarterly. The article is called "The Hero Culture" and draws parallels between the drivenness and narcisism found within extreme sports and the similar dynamics that often creep into Christian leadership. For me, there is much joy in doing good things for hurting people from behind the scenes... things nobody else really knows about.

Neue Quarterly is a leadership journal put out by Relevant Media Group.

New Book

I have a new book now submitted to a few publishers through my agent Wes Yoder. This one is called "My Brother's Keeper" or "Life Attempt" or "Of Valor" or... whatever the new publisher wants it to be. That's how these things go. Here is a copy of the first page. I'll post more here later as time goes on. Enjoy:

At the far Northeast side of the Van Nuys area a conga player is finishing up an all night recording session. He’s covered in sweat, in part because it’s already too warm at 5:30 in the morning and partly because he’d taken too much speed. The sun was starting its morning fight to crest the East side of the San Gabriel Mountains and the drummer was fighting to finish up ten days of recording - the last four with no sleep. The drugs and coffee were required. He was sure of that.

A studio engineer was with him, playing the newest conga track through the overhead studio speakers. The driving sounds bounced off the Cedar paneled walls of the small studio office where the drummer, Hank, was digging for his check book. He loved it when the music made his head spin. From its own class of intoxicant, his music, Afro-Cuban music in particular, could draw out tactile emotion from its source and force it on the musician and listener alike. It was as if the dead beast whose hide was now stretched over the primitive drum was angry, or in love, at the moment it became an instrument..

The tempo started to mix with the LSD and something inside of him that was foreign and raw began to boil…

Ticka, ticka, tacka, thud, tacka, thud…

The emotion in the music was going too deep this time.

“Yeah man. That’ll do it. Ok. That was it, right on? Hey the-Biglermeister turn it off now”, The engineer was fading in and out of sleep. He sat in a black swivel chair and didn’t hear Hank at first, “You tuned in my man? Hey, whadda I owe you? I gotta get outta here and crash, man, like soon too, you dig?”

The-Biglermeister, as everyone called him, tried to shake himself awake. At first, his will to write up the bill was not strong enough to conquer his desire to sleep, something nearly impossible anyway while slouched and hunched over in a swivel chair. But he still didn’t respond immediately, so Hank, growing agitated, returned to the sound room to pack up.

His drum bags were custom made by a sail maker in Santa Monica and personalized with anti-war graffiti, hand drawn pot leaves, and rainbow colored peace and love patches. While his family bounced between Chicago and Los Angeles to work in business or the movies, he went into being a perfectly friendly, anti-war, conga playing, rebel with a college degree. None of this was hard to notice. Aside from his painfully long hair and beard, it was his drum bags that served as his business card, the company brochure. On a normal day he’s almost giddy about his drum bags. But not today. He was growing frustrated with his new inability to line up and twist the little grommets that closed the top of the bag.

I’ve closed these before, with these same grommets, with these same hands, a hundred times before, he thought. So he started to argue within himself under his breath, “Little grommets, why now? Why me?” Self propelled, with no help from the outside world, his anxiety had quickly become explosive.

Christianity Today - Radical Faith

The Feb issue of Christianity Today hit the shelves last week. I wrote a story on My Search for Radical Faith that landed on page 36. If you took the time to read it, I'd love to hear from you. If so, what made the biggest impact on you?

Of all the articles I've written, the process behind writing this one effected me the most - so far anyway. I had originally written this at the request of Relevant Magazine. But after I submitted the first draft to the editorial staff, without much explanation, they asked me to change the direction. But that direction - and the surprise ending - was something I could never change because it had so deeply effected me.

In a twist, a fellow Judson University alum, Ed Gilbreath at Urban Ministries in Chicago, referred the story to a CT editor who really loved it.

Here is a link to the web version. I'd say "enjoy the read", but if you genuinely read the story, joy is probably not the first emotion that you'll have. So... umm... more peace on you then.

Catching a Monster

I'm not much of a fisherman, unless you count hooking into seagulls and seaweed as requiring skill. But this got my attention.

These guys are friends of a friend. They were fishing the Willamette River here in Oregon a few weeks ago and caught this 1000 pound Sturgeon.

Lawyer Jokes become Banker Jokes

After my own battles with Countrywide Mortgage Services (which I will begin blogging about separately), and the realization that banks have received billions of dollars without lending it back to struggling consumers, I propose a new rule to the committee that manages global joke telling. Here is my suggested language:

Rule 5150: From this point forward, herewith and thereforeto, we, the committee for the ethical treatment of jokes and their telling, do hereby determine that "lawyers" are no longer to be used to represent the lowest degree of human behavior within jokes and their telling.

Henceforth, "bankers" and/or "mortgage company executives" will be used in their place. Bankers and Mortgage Company Executives (aka MCE's) may be treated as mutually low and interchangeable in context.

Ok, get the word out there and have fun telling "banker jokes".