The good folks at Disney sent me a handful of High School Musical 3 DVDs to give away. So, stealing a page from Marko, let’s have a caption contest. The top 5 captions submitted for this picture will win.

After a really great vacation, I’m feeling refreshed and excited to be back in the saddle. The last season of ministry (the last year or so…) has been an extremely busy and taxing one and I allowed myself to go far too long without taking care of myself physically, emotionally and, to some extent, spiritually.

I may have shared this before and if so, consider it a reminder that you may need as much as I have recently: “TIME OUTS” ARE A REALLY IMPORTANT THING!

Think about a football game. In each game, teams are given three timeouts per half, or a total of SIX per game. When used wisely, these timeouts help teams re-group, re-fresh, re-strategize and re-focus for the task at hand. I think the same is true in our personal lives….we all need to call Time Out once in a while. Admittedly, I’m not the best at taking my timeouts, but I do have a strategy I try to follow and it looks something like this:

Daily Time Out: Two or Three short, 20 minute breaks each day to clear my head and think about something….anything….other than the daily grind.

Weekly Time Out: A true sabbath every week. Not checking emails, not “dropping by” the office for an hour. A day to relax, refresh and re-coup.

Monthly Time Out: One day a month to escape from the office for a “mini-sabbatical”. I read, pray, dream, journal etc.

Yearly Time Out: Actually, I try (but don’t usually succeed) to take three weeks off per year: Two traditional vacation breaks with my family, and one that is “Kurt focused”. This past vacation was an example of a Kurt-focused timeout. I went on two separate camping/dirt bike trips, laid around a lot, and took my wife on dates to restaurants of my choosing.

Your Time Out plan certainly doesn’t need to look like mine, but I would encourage you to have one.

Our leadership team has been asked by Pastor Rick to focus a great portion of our ministry energy this year in two key areas: “Connecting” and “Equipping”. Josh Griffin, our high school pastor and blogger extraordinaire, and I have spent some time brainstorming creative new ways to connect students to each other and our ministry and to equip parents, students and leaders. Our goal was not to simply create new programs, but larger strategies that will stay in place as various programs come and go.

I’m almost certain Josh will post about this stuff in greater detail, but I thought I would steal some of his thunder and beat him to the punch! Of the eight or nine ideas we came up with, here are my three favorite:

- An Online “Campus” For Students: Our church has four physical campuses, but we want to create an online “campus” for students who have to miss a weekend due to travel, blended families, etc. Our hope is that students will be able to tune into a live feed of our JH and HS programs complete with an adult volunteer “pastor” to interact with. Stay tuned.

- Parent Campus Connections: Certainly some of you are already doing this and can give us some input. Our hope is to get parents of “Same grade/Same school” to form little prayer/support/school action/etc. groups.

- The Starting Five: We want to strategically partner-up brand new volunteers with a veteran volunteer for the first 5 weeks in our ministry.

There’s much more to share, and I’m sure Josh will. But he will do so knowing I am the superior blog updater guy.

It’s been well over a year since I’ve taken a true week-long vacation, so I decided now was a good time. Kayla is in Kenya, and Cole is in a cast due to a broken wrist (a wrist we waited about TWO months to have checked out by a doctor!) so we really don’t have anything planned. Just some lazy days followed by a dirt bike trip with some buddies. Today was my first official vacation day and it was action packed (insert sarcasm).

- Woke up about 9:00 a.m. and laid around watching news and ESPN until Rachel got back from a morning coffee date with a friend.

- At 11:30 we went to Chick-Fil-A for our usual Monday morning date…I drank way too much sweet tea.

- Over lunch I began to warm her up to the idea of purchasing a used pick up truck to haul our bikes around. I had a truck for years and about three years ago I donated it to our church thinking I had outlived my need for a pickup. Of course, that was before we started dirt bike riding. Doh!

- This afternoon we picked Cole up from school and took him to get a cast on his broken wrist.

- A few minutes ago I got back from test-driving the truck I have my eye on. I highly doubt I will end up buying it (or any other one for that matter), but it was kinda fun. My environmentally-minded, global warming sensitive friends will be disappointed in my vehicular choice should I make a purchase.

- Now I’m getting ready to eat some chili, hang with the family and gear up for 24.

Dear vacation,
I think I love you.

What happens when there are tons of homes in foreclosure in Southern California? According to this article, skaters from all across the country and even from overseas are staking out communities with lots of empty homes……with empty swimming pools.

(Thanks, Jason.)

Three key tasks of a communicator are to convince the listeners you care about them, to convince them you know what you’re talking about and to convince them that what you are saying is worth listening to.

The last two are easy….simply know what you’re talking about and communicate in an engaging way!

But the first one is a tougher challenge. How do you let listeners know you really care about them? How do you, in essence, gain the trust of your audience? You can begin earning the trust of your students in a few fairly simple ways:

- Be yourself…students can smell a fake.
- Be consistent…students can smell a flake.
- Be vulnerable…students trust people who are willing to share failures and struggles.
- Be fair….life isn’t fair, but young teenagers think it should be.
- Be involved long-term…students in 8th grade will more quickly trust leaders they’ve known since 7th grade.

As you begin to build more and more trust, your students will more easily believe you truly care for them, and they will be more likely to pay attention and put your bible studies and lessons into action.

If you are the leader of your ministry, one of your primary roles is to equip other godly men and women to share the ministry load. But what does it mean to “equip” somebody? Here are some thoughts:

Empower: Give them the freedom to minister and lead.
Quietly correct: When correction is needed, do so privately.
Unlimited support: Become their biggest cheerleader.
Invest time: Follow Christ’s example…he invested time with those carrying out his ministry.
Provide tools: Make sure training, seminars and resources are available.

Ever wonder whether something is worth the time and effort it takes? Is it really worth it to spend a full day making a 5 minute video that your students don’t seem to care about? Is it worth it to spend two days making a 3 minute video that they absolutely love? How much time should be spent creating cool graphics? How much money should you spend on your summer calendar?

A few of us on our team recently made a commitment to try to run the vast majority of these types of decisions through this little grid. Basically, I want our team to avoid doing things that are high in investment and low on impact. However, I would love for us to focus on things that are low in investment and high on impact.

A few examples of things that might be high investment/low impact:
- A game that takes an hour ahead of time to set up, 10 minutes to explain but only TWO minutes to play!
- A 5 minute story/illustration that is funny but doesn’t tie into lesson well.
- Running every aspect of your own camp instead of letting the camp do the programming (maybe the same impact but much different investment….)

A few examples of things that might be low investment/high impact:
- Borrowing ideas from our ministry friends.
- Repeating really good lessons and series from time to time.
- Buying pre-produced videos instead of creating our own.
- Less time spent creating promo and fliers and more time “talking it up” with students.

A pretty good weekend, especially considering the fact that things felt a little “cut N paste” together due to so much attention on our Believe retreat.

ATTENDANCE: Attendance was a little low. Again, I think this may have been due to lots of kids who went to the retreat may have skipped church upon their return.

FUN FACTOR: Pretty high. Our lesson was around the idea of learning to grow on your own and we did a good job of tying much of our program into the theme.

LESSON: David Hughes, one of our college-aged volunteers taught the bulk of the lesson after a short video set-up by me. He did an AMAZING job; one of the best JH lessons I’ve heard in a really long time.

MUSIC: Music was great! Probably a little mellower than usual, but the band was tight, the kids singing blended well together.

VOLUNTEER INVOLVEMENT: Very low. Because so many leaders went to Believe, most of them didn’t show back up for the weekend program which made things a bit rough around the tables.

The truth is, I’m a pretty laid-back guy and really don’t get too worked up over much. But there are a few things recently that have bothered me a little bit. For instance:

SHAVING: the whole process is such a bother which is why I choose to only shave once a week or for an important meeting. Electric razors don’t work well and traditional blades are a hassle.

MY COMPUTER SCREEN: I have a brand new lap-top that seems to be pretty nice (I know nothing about computers so maybe it’s really a turd), but whenever I am in battery mode, the screen flickers ever so slightly….not enough to be a major problem, just enough to bother me a bit.

850 BILLION DOLLARS: I’m no economist, and I really don’t understand how we got into this mess or what the best way to get out of it is, but 850 BILLION Bucks maybe fix it? That bothers me.

FEET: Mine are gross, and I imagine most people feel the same way about theirs. The fact that I have to try to “un-gross” my feet bothers me.

MEETINGS: They usually don’t accomplish much but everybody seems to think we need them which is why I have to stop this post short….I’m late for one. Meetings bother me and me being late for meetings bothers other people.