OK, this post is two-parter. If you don’t follow the directions, you’ll be thoroughly confused.

Step one is to watch the video in this post:

“25 is the new 16: How the economy is delaying adulthood for many”

Now watch this video for my take:

Bottom line is, Yes, it’s going to be hard but not as hard as you might think.

There’s something going on in church circles that really has me confused. It happens when a minister or pastor commits adultery and is fired from their church, especially if the person had fairly high profile. The first thing that happens is people generally choose one of two teams.

The first team is the “the Bible says don’t judge” team. They don’t want the person to suffer any significant consequences. Usually because their lives have been touched in a significant way by the work of the pastor. But this isn’t biblical. The bible is very clear that pastors/elders/leaders are held to a higher standard. Which is how it should be.

The second team is the “this person is permanently removed from leadership” team. They think that it’s a one strike and you’re out policy. In their minds the pastor is benched forever.

OK, that’s all fine, but it’s what happens next that confuses me. If the pastor/minister begins to rebuild his life, especially if he/she talks about it online, there is a group of people who get ticked off. I mean furious. They say things like “He hasn’t really repented” or “I don’t see any outward evidence that he’s sorry” or my personal favorite “he’s not sorry that he did it, he’s just sorry that he got caught”. There’s an underlying theme to every comment: he’s not sorry enough.

In the Old Testament people would put on sackcloth and pour ashes on their heads to show their sorrow and repentance. I get the impression that there are some people who want a 2010 equivalent.

I’ve got two friends who have been through this. One was very prominent because he pastored a mega-church. The other was prominent because he was very active blogging and on Twitter and he lead a new church that was exploding.

Both guys had adulterous affairs. Both were fired. Both lost their wives. Both did significant damage to their children. Both have publicly confessed. Both will forever deal with the consequences of their adultery.

Both also are back leading churches. They are also both back in the internet public eye. They are trying to rebuild their lives and there are significant numbers of people who are ticked off because they are.

I’ve seen posts online about each of these guys that have this undercurrent of “he’s not sorry enough” and I don’t understand that sentiment. There also seems to be a punitive theme to the comments. They want these pastors to suffer. I can’t speak for every pastor who’s have an affair but I know my two friends have suffered and continue to suffer, but they are not going to let that define them. They are trying to move on and tell people about Jesus.

I think the problem is that too many church folks have forgotten about Scripture really teaches about repentance and sin. We’ve forgotten that Jesus told a woman caught in the very act of adultery to go and sin no more. We’ve forgotten that God is the only one to really know the condition of a human heart. But mostly what these folks are saying by their actions is that we don’t trust God to handle the situation and He needs us to step in for Him. Believe me, that’s the last thing He needs. God has shown Himself capable of disciplining His kids for thousands of years. He’ll deal with people who haven’t really repented, so we are free to re-purpose our time for more Kingdom minded pursuits.

Handle a Blowout

So you’re cruising down the interstate on your way to the beach. Traffic is light so you’re going slightly over the speed limit. The tunes are cranked up and you’re in the zone when all of  sudden you hear a loud pop and your car starts pulling into the other lane. You’ve had a blowout. Would you know what to do?

“Instead of hitting the brakes, maintain your speed,” says Eric Espinosa, executive director of the Maryland-based National Institute of Vehicle Dynamics. Sudden changes of speed can compromise what structural integrity the tire may still have. Steer gently for the same reason. With things fully under control, slow gradually and pull over to the shoulder.

If you’re looking for a great book to help navigate a midlife crisis, check out “Men in Midlife Crisis”. Here’s a short review.

Read a Tape Measure

Reading a tape measure is one of the building blocks to a ton of different projects. When you first look at tape measure it can be intimidating,  what’s up with all of the lines?  The good news is that it’s really not all that difficult. Here are the steps.

Reading the Inches

The most obvious marks you’ll find on your tape measure are the ones for inches. They’re the ones with the large numbers on your strip of tape. Each distance from one number to the next is exactly one inch.

Reading the Half Inch Marks

When you read a tape measure you’ll notice that there are lines in between each number representing an inch. The lines are of different lengths and the tallest ones mark each half inch. These are usually in between each number for every inch on your measuring tape.

Quarter, Eighth, and Sixteenth Inch Marks

The next thing you’ll notice is that there are other marks in between the half inch and inch numbers. The next tallest ones are the quarter inch markers, followed by the eighth inch, and sixteenth inch markers. Each smaller fraction of an inch is marked with a shorter line.

Here’s how you read a tape measure:

Step one: Pull out a length of your tape measure starting at the point where you want to begin measuring. If you’re using a heavy duty measuring tape you can lock it at the length where you stopped so you don’t have to hold the length of tape down with your fingers.

Step two: The first thing you read from your measuring tape is the inches. Read or write down the closest number to where you stopped.

Step three: You then go over each of the half inch, quarter, and other lines on it and write them down until you get to the point where you stopped.

Reminders

If you’re measuring large spaces you may hook one end of the tape measure and pull the whole length back. You may also lay and read a tape measure on the floor. Most tape measures you’ll find will have the same unit of measurement

This picture will hopefully help pull it all together.

One thing I learned while living in Tuscaloosa was how important it was for college football coaches to work for certain people. There are coaches that everybody wants to work for. Guys like Nick Saban, Urban Meyer of Florida, Bobby Bowden formerly of Florida State, Joe Paterno of Penn Sate, and Mac Brown of Texas. Up and coming assistant coaches will move their families all over the country to work for one these coaches.  Sometimes knowing that it will mean 80+ hour work weeks, tons of traveling, and no guarantee of having a job next season.  Even with all this, they still choose to do it. So what can the average guy learn from this?

Find something you love to do.College football coaches don’t all make $4 million per year. In fact, it’s only been in the last 4 years that anybody other than the top 5 guys were making big dollars. Everybody else worked for salaries that were barely minimum wage when you counted up all the hours they worked. Coaches coach because they love it. They love working with and developing young men and you need to find something you love to do.

Find out who the top guys are in your field. For example, if you’re programmer you’d probably like to work at Google. Most programmers don’t start there, so find out the people who used to work at Google and now are somewhere else. That’s who you want to work for. Begin the climb up the ladder.

Throughout your career, always remember it matters who you’ve worked with. I used to hire people and one of the things that made a resume move to the top of the stack was seeing that they had worked for good folks. Some people might call this a good old boy network but it’s not. It’s simply that if a person was good enough to get hired by someone I respected, then I wanted to talk to him/her.

Learn everything you can when you’re working for a successful guy. A great illustration of this is the new Tennessee coach, Derek Dooley. He holds the record for the longest tenure working for Nick Saban, seven years. Now he’s heading a major program and you can see the similarities everywhere. From the way he talked during his introductory press conference, to the way he promotes his program. I heard Coach Dooley say in an interview that one of the main reasons he stayed with Coach Saban so long was because he wanted to learn the entire system.

Lastly, have a goal to one day be the guy everybody wants to work for. You’ll get to work with the best and get the satisfaction of seeing them succeed later on in life.

But the big idea is do everything possible to be selective about who you work for.

Make a Good Home Movie

If you’ve got an smart phone chances are it’s got a video camera it. Same with most pocket point-and-shoot cameras. Not only do they have them, some of them are good enough to turn out some really good stuff (check out examples below).

But let’s be honest, most home movies suck. Not because the person shooting them didn’t want or intend it to be good, they just didn’t know how to make their movie good. So here’s a few tips from “Popular Mechanics”.

“Sure, a $400 video-editing suite gives you advanced features like special effects, but inexpensive software such as Adobe’s Premiere Elements or preinstalled programs such as Apple’s iMovie serve just fine for most amateur moviemakers. No amount of editing, though, overcomes shoddy camera work. Here are simple ways to make your home movies look great.

Avoid a common rookie mistake by taking establishing shots. Typically, they are filmed at the beginning of a scene to give context. One example: an exterior of a house, followed by interior shots.

Another tip: Start the camera a few seconds earlier than you need to and run it a few seconds to gain better control over pacing and lots of room to edit. Reshooting the same action from different perspectives allows multiangle cuts of exciting moments. For great transitions, shoot the people, places and scenery that surround the action. Try to shoot ahead of the action so it appears to be entering the frame, not leaving it.”

These movies were shot completely with an iPhone 4

One of the quickest ways you can improve as a man is by listening to successful men, guys who have actually done something over a period of time. A great source of these kinds of men is college football. I’m fortunate to know a few Division 1 coaches and one of the first things I discovered after getting to know them is they are different. They are not all talk. Not only do they know the x’s and o’s of their sport, they know how to motivate and lead. Nobody survives in coaching unless they can get stuff done.

Recently sports talk radio host Paul Finebaum, did series of brief interviews with some of the biggest names in college coaching. I learned a ton from listening to them. Below is the link to the individual interviews or you can go to iTunes and subscribe.

Kirk Forenz, Iowa

Charlie Strong, Louisville

Brian Kelly, Notre Dame and Bob Stoops, Oklahoma

Remember the first week you went back to elementary school after summer break? Two things were guaranteed to happen: you would get a new lunch box and you’d have to write a paper titled “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”. I know we’re only half-way through summer and I’m not going back to school but I wanted to let you know why I haven’t been blogging for the last couple of months.

First, a little background that might help it all make sense. In November of 2008, after 11 years, I stopped working in churches or being “in the ministry” as all good Baptists would say. The reasons why aren’t important, but if you’re curious check out Fish Bowl.  Anyway, I went back to the marketplace and decided to just chill for a while.

It didn’t take long before I started getting the itch again, not to start working in a church but to do something. I had gone from working 60-hour weeks and then stewing about work while I was at home, to walking out the door on Friday at 5 and not thinking about work until I went back on Monday. In fact, I just finished a great 10-day vacation without getting a single phone call or email from work. To tell you the truth, it was a little weird. A few days ago my wife was talking to someone who used to work with me and said “Sometimes he doesn’t know what to do with himself.” That was a great synopsis of the last few months. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with myself.

I narrowed the list of possibilities down to two things: a consulting service to help churches by doing secret shopper visits and teaching/training men. Great! I had it. But in a just a few days the nagging feeling of being unfocused returned, so I decided to try doing nothing. No blogging, no trying to get secret shopper visits with churches, I stopped working on my book, nothing.

I honestly didn’t do this with the purest of motives. In the back of my head I was thinking “Once God see’s me doing nothing He’ll go Old Testament on me and reveal what I’m supposed to do with some grand display, maybe I’ll even get a burning bush”. So I waited. And Waited. After a few weeks it became apparent that I had seriously misjudged God. He was taking the very parental strategy of allowing me to do what I wanted. If I wanted to sit doing nothing, that was fine with Him, He’d wait me out. And you know what? He did.

Inactivity finally got the best of me, so I did the only thing I knew to do, I sat down and did a pro’s and con’s list of the two opportunities because I had to choose. There weren’t enough hours in the day for me to do both effectively. In the end the decision came down to be realizing that I could help churches do Sunday mornings better, I have the abilities and experience to help pastors get their systems working better. OR I could train up men to help them. To me teaching/training men has more capacity to make the largest impact.

So I shut down the secret shopper part of my website. I purchased an iPhone 4 because of the front-facing camera which will make doing videos much easier.  I literally took my Moleskine out, turned to a blank page and asked the question “How can I teach/train men?” No preconceived notions, no thinking I had to do it a certain way, just a “clean sheet of paper” approach to a huge project.

One of the first realizations I had is I’m going to have to say “no” to some things I’ve been doing that aren’t bad, they just don’t fit the mission. I’ve got a few more commitments to finish up in the next few weeks that I won’t be re-upping for and that’s a good thing. It’s step one to gaining focus and I think it’s the step that so many guys stumble on because they wrongly think they’ll be letting people down.

One thing is for sure; I know what to do with myself now. And that’s how I spent my summer vacation.

In honor of the last episode of 24. Thanks to www.sacredsandwich.com