Posts Tagged ‘Down Time’

How to Serve Those Who Serve Us

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

This week has been one filled with great inspi­ra­tion and sor­row for me.

I am writ­ing this from one of the most beau­ti­ful loca­tions I have ever been to. I am at Mal­ibu, which is a Young Life Camp located in Canada in a nar­row fjord called Princess Louisa Inlet. The first pic­ture included here shows the beauty of this place. The other is my inspi­ra­tion for this post.

On Mon­day, I arrived here with my son Wes­ley and about 50 young peo­ple from our church. We are here to serve the fam­i­lies of US mil­i­tary who have recently returned from deploy­ment in Afghanistan or Iraq. Some have only been back in the states for a few weeks, and this is the first real down time they have had with their wives, hus­bands and kids.

Re-entry can be very dif­fi­cult, and my role has been to serve as a small group leader with a few cou­ples. It has been truly rich and wonderful.

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Posted in Inspiration | 6 Comments »

Keeping Your Perspective

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

We all fight bat­tles at some point in our lives and careers, and some of these strug­gles can last a long time. Lengthy bat­tles cause weari­ness. Over time, weari­ness erodes our con­fi­dence. When we lose con­fi­dence, we can eas­ily lose our perspective.

When a leader loses per­spec­tive for too long, it can be terminal.

So what should one do who finds them­selves tired, fear­ful, and con­fused? Here are 5 sug­ges­tions for those of you who might be trapped in this very uncom­fort­able place right now.

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Posted in Leadership | 2 Comments »

Things Will Not Fall Apart

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

I am writ­ing this post from a great lit­tle cof­fee house on the Ore­gon coast. This has been a morn­ing of catch­ing up on email. As I men­tioned in my last post, “Some­times You Just Have To,” I spent last week with friends and fam­ily, surf­ing our way up the Cal­i­for­nia coast. It was a fan­tas­tic mem­ory mak­ing time!

Today I am pay­ing the price. I have been knee deep in email for the last three hours.

One of the email mes­sages I just reviewed was from my won­der­ful team­mate, Kit John­son, who runs HR and Account­ing for us at Build­ing Cham­pi­ons. She sent me a report I had requested with our team’s unused vaca­tion hours. I asked for this because I want to make sure I am encour­ag­ing my team­mates to take full advan­tage of their vaca­tion time.

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Posted in Leadership | 4 Comments »

Trip or Vacation?

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

As I write this, I am in the home stretch of our return trip from South Africa. 26 hours down, just 2 to go…

My fam­ily and I spent the last three weeks sight­see­ing, learn­ing, sun­ning and surf­ing our way through this amaz­ing yet chal­lenged coun­try. We were so very for­tu­nate to join my sis­ter, her South African hus­band and their three won­der­ful kids on this trip. My brother-in-law Mark was a fan­tas­tic tour guide.

Our sched­ule was action packed. We saw pen­guins on the beach, vis­ited the Apartheid Museum, hiked through beau­ti­ful moun­tains, went zip lin­ing over rivers, and rode Ostriches. We went on game dri­ves where we saw lions, rhi­nos, ele­phants, and wilde­beests. We learned a lot about their bro­ken gov­ern­men­tal system.

And yes, I finally surfed my dream wave at Jeffrey’s Bay.

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Posted in Self-Development | 1 Comment »