You’re up earlier than you need to be so that you can arrive earlier than anyone else and get in an hour or two of extra practice, extra work. This is drive and determination, this is the desire to get ahead, or, at least, not fall behind. This is how you make an impact.

But do you have metrics for enough? When the right amount of impact is made, will you know it? And if you know it, will you still sleep less and push more?

Maybe you’re trying to make an impact, or maybe you’re outrunning the fear that you’re not the impact-making type and that today is the day everyone will realize it. You can’t sustain good work and ministry–much less health–that way.

Decide what counts as enough. Then stop.

I always sleep terribly the night before the spring time change. I sleep a fitful sleep full of nightmares about sleeping too late. But no worry this year: I had a plan to trick my alarm clock. It was brilliantly analog.

Here it is: since the phone is the alarm clock, switch it into airplane mode before midnight and set the alarm for one hour earlier than you actually want. If you want to get up at 5:00, set the alarm for 4:00. Since, in daylight savings-adjusted time, 4:00 is actually 5:00, you’re good. Mass chronology tracking shenanigans: defeated.

Only somehow the phone clock changed on its own anyway, even with all the networks switched off. Which means that the alarm went off at a pre-daylight savings time of 3:00.

Digital wins again. I tried to analog outsmart the time change and got digitally punched in the face.

Jesus knows a lot. He knows things other people don’t know, even about themselves. He knows things about himself–where he’s from and where he’s going.

Maybe one of the keys to understanding the foot-washing episode that unfolds in John chapter 13 is Jesus’ self-understanding. As that story begins, John tells us that Jesus, “knowing . . . that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table . . .” All the action that follows is grounded in what Jesus knows to be true about himself.

John is at pains to portray the action: Jesus getting up from the table; Jesus laying aside his robe; Jesus taking a towel; Jesus tying the towel around his waist; Jesus filling a basin with water. Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. We are meant to marvel at the deliberate movement of one who knows what he is doing because he knows who he is because he knows where he’s come from and because he knows where he’s going.

When we know where we come from and where we’re going, we can do a lot. The greatest feats of humility and service are possible when we are freed from the chore of performing our identity for the world and when we are permitted to just be who we know ourselves made to be. We are children of God, made in God’s image. We are going to God. Our lives are pointed in that direction.

Jesus’ instructions to imitate his humble service are possible when we own those truths about ourselves.

Jesus’ inability to be surprised is a bit of a hurdle for me. I’m working on a sermon about the foot washing episode in John 13, where the author insists on telling the reader the things Jesus knows that the disciples in the story don’t. Each time the story does that my heart sinks a little. I kind of want to see Jesus surprised.

All the gospels give away that their Galilean subject knows things normal people don’t, like what people are thinking before they say it and the true intentions behind peoples’ gotcha questions. John does it the most, though.

Jesus knew that the hour had come. Jesus knew who was going to betray him. It’s not the plausability of it that gets me; the objection that he couldn’t possibly know those things seems hung up on the wrong element. It’s the drama of it that gets hurt when we’re told as an aside that Jesus knows the ending already.it sucks the tension right out of everything. 

This is another reminder that the gospel is the gospel. It’s not some prototype of a story onto which we can project our own literary or critical conventions to make it do what stories are “supposed” to do.

Kiddo went to a new gymnastics class yesterday at a legit gym that has bars and rings and the whole bit. She’s been cartwheeling and handstanding all over the house for six months, stopping only long enough to watch YouTube tutorials and floor routines. 

Yesterday her course of self-teaching met it’s first real obstacle: the push up. 

The coach put Kiddo and her classmates through a circuit of gymnastics skills AND strength exercises, and Kiddo strained and struggled. 

Though I know literally nothing about the sport, gymnastics seems to rely on both complicated technical skills AND Herculean physical strength. One of those attributes without the other does not a gymnast make. 

The same goes for all kinds of meaningful work. Impressive skills are supported by core strengths. The gifted orator practices reading. The in-demand designer works on listening. The effective teacher prefects her diction. 

Push ups. 

What’s your push up? 

I’m getting my game document in good working order. Fresh off a weekend youth retreat where this bad boy was ever at my side, I can say that the time it takes to assemble and maintain a collection of games for youth ministry is time we’ll spent. Nothing brings a group of teenagers together quite like a simple, thoughtful, well-led game. 

Of course, as with any vital resource, 100 % of my games are pilfered from other sources.. There’s people I actually work with. There’s this classic blog post and this YouTube channel, and then there are those old Youth Specialties games books. 

Anyone who says they invented a game should be regarded with suspicion. 
For my money, the best games require few or no supplies. They don’t progressively eliminate people but encourage constant participation by the whole group. They don’t rely on embarrassing people. 

I update this document constantly, and I take a copy with me on every retreat. 

What’s your go-to game source? 

I threw in these 15 minute prompted journaling time blocks for this weekend’s Confirmation retreat. The prompts all related to Brian McLaren’s appendix and built toward a Statement of Faith all the students would be writing. 

I expected resistance. 

It did not come. 

Instead, students asked during the retreat evaluation session for more of that journaling time and less of the grown-ups-talking-at-us time. I will gladly oblige that request (I will not, however, oblige the evaluation request for more Hamilton sing-along time).

Here’s the assignment we used to guide the student’s journaling and faith statement writing. Is it too vague for 8th graders? Too abstract? It seemed to work well enough this first run, but I’m always tweaking, you know. 

So here’s a powerful confluence of events. The 8th grade Confirmation class leaves for its spring retreat tonight, the evening of the very day on which many of them will receive letters from the selective admission high schools to which they applied (it’s a Chicago thing).

So at the same time that my students will be relishing acceptance or despairing rejection from the schools of their choice, I and their leaders will be nudging them toward their own acceptance-of faith, of the church, of Jesus. 

It’s bound to be a time filled with possibility. That’s how I’m choosing to look at it. 

One of my first sermons to begin Lent after becoming a pastor made a lot out of these 40 days as something that couldn’t be got ’round. “We have to go through it,” I confidently intoned, drawing on the heart of the Protestant work ethic to face what needs facing. That’s how it rings to me now, at least.

But this Lent finds me more eager to tread the penitent path than I have been before. This year Lent feels not like something that must be done but something that can, and should, be done.

A great deal of mud has stuck on my shoes this past season that I’m eager to scrape off with a gnarly Lenten stick: outrage, anxiety, even despair. I need a season to drop some of that stuff.

So much accrues. Obligations, habits, grudges, attitudes: Lent is an invitation to walk for a season without some of those things by making a habit of dropping them by the roadside. It beckons us to experience time for a time without the daily dose of outrage, without those digital dopamine hits of affirmation, without the satiety of sweets or steak or whatever it is that makes us full.

The promise, of course, is that we will find how little we need them. We will discover again how much we can do and how far we can go on trust, simplicity, and grace.

The Acer R11 is back in the shop again. Seriously as The Verge might be about the R11 as the best Chromebook you can buy, when your one thing as a computer is web connectivity, you’d better be sure that thing works reliably.

So we’re blogging on the phone.

I finished Cal Newport’s Deep Work on Monday and started putting one of its insights to work on Tuesday by tweaking my task list for this week. Newport is down on task and to-do lists, because the don’t differentiate between shallow and deep work. Shallow work are tasks that any college educated worker could do, right now: ordering bagels for the youth group, scheduling a meeting, updating attendance logs. They need done (and well), but they don’t demand much in the way of concentration.

Placed alongside deep tasks, things that do require long periods of uninterrupted concentration, we choose the shallow stuff. It feels good to tick off those boxes.

So this week my task list is in two columns: deep and shallow. The deep all have to do with preparing materials for this weekend’s Confirmation retreat. 

Now to schedule the time to actually do the deep work…