In High School and College, I worked at a summer camp. I love the way that camp can get kids out of their comfortable life environments and expose them to new experiences and open their eyes to evaluation and life change.

One summer, my area of responsibility was leading the backpack guides. It was a fun team of young men and women who loved the outdoors and, I came to discover, loved playing tricks on one another.

If you are a prankster, you know that there are some classic pranks that fall into specific genres. The tofurkey genre of tricks involves the switch out. Where someone does something or eats something that is very different from what was expected. It looked like turkey, it was served at Thanksgiving, but we all came to realize it was something very different…

This was the favorite genre for the backpack guides and would typically play out as someone would come off...

On a recent trip to Africa to participate in some relief work and visit my parents, I had the opportunity to go on a safari. There were five of us in the jeep and each of us was assigned the task of “spotter”. As a spotter, our job was to point out animals to our guide and the group. Usually our guide had already seen the animal, but every once in awhile one of the members of the group found the animal before him.

A technique that was helpful in spotting animals was to have soft eyes. This is similar to star gazing. When you look directly at the star, it can often appear to diminish in brightness. However, if you look just next to the star and view the star indirectly, it appears to increase in brightness. Having soft eyes allows you to see forms and colors and look for irregularities in the landscape. It connects cognitively as these irregularities can also be logical...

I began climbing the corporate career ladder in middle school. So needless to say I’ve washed a lot of dishes and had a lot of bosses. On one occasion, I was sitting behind my desk and the senior leader of the organization stormed into my office. Furious that something had happened, he demanded answers. As he began to describe the situation, the vein on his neck began to get bigger and bigger mirroring the decibel level of the conversation.

It was clear to me (and everyone in the offices around me) that I had done something wrong. I had failed in my responsibilities.

Then the conversation turned and he began to use declarative statements about who I was as an employee and who I was as a person. He began to tell me what my motives were.

I always…
I never…
I was the type of person who…

The “discussion” went from failing in a responsibility to failing as a human being...

In 1924 Frank Stewart opened a small root beer stand in Mansfield, Ohio. Frank was a school teacher and used the money he made from the stand to support his love of education. His In-n-Out style menu only served root beer and popcorn (although he was known to add extra salt to the popcorn in order to help his root beer sales).

This was the start of what became my six year old self’s beverage of choice: Stewart’s Orange N’ Cream Soda. Drinking a Stewart’s Orange N’ Cream Soda reminded me of everything good in the world. Baseball, summer break, swimming holes, and 50-50 bars. Soda, in general, was a luxury for our family and usually meant grape or cola Shasta, so to have a Stewart’s Orange N’ Cream felt extravagant and luxurious.

In a moment of reminiscing a couple of years ago, I thought it would be fun to revert back to my six year old self and crack open a cold Orange N’ Cream...

I heard an interview with Jason Russell one of the founders of Invisible Children, who you may remember started a campaign against Joseph Kony in 2012, hoping to end the evil reign of the LRA. The campaign was an overnight success. However the success happened so quickly that Jason had a very embarrassing and very public break down. In his interview, I was struck by his ownership and honesty in describing his break down and most notably, the role that his family played in helping him get back to work in a healthy fashion. As a family, they established some ground rules to establish a balance between work and home life.

It can be incredibly difficult to find this balance. Complicating the issues is the variety of opinions out there. Numerous books and podcasts have been presented with simple and easy solutions. The problem is that while they all may be simple and easy to...

I grew up in a very small town. It was a summer resort town. The “resort part” was limited to a lake that you could waterski on. The population of the town in the summer would swell to 2,500 people and pets.

For a brief period of time there was a movie theater that would show one movie a month, that had typically already been in theaters for well over a year. The first movie I saw there was Disney’s, The Jungle Book. The film was released in 1967, but I saw it in the theater in 1977 (It was a very small town).

Looking back on the films of my childhood I remember being impacted that both Bambi’s mom and the fox’s mom from The Fox and the Hound were killed. Don’t get me started on Where the Red Fern Grows…

On a recent trip to Rwanda, one of the leaders of Africa New Life Ministries was describing the difficulty Americans have in seeing poverty. He described it this way...

My wife showed me this quote and I started laughing:

Someone’s counselor knows all about you.

I know one therapist who knows all about me. And while they know all about me, I have only briefly met them. Their understanding of who I am has been established through the vantage point of another individual. They have created a set of assumptions of how I think and interact, based on the interpretation of another individual.

Often times, before an individual places their faith in Jesus, they will do the same thing. They will look to understand who Jesus is by looking to one of his followers. The problem is, if they look to us, they might only see who Jesus is through a secondary source. I know that my reflection of Jesus is marred by all of the ripples that I create. Ripples of selfishness and pride. Ripples of bad theology and lack of discipline. Ripples of arrogance and...

Having sat through a number of external audits, I have seen my fair share of junior auditors. Now a junior auditor has a tough job. They are typically young and thrown into an environment where most everyone they work with loathes them and wants to spend as little time with them as possible.

Often times this stigma creates a self fulfilling prophetic cycle, where, because of stereotype of their position, they develop an caustic attitude and demeanor to establish protective walls around their hearts, which in turn, reenforces the stereotype. Other juniors would, in a desire to be liked, lean into their insecurities and become a door mat for every financial analyst. Neither approach helps their clients, nor their future in accounting.

During the fraud interviews or systems walk throughs, the primary role of the junior auditor is to ask questions.

With every organization...

Saving our prayer life from meaningless words…

I have been around a lot of prayers. Prayers before meals, before church, before the offering, before the message, before the game, prayers involving hedges, prayers filled with Fathergod, prayers as a letter (Dear Jesus,…), prayers after the game, after the message, after the offering, after church. Lots and lots of prayers.

The prayers that always bothered me were the repetitive “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayers. These always seemed to have as much meaning as singing the chorus of Oceans for the 24th time. My kids went to a Christian school for a number of years and during the weekly praise and worship time, it would always conclude with a sweet little second grade girl praying “to close our time together”. As a parent attending these on a regular basis, I got to hear that cute little second grader pray a hundred times for...