Improv Classs Starts Tonight

Like I said earlier, I'm teaching a six-week Improv class at VCC starting tonight. I'm pretty excited. I tell Brad all the time that improv is magic. It has special powers to build community and change lives. I can't explain it, except that it makes us adults like children. Here's a quote from our Improv Matriarch, Viola Spolin:

"Improvisation is not exchange of information between players; it is communion. The heart of improvisation is transformation."

There are still a few spots left if you get this before 7:00 tonight.

Sentimental Sojourner

We arrived back home from vacation on the one-year anniversary of our moving here to Ohio. It was strange to fly into the Dayton airport, a place I had only been twice before, and convince myself that I was now home. I've returned home to McCarran in Vegas at least fifty, maybe one hundred times, in my life. LAX or John Wayne a few dozen times. It is odd when home is not yet a familiar place.

Vacations make me homesick. The more places I have called home, the more homesick I get when I travel. This idea of life as a pilgrimage is foundational to me. The idea of being a "rebel pilgrim" is more than a title I've given this blog or my production company. It's my spiritual mandate: to be engrafted into the story of Israel and Christ as a wanderer/traveler/seeker. Part of being a pilgrim is being content with never having a home - at least not until the journey ends. The literal pilgrimage of my life has been simultaneously exhilarating and emotionally devastating. I desire to be grounded and yet I desire constant change and movement. Part of my soul never left Las Vegas. A smaller part stayed in California. Part was left here in Cincinnati from my college years, but when I returned I could not find it...because I had changed and returned home a different person.

And now nostalgia meets reality. Home is here. I would not go back, though sentimentality gets the best of me. Maybe there is time travel in the eternity we call Heaven. I'd give all my fortune (it's a lot, trust me) to have one more ping-pong match with Ernie, Doug and Lumpy in the second floor lounge at President's Hall in 1992. I'd love one more day with just Debbie and Cosmo (our cat) in our tiny first apartment in Las Vegas in 1995. One more early Sunday morning setting up for Canyon Ridge at Cimarron High School in 1996. Planning an early Apex service with Doug Citizen, Kristi Andrade and the gang in 1997. Waking up in the middle of the night at a time when I could hold Eli with just one hand and prepare a bottle with the other in 1999. A leisurely espresso with Kevin Rains in Quebec City in 2001. Just one more warm summer night in 2002 in the backyard of our first house on Tame Place. One more hour to read Nouwen or Willard or Hauerwas or Yoder for the very first time at the Starbucks at Lake Mead and Rainbow. And how I long for just one more performance at Tony n' Tina's Wedding circa 2005. To be Michael Just or Barry Wheeler for just two hours again. To step on stage and teach my friends at Lifelines one more time in Costa Mesa in 2006. To walk down Hollywood Boulevard with my headshot and resume in hand, muttering the lines of my upcoming audition and carefully not stepping on anyone's star out of respect for the auditions they endured decades before me. To slate my name and agency and nail one more reading would be a taste of heaven. But those days are over - all of those days. And I couldn't pick any one of those days that I liked more than the others. They are my pilgrimage. I loved them. I miss them.

And though I can't always feel it in the moment, I trust that a few years from now I will miss the summer of 2008 - the trip to Disney World with two boys who will still hold my hand and aren't too grown up to cry if they get hurt. Someday soon I'll wax nostalgic over my first year at The Vineyard: diving headfirst back into vocational ministry, being loved and accepted by a wonderful church, forging the foundation of what will be life-long friendships. Someday this very moment will be a romantic memory in the light of a future reality.

I'm a sentimental guy. Hauerwas says that sentimentality is the most dangerous enemy of the gospel. I've never fully understood his point, but part if it involves the easy choice we all make to live in the past as the future spontaneously unfolds all around us. As I manage through a strange bout of melancholy after a wonderful vacation, I am encouraged to see that my life has been so full of joy that my only sadness comes from remembering how good my life has been until now.

Vacated.

One more day in Kansas and then we fly back home. It has probably been the best vacation ever...a perfect mixture of doing stuff and not doing stuff. This last week has been relaxing and I think we are all ready to return home again. I'll have a few more days off work when we get back and I'm looking forward to doing a little reading and writing before jumping back into the chaos.

Since my brain has been on vacation for a few weeks, that's about all the thinking I can muster up for you for now. I'll plan on being witty and inspiring in my next post.

Intermediate Improv Class

When I get back from vacation, I'll be teaching a six-week improv class as part of Vineyard University. It starts Wed, Aug 27 at 7pm. It's intended for people with a little improv (or acting) training or experience who want to go to the next level or catch a refresher. Limited to 14 spots.

If you want to sign up or get more info, click here and click "Intermediate Improv."

Leaving Las Disney

Tomorrow we pack our bags and head to KC to visit my mom and dad. The first half of our vacation was great. I could easily go to a cynical place regarding the Disney Empire, and maybe I will here in a few weeks, but my kids (and wife) have had a wonderful time. (OK, I have had fun too.) My kids will remember this week for the rest of their lives. We were here for six days and maybe saw half of all there is to see. Over forty square miles of magical-ness. I think we'll come back...but not next year.

I'm more or less over my illness and the last two days were much happier for me than the early sick days...

Talk to ya'll in Kansas.

The good and the bad.

Vacation is in full swing. Two days at Disney down. We spent yesterday at EPCOT. Good times. Fun in a kinda nerdy way...my favorite park by far.

However, I write to you from my bed at the fabulous Port Orleans Resort. Alas, not all is well in the Magic Kingdom. At least, not everyone is well. I have a terrible cold or flu or something. I sneezed about a thousand times yesterday and went through a few Kleen-ex mini-packs. Breathing is a chore today and the coughing has started. I haven't been sick like this for three or four years. I've been a trooper though. You'd all be proud of me.

Debbie and the kids are at the water park for a few hours now while I recoop. This afternoon I'll rejoin the family fun for the Animal Park. The kids are showing a few early signs of the plague as well, so hopefully they can fight it off.

Favorite things so far: Soarin' and Test Track at Epcot and the crazy vegetables they grow in The Land exhibit. I also strangely enjoyed my tuna sandwich at Earl of Sandwich in Downtown Disney.

CLE

Stuck in the Cleveland Airport - three hours delayed for my flight home. Yes, that means I could have driven faster. But if I had driven, would Continental Airlines be paying for my dinner at Max & Erma's right now? No.
That said, I need to get back to Dayton so that I can drive home and drive my family back to Dayton to get on another airplane. Well, Sean is driving us to Dayton, but you get the idea. Mickey awaits. Then a flight to KC next week. Then the flight back home the following week. This may not be the only extended stay in an airport this month for me.

I enjoyed my time with the good folks at Fellowship Bible today. Last night, I had to kill a few hours, so I found a community theater in Chagrin Falls. I caught their last performance of Urine Town, a musical I've wanted to see for a while. It was fun. Three of the leading actors were great. The dancing was painful in parts, but for community theater it was good and a nice little find. Downtown Chagrin Falls is actually quite beautiful and retro-urban-trendy. It reminded me somewhat of Laguna Beach...which is really odd since it's in northern Ohio. The downtown is actually built around a waterfall...pretty cool:

I'm Outta Here...

I'm headed up to speak again at Fellowship Bible Church in Cleveland this weekend. I really enjoyed my time with them earlier this year. It will be good to see them again. After that, it's all vacation all the time. We are headed to the self-proclaimed happiest place on earth for a week, then onto see my folks in Kansas City. It's kind of our first real family vacation ever since we have 1.) normally used any off time to come back to the midwest and visit family and 2.) always lived in a vacation hotspot. When you live in Las Vegas and OC, mini-vacations are easy to pull off.

For those of you in CIncy, the new AWE series launching this weekend at VCC is going to be very cool. I'm sorry to miss the first three weeks of it. (Not sorry enough to not go on vacation, but a little bummed.) Dave is back and rockin' a Dave Letterman post-writer's strike beard. You don't want to miss that.

On another note, I produced a few viral web commercials for my buddy Kevin Rains' auto body shop, Center City Collision. There are a lot more to come, but here's the first one on youtube:

A Tale of Two Kingdoms

I've been a little overwhelmed with requests for a copy of my fairy tale that I read this weekend at VCC. I'm happy to share it with anyone who'd like to read it. The easiest way is to read it online. I posted it a while ago at www.tommyandmary.blogspot.com. I read two chapters this weekend, but all nine chapters of the first book are online. The second book is about half finished.

Lots of people have asked about publishing. I've tried rather half-heartedly to get it published through the years, but nothing has come of it yet. I may give it another run now and see what happens, but I think the main thing is to make it available if it proves helpful to people.

Draggin'

I spoke a few blogs back about being tired. I am thoroughly surprised at how tired I am. It's not tired like I want to sleep or even waste a night in front of the TV. I'm idea tired. Maybe it's a full year of writing messages, screenplays, stage plays, videos, strategic plans and stories. Perhaps my current level of creative exhaustion has something to do with the amazing level of creative freedom I have been given lately. New ideas are normally the most exciting thing you can throw my way, but for the last two weeks they haven't done it for me. New ideas have been bouncing off me as if they were made of rubber. To be honest, writing this blog is a bit of a chore tonight. And as you can probably tell already, it's not even that great of a post. There is no way this is getting into my blog post hall of fame five years after I retire from blogging. But, alas, at least it's honest.

This coming weekend should be my last great creative burst before some time away. I can already foresee some excitement in the next run this fall. If I were Brett Favre I'd retire and come back in three weeks...but as it is, I'll just take a vacation.

Here and There.

I had a great time at Southbrook Christian Church this weekend. It was fun to see our old friends Shawn and Amy Case, as well as Fred Brooks and his family from my home church in Worthington. I think I've had six or seven speaking engagements since moving to Cincy. It has all been part of the strange journey this year - thrown back into vocational ministry with a little whiplash to prove it. I have always enjoyed finding that ebb and flow between being grounded in a local community and visiting other places from time to time. It gives you a broader perspective on the state of the church and, at least it my case, stirs up my passion for life on the homefront.

Next week we'll wrap up The Lord's Prayer series at VCC. I'm looking forward to that too. And...speaking of the homefront, Dave's new book, The Outward Focused Life, is now available. Check it out below:

Vacation Awaits

As a general rule of thumb, when you don't have a "real job" you can't take a "real vacation." Two ways of thinking about that I guess. Since I was primarily freelancing for the last five or six years, we could never really leave town for an extended period of time. The upside to the downside was that whenever work slowed down, I'd find free time to hang with the family or do whatever. Life was full of mini-vacations.

Things are different now. I'm hitting the eleven month mark at VCC and starting to feel one-year tired. (I've found that there are different levels of tired - one-day tired, one-week tired, ten-years tired.) They all require different forms of rest to recover from. One-year tired is best solved with a few weeks of doing none of things that caused you to be tired in the first place...and that's what we are doing. Our first real vacation since the kids were babies. It all starts Aug. 5 and I will be completely ready for it.

Before then, I have three more weekends to teach and a few dozen meetings to attend. This week I'm up at Southbrook Christian in Dayton and then we wrap up the Kingdom Cliffsnotes series at VCC the following week. I'm hoping to finish strong and rest hard when it's over. (And then come back...the best vacations are about two days too long so that you want to come back.)

Hope you find some rest this summer too...

Recommended Kingdom Reading...

We are knee-deep into Kingdom CliffsNotes, our VCC series on The Kingdom and The Lord's Prayer. Here are nine books I recommend for further study on the topic if you have an interest. This is an Amazon link, but you can also get them through the VCC Bookstore if you are a Vineyardite.

Way to go, Miah!

My friend Jeremiah Smith has had a pretty good week. Miah finished 146th out of nearly 7,000 in the main event of the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. He was actually leading the world championship at the end of Day Three (Thurday). He busted out earlier today taking a few unlucky flops with better cards. I couldn't be more proud of him.

Miah and I first met when he was a pastor in Manchester, NH. Right after we moved to California, Miah and Melissa moved to Vegas. They literally took our place at our house church and Miah was able to teach some at Apex in my absense. In fact, my first blog post ever was written at Miah and Melissa's house in NH on August 2, 2002...the first day I met him.

God is using Miah in a unique way. His recent press is well deserved...please take the time to read this article at ESPN. It's more about his faith than poker: Jeremiah on espn.com.

Wall-E

Wall-E is my movie of the year so far. It's Pixar's version of The Matrix, attempting to craft the existential issues of our time into a new mythic world. Joseph Campbell, George Orwell, Ayn Rand and Isaac Asimov would be proud. It's a kid friendly movie for thinking adults...high recommend.

The Parable of the Brick Wall

Imagine a brick wall.

What you are imagining is not nearly big enough. Imagine yourself standing in front of a massive brick wall. Now, look to the right. The brick wall continues as far as you can see. Now look to the left. It has no end. Look up. As far as you can see - past the clouds and into outer space. The brick wall never ends.

Now imagine that this brick wall is real. And that it exists in the future. This is the wall that separates the past and the present from the future. Behind the wall exists Heaven. Heaven is a good place and you'd like to be there. What little we know of Heaven is mysterious, but we know that it is a good place - no death, no mourning, no crying, no pain. God reigns in Heaven with a loving rule. Heaven has the power to heal.

Now imagine a homeless man standing in front of the brick wall. He is in his early thirties. He eyes the wall with a crazed look. He clinches his right hand into a fist. The muscles in his forearm tighten. His triceps and biceps bulge. With one massive swing he punches the wall with his bare fist. The wall is unharmed. It's a brick wall. The man's knuckles turn red as he makes his fist again. He punches the wall harder. Blood spurts in all directions. Several bones in his hand shatter. His eyes glaze over like a soldier in a firefight. He wails on that wall. Swing after swing. Punch after punch. Eventually every bone in his right hand is broken. It is mangled - a bloody useless stump. He takes a breath. He thinks. Then he makes a fist with his left hand and begins to punch the wall over and over until that hand too is shredded and useless.

Remember, this man stands in the future. But word of his insanity reaches the present and the past. Someone is trying to release Heaven. This news threatens the powerful - the tyrants and despots, the violence peddlers, the religious con artists, the greedy self-centered tycoons. From the past and the present, these violent men rush into the future all the way to that brick wall. When they see the man, they attack him with sticks and metal rods and rocks. The man takes their blows with an unshakable gaze targeted directly on that wall. When he gets a foot free from their grasp, he kicks the wall breaking his toes. He knees the wall, shattering his kneecap. As the evil men beat him down, he manages one last open handed slap on the wall before he collapses...and then he dies.

Arrogant and proud, the evil and powerful men from the past and present turn around and stroll back to their time and place, leaving the man’s lifeless body to decay.

And then the most remarkable thing happens. One brick, about five feet from the ground starts to shake. The mortar around the brick cracks. The brick shimmies. The magic of Heaven pushes the loosened brick forward until it falls squarely on the back of the dead man.

And then all of history holds her breath as Heaven begins to leak. Just tiny droplets at first. Heaven trickles out of that hole in the wall and lands on the mangled, lifeless hands of the homeless man. When Heaven touches his hands they are instantly healed. Heaven drips on his feet, his knees. And eventually, Heaven splashes on his heart. The man's life returns. He stands to see the hole in Heaven's wall. He sees Heaven beginning to flow out of the future toward the present. He smirks and turns on his heels and sprints from the future, through our present and into our past. He sprints back to first century Palestine and pokes his head into human history. Breathless and battle-tested, he speaks one message to anyone who will listen. "Heaven is coming!" He didn't say, "You can go to heaven," but "Heaven is coming to you." He cried out, "Get ready. Turn toward the future and away form the past and present. Align yourself because Heaven is coming!" Even as he said these words, Heaven was beginning to flow into the past from the future. "Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!" It's all he could think to say to us…it was the whole reason he came.

Big News

Hooray.

The Power of a Milkshake

When I was 13 years old I moved from Ashland, Kentucky to Worthington, Ohio - just north of Columbus. I was a chubby kid with a thick Appalachian accent, brown glasses and a salad bowl haircut. We moved in the summer just before my eighth grade year. When school started I couldn't buy a friend. I was made fun of everyday for the way I looked or talked or acted. I've had a few rough years as an adult, but 1986 was the worst of my life. Through the real, enduring pain of that year the true course of my life opened up. That year taught me that pain eventually passes, or more truthfully, we eventually pass through our pain. The pain changes us. Without that year of pain, I may not have had the courage to make the big moves of my life - to Las Vegas, to LA, to Cincinnati. Without that pain, I may never have noticed the pain in others' eyes. Everything I do is informed through the eyes of the outcast and unwanted...I see everything in every room I enter through those eyes. As a teacher and storyteller, I see through those eyes.

What got me through the worst year of my life? A milkshake. Specifically, a 28 year-old ex-jock buying me a milkshake at The Dairy Queen on Sawmill Road in Dublin, Ohio. I have no idea what we talked about. I can't remember anything about that meeting except that we met at that particular DQ. I just know that that guy was my first friend in Ohio. I know that he introduced me to some other kids who accepted me. I know that he stood beside me when I made a public commitment to enter ministry. I know that he flew 3,000 miles on his own dime to be my best man in my wedding. I know that I followed him to Las Vegas with my wife of six months because I couldn't imagine wanting to be anywhere else. I know that he was among the first to hold both of my babies. I know that he patiently and selflessly waited for me to learn hard lessons in my own time. I know he continued to love me through my worst mistakes and through my multiple career changes. I know that his brother is the reason I'm back in vocational ministry.

I'm just saying, a milkshake goes a long way. We just spent the last two hours together. This time he bought me coffee. Maybe at some point I should start paying for these meetings...

Iowa Flood Relief

Our outreach department is pulling together a team of people to help out those displaced by the floods in and around Cedar Rapids, IA. The trip will be July 7-13. If you are interested, click here.

The Kingdom is Coming.

Jesus came to earth with one prevailing, revolutionary, and controversial message. He came announcing a new reality for mankind, dramatically turning human history on its head. All we know of Jesus - his teachings, his morality, his claims, his story - stems from one arching idea. That the Kingdom has come...and is still coming. He spent three years teaching about it, proclaiming its reality and showing us what life within it felt like. Something so big and overwhelming could never be stated in just a few words...or could it? Jesus summed it up in 57 words:

πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφήκαμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ

On Independence Day weekend we start a new four-week series at VCC looking at Jesus' summary of life in the Kingdom. Hope to see ya there.