Al Roker

Orlando Airport security lines.

my wife met Al Roker on Thursday as we waited in line to have our carry-ons screened before flying home. Al wasn't a happy camper. the lines were long and Mr. Roker's request to move to a shorter line was rebuffed by a TSA official. my peace-making wife tried to console Mr. Roker as he waited impatiently behind us. it definitely wasn't the same picture we've had of cheerful Al on the Today Show and Food Network.

it can't be easy being a public figure. there weren't any paparazzi trailing Al Roker, but still, there was no blending into the crowd. how do you separate your public and private persona?

on a MUCH smaller scale, as a pastor in a small community, i've had to wrestle with the public nature of my calling. i can try to hide from it. avoid it. or always be "on call" - always wearing the clergy uniform. none of the above have worked very well.

i too have my good days and my bad days. one thing i am striving for is authenticity - wysiwyg - what you see is what you get. not that I use the "pulpit" (actually music stand) as public therapy, but i definitely don't want a huge disconnect between my public life and my private. this will require friends and especially my wife to keep me on the true (truth) path. she knows more than anyone whether the morning message jives with the evening dinner

hope you have a better day tomorrow Al.

natural frequency

exponential conference 2008 - the day after

just got back from Orlando, FL at a church planters conference - three intense days of sessions, seminars and networking all geared around connecting church planters and reproducing churches to new ideas (and old ones), techniques, and technologies (plenty of vendors). one of the sessions was on blogging (why i'm here at blogger) but that's not why I write.

the conference was a lot like drinking water from a fire hydrant - ideas and competing ideas and (really) far too much stuff for my ADD brain to handle. one of the first sessions was on the tension between being an attractional church (build it and "they" will come) ad incarnational church ("they" won't come so we must hangout with "them") i wish i could unpack this because of course it is not nearly this simple and tidy and i don't like us-them thinking.

but what i did want to get at was this sense of who i (and my team) resonated with. being a former engineer, i've always been fascinated with the idea of natural frequency - that everything has a frequency at which at which it likes to vibrate (go into a bathroom stall and hum at various pitches until you hit a pitch where the stall starts to join you in song (i wouldn't recommend doing this when others are in the bathroom too)). you get the same affect from plucking a guitar string and having another vibrate or watch the youtube video of the Tacoma Bridge collapse. . .

(remember that video from high school physics? only one small dog was lost in the shooting of this video!)

anyway . . . back to the conference . . . i found myself really resonating with Alan Hirsch, Neil Cole, Andy Stanley, John Burke, Tim Keller, and Larry Osborne (almost forgot - Vince Antonucci.) and really going flat with others (even Rick Warren). i wonder if this had anything to do with personality and preferences, maybe theological bias, or whether just somewhere, deep in my soul, this is who God wired me to be and these speakers speak to the kind of church God is calling me to plant. they "struck a chord" - my natural frequency. we had three members of our core team there as well (a female clergy and lay couple) and they need to share their experiences as well.

so broke the first rule of blogging - keep it short - but hey, it's my first time.