Category: Personal

2008 Year in Review

Kevin2 Comments

2008 was an historic year in my life.

When I look back at this year later on in my life, I imagine that I’ll see this year as a major turning point. I’ve had big years before (marriage, ministry change, college), but no year compares in my mind to this year. Not only was it historic, it was a great year.

The first big thing that happened in my life was that I completed my Masters degree. It took me just under two years of focused, self-disciplined dedication and I did it while working full-time, but in May I graduated from Liberty Theological Seminary with a Master of Arts in Religion, Church Ministries concentration. I had a personal goal at one point of having a Masters by the time I was 30, and I accomplished that goal at the age of 29 (no need to point it out, I know I procrastinate).

The second big thing that happened this year was I became a dad. Emory Nicole Rossen came into my life on May 27 (just a few weeks after I finished my Masters) and my life will never be the same. Seven months into this adventure I have to say that it’s an amazing experience. I love being a dad. I love watching Brea be a mom for Emory. I love the joy that I feel when Emory smiles at me. I love the fact that I understand God’s love for me more now than I did 8 months ago. There’s so much more that I love about being a dad, but I’ll save that for another time.

The third big thing that happened this year was I ran the White Rock Half Marathon. I recently blogged about this, so I won’t elaborate a whole lot, but this was a big deal for me. I had become very sedentary, partly due to my graduate studies, and I really needed something big to motivate me, but not so big that I got too discouraged in the process. 13.1 miles turned out to be the perfect distance for me to race. It was achievable, but it was also a stretch for me. I lost over 15 pounds along the way and I feel so much better physically now than I did before I stepped out the door to run one July day.

Here are more highlights from this year, in no particular order:

  • Vacation to Chicago in October
  • Watching Emory try to tear open presents on her first Christmas
  • Emory falling asleep during fireworks on July 4th
  • Flying to Houston to buy the Sonata
  • Getting hooked on Twitter
  • Getting hooked on Facebook
  • Transitioning to a one-salary household
  • Seeing Foo Fighters in concert for the first, and hopefully not the last, time
  • Starting Financial Peace University and Men’s Fraternity at church
  • Teaching Greek at church
  • Preaching on Father’s Day and my 30th birthday

Of course, not everything that happened this year was positive. The biggest shadow over the year was the death of my last living biological grandparent. I hadn’t really been close to him since I was a kid, but I still loved him and have very fond memories going back to the days we’d spend at their house in Illinois. It was also a neat thing to spend time with him and my Aunt/Uncle’s family over Thanksgiving. Probably the most sobering thing to think about is that I’m no longer a 3rd generation family member. I’m now part of the 2nd generation of my direct family on both sides. It’s a sobering reminder of the fragility of life.

The other biggest low was the personal struggles of one of my siblings. I won’t elaborate here, though.

So what about you? What happened in 2008 that you’ll remember? Maybe it wasn’t such a great year for you, but it’s good to talk about those things too. I’d love to read your story!

The Race of Life: Biblical lessons I learned from running the White Rock Half Marathon

Kevin2 Comments

I taught this lesson to our Senior adults ministry today. Ten life lessons.

  1. Run with a purpose
    • 1 Cor 9:24, 26
  2. Running has distractions
    • Gal 5:7, Heb 12:1-2
  3. Running takes discipline & perseverance
    • 1 Cor 9:26-27
  4. Running a race requires hydration & food intake
    • John 4:13-15
  5. Running has rewards
    • 1 Cor 9:25, 2 Tim 4:6-8
  6. Running is not fun at times
    • 2 Cor 11:25-29
  7. Running with a friend is easier than running alone
    • Ecc 4:9-10
  8. Runners come in all shapes and sizes
    • 1 Cor 12:12-20
  9. Running a race starts with just a few short, slow steps
    • Matt 14:28-29
  10. Running a race is really just putting one foot in front of the other
    • Philippians 3:12-16

When the recreation center becomes a shelter

Kevin1 Comment

This morning I went to work out at the Rosemeade Recreation Center, but found out that it’s temporarily closed to serve as temporary housing for the American Red Cross. While I’m happy to know that my city is helping out the hurricane victims I wasn’t happy that I didn’t get to work out. I think it was mainly because I got up a few minutes after 6:00 am, which never makes me happy. When I’m tired I tend to get a little cranky, so that probably caused it.

I guess this is just further proof that God isn’t finished with me yet. I still need to be more fully formed into the character of Christ.

Drowning in email? Maybe you’ve believed a myth.

KevinLeave a comment

Communication used to be much easier. Before the days of email you would either send a letter, place a telephone call, or simply talk with someone face-to-face. Those days are long gone. We are bombarded with communication from many more angles. Email, text messages, facebook wall posts, and more make it difficult to stay on top of being current on communicating with people.

But the problem may not simply be the massive amount of emails we receive. In fact, it’s probably more to do with how we have chosen to process email. I know a lot of people who leave EVERYTHING in their email inbox. They have literally thousands of messages, many unread, that are sitting in an inbox. No wonder they feel overwhelmed. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Right now I have six messages sitting in my work email inbox. There are also 17 that I have starred that I either need to review or act on. The oldest of these is only one week old. I’m actually way behind on my email by the standards that I’ve set for me. I don’t like to leave the office with ANY messages left unprocessed. At most, maybe 2-3 that I’m waiting on someone or something to act on.

I haven’t always been like this. There was a time when the normal response time for me was 4-7 days and it wasn’t uncommon for me to take 2-3 weeks to reply to messages. I finally woke up out of this email stupor and decided I needed to make some changes.

There was one thing that was really the catalyst for this change: Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero. The basic premise is that you can get your inbox to zero and then keep it that way. It’s true and it’s a great feeling.

In addition to this I recently came across a post over at lifehack.org that lists 7 Email Myths That Plague the Workplace. I’ve fallen trap to some of these myths before and imagine you have too. There are two that stand out to me in particular:

  • You need to reply to every email. This is not true. There are many email that you really don’t even need to read. If you know you don’t ever want or need the message just delete it. What I do is use Gmail’s archive feature that lets me know that I’ll have the email if I ever need it again, but most importantly it gets the message quickly out of my inbox so that it won’t distract me from messages that will require my action.
  • Email is a beast that can’t be tamed. Again, a myth that’s easy to fall pray to. There are many people who receive hundreds of emails a day that require some sort of action. I know because I’m friends with some of them. They may at times get behind, but I know that at some point they plow through the messages and tame the beast. No matter how many messages you get on a daily basis you can tame the email beast. It might take you changing your email provider to use a system that will block spam, but you can do it, you just have to make the choice.

If you have any strategies for taming the email beast share them in the comments.

Initial thoughts about “Getting Things Done.”

Kevin3 Comments

Earlier this year it seemed like I was reading about David Allen’s book Getting Things Done all over the place on the internet. Most of the time it was on Twitter where people would shorten it to GTD. So I decided to take the plunge and buy the book. That was about two months ago.

The ironic thing was that I couldn’t get myself motivated to read it. I read the first few pages on the first day I had it, then the first chapter or so over the next week, but after that it just sat on my nightstand for about a month. You could say I was procrastinating about reading a book about productivity. If that’s not irony I don’t know the definition of the word.

I finally was able to get through the book, which I just finished today, but it took checking out the audiobook on CD from the public library. I must say that now that I’ve got through the book this way I think it’s the way to go. Starting with the audiobook got me through it rather quickly.

I think I was getting stuck reading the book because David Allen does a really good job of illustrating his points with simple charts that break down his ideas in a very easy, compelling design. That made me really want to do what he was writing about right away, but there is quite a bit of depth to his system, so it’s best to get through the whole book before you really dive in. Now that I’ve gotten to the end of the book I think it will be easier to skim through the printed edition so that I can remember some key points.

Here are the initial takeaways that I had:

  • Write EVERYTHING down. This could be in a notebook you carry with you, moleskin, index cards, or in electronic form. Whenever you have a thought about something you need to do you need to write down that thought and put it into a trusted system/process. He describes this phase of GTD as collection. The main point is that if you’re going to experience stress-free productivity you have to get everything out of your head that you don’t need to be doing at that given moment in time. If it’s in your brain it will distract you.
  • Decide is any piece of information/communication you receive is actionable. There are some things that come into our everyday lives that do not require us to do anything. This could be spam emails, junk snail mail, or a host of other bits of info. This is what he calls the process phase. Once you have it out of your head you have to decide what to do with it. You don’t have to do it right away, but you must make a decision about whether or not you will have to do something about it at any given point in the future. He had a really practical point in this step. He suggests that if an action will take less than two minutes to complete you should do it right then. This has proven very helpful to me. Some things that I’ve had on my task list have been very simple tasks that really didn’t need to be sitting there. I just had to get it done.
  • Decide what the NEXT ACTION is for any project. The next action is always a very specific, tangible task that is required to push the desired outcome toward completion. For example, if your project (or desired outcome) is pick a new curriculum for a class or group that you’re teaching, you would not write “pick new curriculum” down in your task list. This is not really possible as the next action most of the time. You would likely have to first do things like “brainstorm topics to cover with group,” or “check with boss about curriculum budget,” or “look up Rob Bell’s most recent Nooma videos.” After that you would then be able to actually “pick new curriculum.” Most of these next action steps seem intuitive, but I think that I’ve gotten stuck working on projects because I wrote down the desire outcome first without writing down the real, physical, tangible steps to get there.

There’s a whole lot more that I could write about, but I first need to review the printed book and then figure out which areas I need to understand more. Plus I haven’t really enacted most of his ideas. I’m guessing that will take me at least a few months, but I plan on blogging about the process as I go along.

For what it’s worth I think the book is worth checking out if you’re a working adult. There are a lot of very practical bits of advice.

See also:
– Getting started with “Getting Things Done”
– What is GTD?
– Wikipedia article: Getting Things Done

Stuff I like: LibraryThing.com

KevinLeave a comment

I’m a book junkie. I’ve bought way too many books in my life. I read a lot of them, but some of them I just read a few chapters and then get bored with it. Part of my problem is that I didn’t have a good system in place to keep track of books. That is until recently

A little over a month ago I discovered the website librarything.com. It’s basically a web-based cataloging system for your books. It’s very easy to add books to your library. You simply type in some of the information (title, author, ISBN, etc.) and the site searched Amazon.com, the Library of Congress, or a host of other databases to pull information about the book. It’s very easy and convenient.

To make it even easier you can scan the bar-code of the book and it will automatically add that book to your library. They even sell a cheap bar-code scanner on the site (the failed CueCat from the late 90s). I bought one and was able to catalog over 500 books in a matter of hours. It was great!

My next goal is to get the small groups curriculum of the church catalogged so that I can give leaders a place to go when they are looking for ideas on what to teach their groups. I’ll post a link to that when I make it live.

For now you can check out my library here.

Stuff I Like: WalkJogRun.net

KevinLeave a comment

I just got back from a run tonight that was frustrating. I wasn’t frustrated with my performance, but with my lack of direction. About 20 minutes into the run I realized that I was turned around and at that point I knew that I wasn’t sure how far my run was going to end up being. That’s about when I almost stopped running just to walk the rest of the way. I did walk for about 4-5 minutes, but got moving again when I realized that my body had the capacity to keep going, but my mind wanted to give up because of the frustration.

You see, I like to know how far my runs are going to be before I go. The tool that I like to use is WalkJogRun.net. It’s basically a Google Maps mash-up that lets you plot the route your are going to run/walk based on all the turns you’re going to take. Basically it’s the modern day version of driving around the neighborhood with your car to see how many miles a route is.

The cool part about the service, other than it being free, is that it uses the hybrid view, which lets you see both street names and landmarks. I’ve really enjoyed using it to make up new runs for me to go on. It’s kept me from getting bored with the same old run every day.

Oh, and when I got home, after I cleaned up, I logged back on to see how far I ended up running. It was 3.25 miles, which was .25 further than I planned to go, but not an excessive distance.

Motivation: Finding the desire to workout when I really don’t want to do it.

Kevin2 Comments

It happens to almost all of us. We’re going about our everyday lives with not a care in the world, but it all changes. What prompts it, though, is different: hitting a milestone year of life, taking a good long look in the mirror and not liking what we’re seeing, getting winded from a short walk up a hill, or a number of other reasons. What I’m talking about is the workout bug striking.

That’s right. Many of us decide that it’s time to get in shape. So we join a gym, start running, sign up for a sports league, or just start eating right. I’ve done it before and the motivation lasts for about 10 days and then, POOF, it’s gone. Whatever reason or motivation that started the workout bug has passed and I go back to my old habits.

That hasn’t happened to me this time. I’ve been working out consistently (strength training 3x a week and running 3-4x a week) for over six weeks now. On top of that I am still motivated to keep going. That’s not to say that I actually want to work out or run every time I do it. I just got back from a three mile run tonight that I was coming up with every excuse I could possibly think of as to why I didn’t need to go. But I went anyway.

Looking back over the past six weeks I’ve thought of a few things that I’ve done differently this time around that have kept me going.

  1. I set goals that were big enough to be audacious, but within reason so they seemed reachable. The first thing I decided was that I needed specific, measurable goals that I could aim for to keep me going when the “you should quit” birds start singing in my ears. The first one was to run a half marathon in under two hours and fifteen minutes. That seemed HUGE when I got started but still within reason to keep me from quitting. I also decided that I should get my weight down to under 200 pounds by the time I run the half marathon (December 14). I was 220 when I got started and I’m already halfway there. I have a feeling the next ten pounds will be harder to lose than the first, though, which will make me want to try even harder.
  2. I got a workout buddy that was in a similar fitness level. This one was huge too. I asked a friend of mine from church if he wanted to workout at the gym with me. I’ve done this before, but the person I chose, who happened to be the preacher, was so far above me in the physical fitness arena that it just wasn’t fun. I slowed him down and he pushed me too hard. The friend I’m working out with now and I do just about the same weight on all the exercises we do, so it’s not a competition and I don’t feel embarrased to go to the gym with him. The other thing that it’s done is held me accountable. We typically workout at 6:30 am, which I would NEVER do on my own. I can, however, get up out of bed because I know if I don’t I will be letting someone else down, not just myself.
  3. I had a daughter. I don’t really recommend having a child simply to get motivated to workout, but it really does change things. I realize that she will be depending on me to be part of her life for a LONG time and I want to be able to enjoy EVERY last possible activity. Being in better shape will make those experiences much more memorable and enjoyable.
  4. I started listening to music while I ran. This may not work for everyone, but it has helped me. I didn’t do it the first week or so that I was running, but I have for the past month. The way it has helped me has been two-fold. First, music has a physiological affect on us. Certain songs will give a boost of adrenaline and studies have shown that music played at a higher tempo (120-140bpm) cause us to run along with that same beat. Many of the songs that I hear give me an extra jolt of adrenaline exactly when I need it. The other thing it has done is drowned out the sound of me huffing and puffing. Again, you might not be distracted by this, but it really discouraged me when I would get winded so early in my runs. I would typically stop running and just walk for a while. Now I keep going even though I’m tired.
  5. I tracked my progress religiously. This really helped me a lot the other day. I got done with a run and I really wasn’t happy with my time. When I went to write it down and compare it with a similar run from a few weeks ago I saw that I actually ran at a faster pace! This made me EXTREMELY happy. It’s hard to trust your feelings in regards to your progress, but when you can see the objective numbers it can be encouraging or it can show you that you’ve had false confidence in your progress, which could serve as a motivator too.

Those are some of the things I’ve done. Do you have any tips on staying motivated to workout?

See also:
Minimalist Fitness: How to Get In Lean Shape With Little or No Equipment
Fitness is a Journey. Bring a Map.

Stuff I Like: Mint.com

KevinLeave a comment

I’ve never been a fan of spending a long time tracking my money. I have not balanced my checkbook in over five years, but I have not once bounced a check or overdrawn my account. Most of this is due to the fact that I’ve been using Quicken for a while.

But I even got tired of using Quicken. My bank doesn’t play well with Quicken, so anytime I wanted to update it I would have to manually download the transactions and import them. I would typically do this for a couple months, but then get tired of doing that. I really needed something automated.

Mint.com has filled that role for me. It’s a free service that makes money through partner ads that are designed to help you get a better interest rate for your savings accounts or credit cards. It’s an incredibly easy service to use that automatically updates all of your accounts that have web access and then gives you a financial snapshot of your money.

I’ve been using it for a few months now and have been very satisfied. If you’re paranoid about online security you’ll probably avoid it, but I’ve read enough reviews from reliable sources to know it’s a legit service. Check it out.

See also: Why Mint works