Busy busy busy...

Thank you to my one loyal reader (Hi Dad!) for checking up with the site so valiantly. As many know, I have had a busy summer filled with travels to the beach,, the Eastern boarder of KY, my home state of Ohio, and to the nation's capital, Washington, DC. I also made the terrible mistake of taking classes over the summer, the summer immediately following my graduation from my first five years of college. When not busy with school or travel, I got to spend every day of my summer loving my wife, perhaps the greatest gift I could ever hope for, and certainly the best way I know to spend my time.

That said, I am dedicated to get back into the swing of things on this here blog, and I intend to do it with some intense force over the next few days. I have been given what I consider to be an opportunity of a lifetime in the form of three days of free "conferences" from some of the worlds greatest church leaders, pastors, and businessmen. Tomorrow (or later today rather) I will be at my computer from 10:09AM-9:09PM for a one-day, non-stop berating of pastoral leadership advice in the form of the online conference "The Nines" on 9-9-09 at 9:09 (Central Time) they will begin airing 9-minute long videos where some of today's most successful pastors and church growth leaders will be distilling everything they know about church leadership into a tiny, easy to swallow video. While 9 minutes is all well and good, the conference will be offering no breaks throughout the day... they have over 70 videos lined up. Now, having never attended a conference from the comfort of my own home I can't speak to the level of intensity but if it is anywhere near as good as the impartation that happened at C3 or Thr3e, my brain my have melted by tomorrow night.

To make matters more awesome, Lifechurch.tv has teamed up with Southeastern Seminary to bring to the masses a 2-day, free online conference that they held earlier in the year also on leadership. This particular conference, "The Forum" is all about Christian leadership, plain and simple. Many of the speakers are pastors like Craig Groeschel (where have we heard that name before?) and T.D. Jakes, who I fell in love with early this year at C3, but there are some in the business world, like Dave Ramsey, Jack Welch, and Megyn Kelly. That conference will take place Thursday and Friday from 10-5... pray for my wife because seriously, I suspect I will be absolutely useless this weekend. It is amazing how much God moves at these conferences and how much our minds can take in and process, but when every word you hear for 3 full days is challenging and is anointed by God, it is absolutely exhausting to process it all.

Can you imagine what it must have been like to be with Jesus? We have the ability to go back and read every word but to be one of the men there... your mind would be on constant high-alert in fear of missing something, or anything. I can't imagine the level of excitement you would have at all times being in the presence of God, wanting to devour every word that came out of His mouth... sometimes, these conferences are the same. So many of the speakers have a clearly God-given gift of very clearly pointing out Biblical truths that we so easily look over. One of the things that I took away from my few sermons is that preaching is like sharing a secret. The preacher has spent hours seeking God, doing study, waiting for the text to be illuminated by the Holy Spirit, etc, to understand truth from God to turn around and share it with the people in a bite-sized dose. Until doing it myself, I never understood the intimacy that's there... the preacher gets to share what he has learned from God, with the people, something many of them may have never understood on their own for whatever reason... it's extremely powerful but incredibly exciting. Knowing that feeling, I now eagerly sit on the opposite end where these leaders have spent hour and hours and hours and hours learning the skills and truths that they so willingly give away, all for the sake of the Kingdom.

That gets my to my original comment... all throughout the next few days I intend to give a running report of the progress of the conferences. My intention is to use my webcam to give video updates as I will want to be writing everything (yes, everything) down. Depending on how tomorrow goes I may be able to update during various videos, especially since they announced that all of the videos will be available afterward for free download. On Thursday and Friday I suspect we will be given breaks as it seems to hold to a more traditional conference format, but they haven't sent out specifics yet. Either way, I intent to update you, my faithful reader, on the progress of the conferences throughout the days to come.

In a completely unrelated note, you should check out TokBox, it is a free, completely online version of skype, with a few extra perks. It allows you to record 10 min. videos and send them directly to any email account, it integrates with aim, google chat, yahoo, etc. to allow text or video chatting with any friends on those networks. One of the greatest perks, however, is that it allows an unlimited number of videos to enter any chat, either through the chat interface (aim, etc) or through the sending of a hyperlink. They also have it set so that it can send the hyperlink to your facebook or Twitter account to announce that a chat is taking place. I've only tinkered a few minutes but I'm impressed so far. The quality is very good and it's nice that you don't have to download any software like with skype. I don't know how many videos you could feasibly get running on a screen before your processor starts to cry but as you add them they do get smaller which I imagine helps, but they advertise that you can do as many as you wish, pointedly suggesting that 20 will work just fine. Anyway, random aside.
~Seth