I tried not to sell the surprise on my face.

I had spent the better part of the previous hour sitting in a local coffee shop with a gentleman that goes to my church. It was basically our first-ever conversation after having sat near each other in church for most of the last 5–6 years.

I never knew his name. We greeted each other often, but never paused to actually introduce ourselves or anything like that.

After crossing paths at a church board meeting (I recently joined one of the boards), we learned our names, and he found out that…

I wrote this a couple years ago, and it remains ever-relevant in both my life and in everyone’s.

I never imagined I could sing by myself in front of a crowd of hundreds while controlling a crabby child in my arms. But last Sunday, I did that.

My wife and I sing in the praise band at our church once a month. We have for the last couple years, and it’s been a great experience for us. But as parents to a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, it comes with challenges.

Early in the process, we usually had somebody there to…

Are we too reliant on our phones? My 5 takeaways from a potential disaster…

Back in August 2015, I took my first business trip in a long time — to the city of Baltimore.

I’d been to Baltimore on business once before, and I loved the city. It’s very vibrant, has an awesome pier down at Fells Point, and it is loaded with delicious seafood.

This time, I decided to run everything for my trip through my phone. I wanted to manage as little paper as possible.

I had my flight boarding passes emailed to me so I could just…

I’ve been out of high school for almost 20 years — and a lot of it really sucked.

So let’s take a deeper look, shall we?

High school, in and of itself, is a terrible idea. Cramming a bunch of kids whose only common thread is, “hey, we’re all the same age” into one building for 8–10 hours every weekday and giving them free reign to establish their own social system is universally damaging to everybody involved.

But it’s reality. It happened to me, and it happened to you. What don’t I miss?

1. Dating. This list isn’t in any particular…

On Monday, May 31st, 2021, I will turn 36 years old.

It’s always a reflective time, so I usually like to jot down some thoughts to myself about what I’ve learned as I enter the back half of my thirties.

I found this old post on my personal blog, written when I was 27 years old. I thought I would update the list and present it here, as universal truths tend to not change.

(And clearly, nothing has changed since early 2013.)

1. When you’re young, shoot for affordable. When you grow up, pay for quality.
2. Our bodies are surprisingly resilient.
3. …

We’ve got a real gratitude problem in our society — specifically, a lack of gratitude.

We live in the greatest era in the history of the world, but we still find reasons to be miserable and complain.

It’s always a good idea to sit down and write some things you’re grateful for. Some people even do that as part of their daily routine.

The point is that listing things you’re grateful for is an exercise in perspective. And while I don’t expect you to pore through this entire list of 100 things that I’m grateful for, I do want you…

Yes! My system is always evolving. Right now, I'm trying to use the Ivy Lee Method, so now my labels are down to "Work" and "Free Time", and I limit myself to six work items per day. I do use the priority labels, but I often prefer to just reorder my projects on the sidebar for that day's priorities, and then I set my "Today" view to be by label. So you could do something similar and call it the "Big 3" or something. I agree, Todoist does have some limitations, but at the same time, I can't seem to really find anything as intuitive to use on a daily basis!

We make too many excuses.

My sophomore year of high school, I traveled to Mexico City for a week on a mission trip. We were there to help out with a church, and while there, we met up with a youth group about the same age as us.

This was my first real exposure to international culture, and it was almost shocking how humble some of it was. While our churches have vaulted ceilings and beautiful stained glass windows that we can see from our padded pews, one of the churches we helped at had a folding table at the…