30 Days of Blogging Day 1

30 Days of Blogging

I am going to try and do the impossible and I am going to try and journal/blog for 30 consecutive days to kick start my life back into some consistency. Probably the hardest thing since I have been in LA is having anything that is "normal" that I do from day to day.

Maybe that's why Max the wonder dog plays such a crucial role in my life...no matter what I am doing that feels amazing or important or overwhelming or draining, I have to come home to let him out, to spend time with him, to feed him. That shows you how ungrounded a single person can get when they don't have their home life dictating their work or creative life. I am not complaining but its a different reality then many of you live out of.

So I am going to try and blog and maybe through it you will look into my life and process and have fun, or you will get bored and stop reading after just one (haha) either way I am doing this to share the journey.

During the next 30 days I am going to take radical steps in my:

1) Diet - I am doing a Susan Summers kind of low carb thing and I will update you how it goes. The only thing I won't give up is my coffee....she wants me to drink decaf with no milk or sweetener so I am going to compromise that and let it be my daily treat. (I love vanilla and I have it in every cup somehow..but there is sugerfree!)

2) Ministry related writing - I am writing a lot this month. Not just a blog, but working on pressing out 2 writing projects in the next few months. They are basically done but have to be restructured (Like my life) so that they flow correctly. They used to be different books and I completely changed them but thank God I had several hundred pages to work with. One is a book that I hope life coaches the reader into loving on purpose (thanks for the term goes to Danny Silk but I won't steal it) and the other is about creativity and the renaissance that is coming.

3) Creative Projects - many of you don't know that I love creative writing because I have never released anything to the world as far as stories, novels, etc. but its one of my passions. I love when a story and its characters live whole lives in your imagination and I have been having my first full living world alive inside of me that I want to construct but the first book might be a long process (hopefully years not decades). I need to get back into a writers club or group but again the way I am scheduled between itinerate ministry and church ministry right now is not allowing for the time so I have bought some books to kick start me including: "Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook" by Donald Maass which is amazing if you have other tools along with it & "How to write Science Fiction & Fantasy" by Orson Scott Card which isn't that helpful.

4) Restructuring my leadership team at the church - we have a lady who is fast becoming a real asset who is consulting us about info structure. Grab a group of mostly young adults, throw them into LA where they all go through constant personal transitions and survival mode through recession in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and you are bound to need help building structure. We also have some Bethel guys from Redding coming down to help us. We have vision up the wazoo and we have some management, but we need an admin backbone and clear vision. Two of the books I just read that were AMAZING were : Who Moved the Cheese (thanks Stephanie Taylor from Facebook) because it sounded so unusual, and it was amazing. I also just read Steven Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People again with my team but did a refresher last week...hence why I am blogging. I ordered "Primal Leadership" from Borders at the recommendation of lots of facebook friends saying its amazing. I will report about it soon.

5) Restructuring my itinerate ministry - for years I taught and imparted on the prophetic and healing, but more so lately I have been empowering people with our ministry (my life) themes of LOVE CREATIVITY & JUSTICE. My traveling ministry has the old in it but its shaping up to be much broader and more building then my past season of traveling. We are rebuilding all of my resources (CD's, DVDs, ETC) to be really easy to access these themes and I have about 20 new products built and ready to come out. We just transferred the Dating DVD series onto audio format (finally!) and it will be a book soon as well its in final edits...kind of (right Sally the editor? I promise to give you final copy back after your edits).

So, I am going to blog about these things and unimportant things over the next 30 days. Stay tuned, and I will try and be faithful to upload my blogs to all my blogging sites every day but they will for sure be on MySpace and Facebook.

Shawn