Well, for a while now I’ve been trying to talk myself into biking to work. Problem is it it’s takes me like 15 minutes to drive there using freeways. If I take the streets, there are lots of hills and if I take the safest route where I will be least likely to get hit by a car, I’m thinking it’s going to take me like 45 minutes to an hour on my new cruiser bike. I think. I’m not sprinting the whole way on a road bike with spandex.

Anyway, yesterday, while studying for a mid-term, I sat in a coffee shop in the morning and saw a sign saying that Friday was ride your bike to work day. So, I mapquested it and found out it’s 9 miles. Took me forever to figure out how to make it choose the route I wanted. Hence the four points of destination I had to enter to get to my work.

Then today, when I got my coffee, I told the coffee shop owner that I was biking to work on Friday, and he said, “You get a free breakfast!” Wow. So what’s another half mile? Now I’m definitely trying it. Friday I think I’m going to ride bikes with the boys to school and then I’m biking to work. Then I’m celebrating with java and a breakfast bowl at Cosmos. Weather man says it’s supposed to hit 97 in El Cajon on Friday. Hopefully I’ll be out early enough to beat the heat.

Maybe I can convince my wife to join me. Wish me luck.

Shannon’s mom has been in town all this week and then for the weekend, Gary joined us too.

I had to head in early Sunday morning to get ready for our student service. But in my absence, the boys woke up early with grandpa and made the mom and grandma breakfast. The boys had made a happy mother’s day banner and “secretly” bought all the supplies for breakfast the day before. I say “secretly” because the fridge was chocked full with enough bacon and eggs and sausage to feed 12 moms, but maybe my boys thought they’d be really hungry.

Anyway, after breakfast, the rest of the clan joined me at church and then we went home for family pictures on the lawn.

Then we loaded up the bikes and went to Mission beach to take the grandma and grandpa on their first seaside bike ride here in SD, something that has become a family favorite for us. We rented 2 more cruisers and rode to PB where we had mochas at this coffee shop that serves like 40 different varieties and tops them off with chocolate whipped cream.

Then we rode down to south mission and then went to Red Lobster for dinner- per the request of grandma who held nothing back and had some kinda seafood feast I think. Lobster, crab, shrimp, fish and probably kelp or something. So fun.

3 cheers for moms and grandmas. So wish we could have spent it with all who hold that title in our family, but we take what we can get.

I’m blessed to be at a church that does not do fund raisers. But when we did our church building program last year, we decided that for the next 3 years, we’d commit to helping our church increase funds to the building fund by serving our congregation and community through meeting some basic needs. This year, we combined the jobs with some jobs we had lined up for our Uganda trip too and added a night of childcare. So, on May 10th, the day before mother’s day, we performed the mother of all mother’s day gifts with a serving day we call “Help us, Help you” and here’s what it amounted to this year:

• 22 adults – college or older
• 63 middle school and high school students

Serving on:

• 5 car wash teams going to 12 locations to wash 26 cars and 1 RV
• 2 house cleaning teams going to 5 locations to clean toilets and wash windows
• 11 yard work teams serving in 20 separate locations where we busted our back sides pulling weeds and doing dump runs and chopping down bushes
• 40 kids for childcare

Which resulted in:

• $2883 for the church building fund
• $2117 for the Uganda team.
• or a grand total of $5000 exactly. Not bad for a days work.

• Physically, they exist to care for the children of Uganda who are orphans, sick, dying, abused, abandoned, or neglected who have no chance of survival without intervention. The cool thing is, they even help families start local businesses so they can be self-sustaining and feed the children whom they really try to return to their families. They are not just putting a band aid on poverty, they are trying to solve it all together and they are making great progress in this community. Also, they will pay for the medical expenses of any child from their program all the way up to the age of 12, even after they’ve been returned to their family- so no child dies due to an inability to pay for medical expenses. So cool.

• Spiritually, they desire to provide a loving life-giving environment to give each child a healthy secure foundation for life teaching them God’s love for them. They also partner with local churches and God is making a difference in and through them.

• Helping with some basic building maintenance and cleaning.
• Help care for, play with, and encourage the nearly 60 children and almost that many local staff as well that call this their home and ministry.
• Help with teaching these young lives a spiritual foundation through crafts and stories from the Bible along with the aide of a local church.
• Travel into the surrounding villages and communities to help the orphanage increase its influence and presence in the community as a positive place for children and families in need.
• Take over much needed supplies for the everyday operations of the orphanage too.

• Journey Community Church.
• c/o Brian Berry (UGANDA FUND)
• 8363 Center Drive, Suite 6c.
• La Mesa, Ca. 91942

Isn’t it weird that in a culture that prides itself on freedom, so many of us daily fight to free ourselves from the bondage that capitalism often creates.

If that thought resonates with you, then you’ll enjoy another great article by Patrick Lencioni this month. They haven’t yet posted the whole thing to his website, but I’ll tease you with part of what he e-mailed earlier last month to those who subscribe:

The Danger of More Shiny New Things

I‘m sure it‘s natural for people to be fascinated with acquiring new things. Whether we‘re talking about physical possessions like homes or cars or toys, or more conceptual assets like knowledge or technology or business strategies, we seem to highly value what we don‘t have, especially when it is novel.

I suppose this is understandable—even good—in a society that values progress and innovation. However, there is a cost to overemphasizing and over-valuing all things new, a cost that goes beyond obvious concerns about greed and over-consumption. When we are in constant pursuit of acquiring more of the latest and greatest, we usually diminish or dilute the power of what we already have.

My twin boys turn ten years old this month, and as I ponder what gift to give them, I realize that what they probably need more than anything is more time to play with the things they already have, things they haven‘t begun to fully use or enjoy. Giving them something new may not make them much happier, and may actually cause them distress. You‘ve seen this dilemma on Christmas morning as your children sit in the midst of their own FAO Schwartz store, slipping into a toy-overload coma, overwhelmed by the choices they have and seemingly unable to process it all. If you‘re like me, you probably chastised yourself and vowed to your spouse that “next year we should give them just ONE present.”

This same phenomenon affects us as leaders of organizations too. But rather than toys, the objects of our desire usually involve knowledge or information. Most leaders I work with grow bored easily, and are in constant pursuit of strategies, ideas, trends—even employees—that will somehow transform their organizations. Unfortunately, they haven‘t come close to fully tapping the strategies, ideas, trends or employees that they already have, and yet they discard those untapped assets in exchange for new ones.

On a personal level, I‘ve experienced this phenomenon too. I‘ve recently come to the conclusion that I should stop reading so many new books and magazine articles. Instead, I should go retrieve the top ten books and articles that I‘ve already read, and start re-reading them again and again. After all, I‘ve forgotten most of what I‘ve learned in those books, and I‘m certainly not using or tapping into more than a fraction of what they have to offer. Instead, I‘m pursuing more and more new material, which only crowds out the space in my brain to recall and put to use the tried and true goodness of what I‘ve already learned.

Why do we do this? Perhaps we want to stay current. Or we don‘t want to feel out of touch. But I think it is based more in pride of knowing things than in real pursuit of excellence, integrity and discipline.