Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

- Philippians 4:8

I found this underlined in my bible tonight…. what a powerful piece of scripture. However it caught me off guard. One of the things I have been taught all my life is to live out of excellence. The most common verse I refer to drive home a point of excellence is Colossians 3:17… in fact so much that I think that is the only verse to talk about living out of excellence.

That’s not the case is it? No, the bible is full of statements of excellence…. doing admirable tasks and simply making your life count.  I don’t have time to write a ton tonight, but thought I would share this simple thought.

The world recognizes one thing above race, gender, wealth… or poverty, intellect and religion… There’s one thing that above all the world will commend and encourage. That is excellence. It’s interesting to me how many people I meet that truly think being a christian excludes them from working incredibly hard… being obsessed with excellence and paying attention to detail.

This process takes time to perfect, and it takes work too! Stop. Slow down and work on building excellence! Remove all those thoughts that don’t contain excellence in them… and fill your mind with visions and pictures of a life full of excellence, integrity, truth, love and purity.

I just didn’t feel like it was okay to announce a blog with only a quote and post about “getting back into the swing of things.” Therefore, it would be good to give you a heads up on what’s coming down the pipeline. There are two things I love talking about; Leadership and Relationships. The next series deals with both of those topics… how to lead those we are in relationship with.

Be it a friend, peer, someone older than you or someone you have had a relationship with for a long time, I will talk about how to overcome the obstacles of gaining their support.

Leadership is much more than just acquiring a title:

“True Leadership Cannot be awarded, appointed or assigned. It comes only from influence, and that cannot be mandated. It must be earned.”  - John Maxwell

As you can tell, we can’t just assume a new role of power and expect everyone to be on board with us. It’s going to take intentional time and effort to earn the influence of our peers. A small step is looking at the bigger picture of the organization and seeing how we can leverage our influence to benefit everyone in the organization.

I look forward to walking through that with you in the coming days and weeks.

I started writing some blogs a few years back. It turned into a regular and weekly discipline for me. I really enjoyed it. But for some reason or another… I stopped on February 1st, 2010.

I guess I can blame it on the busyness of life or my crazy work schedule. I’m not 100% sure what caused me to stop, I just know I haven’t blogged since then. Technically I have written blogs since then, but those blogs are not relational like this will be. They are technical blogs like TripleWide Media. This is different.  I want to write about life, leadership, love, grace, compassion, relationships and all the topics it seems God is teaching me as he molds and refines me as a man of God.

If it’s okay, I may pull from the “best of the past” and re-post some I wrote a while back (like the one below this post). No matter what it is that I am writing I hope it falls into one of three main purposes. The first purpose is to inspire.

I want to inspire people to live Continue Reading…