8 Talents

I have been encouraged and challenged in great ways by Cornerstone in Simi Valley California.

Recently, in one of their podcasts, they played a video about how they felt it was time to lead their church down a more biblical path. Not that they weren’t biblical, they communicated that they want to see more of two things.

1. Community- People meeting each others needs.

2. Every member ministry- The idea that a few should not be paid to minister to all but to equip and train.

For some reason the video left me with a longing. I know there are lots of churches that value these two things. Yet, there seems to be a difference between valuing them and working them into the DNA of a church. We must ask the tough questions… If we aren’t like that why, and how can we become more like that? I am sure Cornerstone has some rough roads ahead of them as they lead their flock into a place of living out this vision. A place where one persons problems become a group of peoples problems. Below is the video from the elders and church leadership, minus Francis Chan, take a look and I would love to hear your thoughts.

If you want to hear Francis Chan unpack these thoughts a little more you can find the full podcast at their web site.

We are back from Chicago and it turned out to be a great trip. Amy did amazing! Many of you have probably read about how ‘bad’ the Chicago marathon was this year but we had a good experience. I will let Amy talk about most of the race details, this will be the spectators post.

I like being a marathon fan more than I think I would like being a marathon runner. I had read about how you could use public transit to get to about 5 different spots on the race course but that wasn’t quite enough. I had an ambitious goal of meeting Amy at about every mile along the way. To do that we purchased a bike rack for the car and hauled our bikes up to Chicago with us.

It was a beautiful Morning. The scenery was quite amazing.

This is us pre-race. I am sporting my one-of-kind T-Shirt.
Front: I chased my wife for a year before she would date me.
Back: Why stop now? Amy Barker’s Super-Fan “I’ll see you along the way.”

Amy in the starting coral shortly before the race.

Starting line, it was madness here. Only about 36,000 runners decided to run. There were 45,000 registered. It took them all around 30 minutes to cross the starting line. To provide context, the elite athletes were already 1/4th of the way finished before the last person started.

I had used a combination of bike maps, the marathon course map, and google earth to plan my strategy for the day. Amy’s sister Becky would be tagging along. Her company was well appreciated! Google earth was a great tool as we had to cross some fairly busy streets. Using Google Earth we were able to zoom in and see all of the tunnels that passed under the streets.

Due to the confusion of navigating the city and me gaining confidence in what we were doing we skipped straight ahead to mile 4. Holding up our big pink sign Amy ran up and greeted us. Unfortunately, we were slow to our bikes and Amy had passed our second checkpoint before we got there. We waited about fifteen minutes wondering if she had cramped and needed to stretch or something, but eventually we realized that she was long gone. At her pace she would have been about 2 miles ahead of us so we had to go into contingency mode. We cut under the race via a park tunnel and was then on the inside of the route. This pushed us to the half way point of the race where we finally got back on track and was able to meet Amy about twelve more times.

You can see the original race route in light blue and our route in dark blue (Click map for larger image). Every-time you see a red star indicates a successful meeting with Amy.

It was at about mile 18 that they ‘canceled’ the race. We are not fully sure what that means as they still timed them all the way to the finish. They tried hard to get the runners to walk which lasted for 10 minutes or so and then the runners kicked it into high gear and finished strong. Towards the end it was a little depressing as a lot of runners were going down and needing assistance from medical teams. Ambulance sirens were pretty much nonstop for the entire race.

I was too caught up in the chase to take as many photos as I would have liked to have taken but it was a lot of fun nonetheless. Amy finally had a little room to run. For the most part she all the runners were crammed together like a herd of cattle. If you have ever watched videos of the running of the bulls in spain. It looked a lot like that, except through the streets of Chicago.

Post race photo.

We ended the day with a trip to a Giordano’s pizza place and that was by far the best pizza I had ever had. The trip was amazing, but it is good to be home.

Well we are here in the Windy City and all is well, sort of. I read several articles about how runners get nervous right before a race and can snap at any given thing. Well that has definitely happened several times today, but it has been me doing the snapping. Amy has been great.

She had to be here today by 6 PM or she wouldn’t have been able to race. We had built extra flextime into the schedule but when you wake up an hour after you are supposed to leave it is not a good start to the day.

The trip was quick and uneventful (outside of my unwarranted anxiety). Chicago is kind of confusing as I don’t understand the layout yet, but we’ll get where we need to be and then home safely, Lord willing.

Thanks for your prayers thus far, without them who knows how crazy I might have went.

My wife has always had a dream of running a marathon. She was extremely close in her training once and then had to stop training due to an injury. Now she is back at it and preparing to race in two short days at the LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon. It may seem crazy for anyone to want to run 26.2 miles all at once and even crazier when you do it amongst 45,000 other runners, I really admire the dedication and effort she has put into this race. So with her passion to navigate the 45,000 runners I am going to brave the 1.5 million (yes that is 5 zeros) spectators and attempt to cheer Amy on from as many spots, along the race route, as I possibly can.

Here is the info that you really need.

When Is the Race? Sunday October 7th in the AM.

How can I support Amy? Email her encouragement, write on her Facebook wall, or leave a comment on this blog post before the race. I will make sure she gets everything up until bed time Saturday night.

How will I know how she is doing? They have a cool thing called racer tracking. Amy will have a tracker on her shoe and they will email you or send you a text message once Amy crosses certain points in the race. You can sign up for those here. You need to do that ASAP as they turn the tracking registration off at some point. Let Amy know you signed up for updates. While there is not a huge crowd that will be going to cheer her on, if she knows that each of you are tracking her as she progresses from your respective homes then I think that will really help. I would love for at least 30 people to sign-up and encourage Amy in this way.

I think that is all for now, I am going to attempt to get Amy to write a guest post on this blog about her experience with the race and I will post my own recap once we get back from Chicago. It is looking to be a grand adventure!


I don’t have any running pictures of Amy yet, those will come soon.

See what happens when mom is gone for a day or two. The mooch talks me into all kinds of trouble.

Amy’s absence is consequently also how you get random blog posts from me at two thirty in the morning.

My life lacks a passion for the world. I can be very ME centered. I stumbled upon the video below when browsing Francis Chan’s website, In Love With God. Their church has been unable to grow for 5 years due to a lack of space. Obvious answer? Build a new bigger better building. They have access to plenty of funds. Yet they are bucking the trend. Instead of spending millions on a new Sanctuary they are building a much cheaper outdoor amphitheater. That will double as a community park throughout the week. I think they have locked onto something. In doing so it frees them up to give more to the world, oh to be like that.

So it seems like I don’t know how to embed videos very well, here is a link for you to download the video and view it with Quicktime.

Video from Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, CA.

Click through to their building explanation page to learn more about what they are doing for the world. Making videos like this is part of what I want to do when I grow up :).

I have been greatly challenged tonight by a post from a good friend, Pastor David. He quotes Erwin McManus from Barbarian Way at a slightly greater length than I am going to in his post. One line in particular hit me hard;

God would never choose for us safety at the cost of significance.

That is a revolutionary statement. I cherish the safety of my surroundings. How often have I chosen my own comfort and desires over the alternative of significance? What a foolish and cheap trade that is to make.

It reminds me of a trip that I took with 9 youth backpacking this summer. Our goal was to climb a 14er and on our first day I chickened out. Not because I didn’t think I was able but because it wasn’t as safe as I like to be. The next day I worked through the fears; it was at considerable risk, but with great rewards.

Lord please teach me how to always choose the significant things in Your eyes over my own desires.