15Sep, 2010

Special Opportunity in Portland for those attending the LABS Seminar

Posted by Don
15

If you are coming to Portland for the Living a Better Story Seminar, you may already know the theater that will host the seminar is the Armory, Portland’s newest and probably greatest play house. The weekend before the seminar, Portland Center Stage will be performing Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Sunset Boulevard. I happened to see Snow Falling on Cedars last year and it was remarkable, perhaps the best performed play I’ve ever seen. Sunset Boulevard is bound to be terrific. We struck a deal with the Armory for you to get a discounted ticket. There’s actually a matinee the day the seminar starts. You could literally see the musical, go grab dinner, then come back to the same theater and start the seminar (looks like it’s going to be a capacity crowd, so you’ll have the chance to scope out your seats). If you are coming in Saturday morning or afternoon, there’s also a Saturday evening show. So you’ve got a couple options. To get your discounted ticket (it’s a $5 discount, but if you go with one-hundred other people, that’s $500 off. Okay, there aren’t that many open seats, and I know $5 isn’t much, but it’s a show [...]

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09Sep, 2010

Knowing Where You’re Going will Keep You From Making Bad Decisions

Posted by Don
84

Ever wonder why Joseph didn’t sleep with Potiphar’s wife? He certainly could have. She came on to him often, and finally got so tired of his rejections she lied and said he tried to rape her. Joseph ended up in Prison for a crime he didn’t commit. But what gave Joseph the strength to not give in to temptation? First, Joseph knew what was his and what wasn’t, and Potiphar’s wife was not his, and Joseph had a great deal of respect for Potiphar, but second, and second is important, Joseph knew his own destiny. He’d been told in a dream he would become a powerful man. And that was beginning to happen in Joseph’s life. Joseph ran all of Potiphar’s affairs. He may not have known it then, but he was in training to run all of Egypt. One of the most important elements of story has to do with what the main character wants. Does he want the girl? Does the football team want to win the state championship? If we don’t know what the main character wants, the story is boring and dull and it’s torture to sit through. The same is true for a human life. [...]

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01Sep, 2010

A Campus-Wide Inciting Incident

Posted by Don
35

Yesterday morning I spoke at Belmont University in Nashville, kicking off a fascinating, campus-wide experiment. Belmont is handing out cash to their students. In denominations of five, ten and twenty bucks, hundreds of students will be handed packets containing cash and asked to “do something” with the money. The idea is they can’t spend it on themselves, and they have to use it to tell a great story. Each student will consider what to do with the money for a few days, I am sure, and then launch into a creative endeavor to make something great happen with the dollars they have been given. If you want to follow along, you can read some of their stories here. I get to be part of this campaign as an experiment to have fun with the concepts in A Million Miles. The idea of an inciting incident involves passing through a doorway of no return. With a twenty-dollar bill in hand, and knowing they can’t spend it on themselves, students will start making things happen, bringing stories into the world that would never have taken place if it weren’t for them, and for the inciting incident of being handed a packet containing [...]

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01Sep, 2010

Announcing the Winner of the Living a Better Story Contest: Lori Ventola

Posted by Don
0

After receiving and reading through more than 500 entries to the Living a Better Story Blog Contest, we’ve chosen our winner. And believe me, this was no easy task. There is no story greater than one human being attempting to live a meaningful life. We read painful and beautiful stories about marriages falling apart and getting back together, children being taken from the world too early, stories of noble ambitions to build orphanages and start schools. We passed around your stories like favorite baseball cards, each of us wanting plenty of you to win. In fact, even as I boarded a plane yesterday, well after we should have chosen our winner, we couldn’t decide. I finally left it in the hands of my faithful and prayerful assistant Tara, who told me when I landed in Chicago that she was having “panic attacks.” The final decision was very difficult, and included a secondary round of questions for about a dozen final contestants. In the end, we chose the contestant we felt the seminar would help the most. Again, it was tough. But the winner is Lori Ventola of Denver, Colorado. Lori wants to start a mobile after-school program helping children of [...]

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24Aug, 2010

Living a Better Story Seminar Contest Update

Posted by Don
52

The Living a Better Story Seminar is just over a month away and we already have more than 350 people signed up! We couldn’t be more excited. More than 500 people entered our contest to be flown out for the seminar, and we will be announcing the winner on September 1st. In a way, the seminar will be like a reunion of people who have never met, if such a thing is possible. Fans of the books and blog along with folks who are just looking to energize their story are descending on Portland September 26th and 27th. If you haven’t registered yet, please sign up today! If you’ve already signed up, prepare to closely analyze the major decisions and turns of your life as a way of exploring how God wired you so that, together, we can discover what the best story for your life might be. God used the stories of peoples lives as His primary way of communicating to the world, and we will be looking at the way God interacted with characters such as Joseph, Paul, Moses and a few others who will join me on stage. In the Seminar, you’ll learn to see how God [...]

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