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 the inciting incident of a great story.

What creative thing would you do if somebody handed you a twenty and you knew you had a to create a great story with the money?

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 the homeless transition into school. She has a plan and a vision, and we are hoping the seminar brings some ideas into clarity and gives her the inspiration she needs.

Lori, we are flying you and a friend to Portland and putting you up at a swanky hotel near the venue. We will even save seats for you wherever you want. You are our guest of honor! On the first night, I’ll bring you on stage to share a bit of your story, and where you’d like your story to go. Lori, this picture of you laughing did us all in. We love it, and we think you are going to be doing a lot of laughing when you come to Portland. Life is hard, but even the hard parts are worth celebrating. God is always molding our story into an epic narrative that is designed to save many lives. I can’t wait to meet you in person before the seminar.

The Living a Better Story Seminar is a Seminar for people who want to do great things with their lives, who want to live a story that has meaning and helps and inspires others. If you’re wanting to spend time in a room full of people who are doing remarkable and unique things, whether it’s starting hospitals or creating movies or turning their own homes into orphanages, you’ll want to join us!

If you’ve yet to register for the seminar, you can do so here. We’ll see you soon in Portland! Less than a month to go!!

Anne is also giving away a copy of her book to two commenters, chosen at random, on Friday. So check out the question at the end and leave a comment to be entered to win.

You can pick up a copy of the book here.

Essay #1 – The First Brick

We all remember the first time we had our faith in someone betrayed. The moment when innocence began morphing into skepticism. Mine happened on a playground in the fourth grade.

I found myself dusting the gritty hot sand off my hands and knees as my best friends stood laughing at me.

Leigh and Amy.

Daughters of deacons at the church where my dad was the pastor.

As a welcoming gift a few weeks earlier, they offered me the middle part of a three-piece heart necklace. You know the kind. The type that reads “Best Friends Forever” when the parts are put together.

I considered it part of my own heart. And in a way, it was. Finally, something stable. Something promising. Something consistent in my inconsistent life. This new school was the third school I had attended since kindergarten because we moved around so much.

I believed maybe this time, these friendships would be different. They’d be forever, just like the pendant said.

But after school one day, Amy reached out and tore the necklace off mysuntanned neck. Leigh pushed me down into the sand under a plastic green slide.

“We never wanted to be your best friend! Our parents made us!”

I stared at them, holding back my tears and feeling one of the chambers of my heart twist. It felt strange, and it hurt. Until that minute in my ten years on earth, I had never felt that before.

Clenching my teeth and ignoring the pain from the scrapes on my knees and my twisted-up heart, I did what any ten-year-old would do.

I ran.

Home.

We only lived about a quarter of a mile from the playground. My scrawny legs carried me faster than I had ever run before. I tore into the house, the storm door slamming behind me. I continued running down the hall until I reached my bedroom, where I threw my sandy, sweaty, heaving body on the bed.

Burying my face in my favorite pink-flowered pillowcase, I sobbed. I sobbed and I sobbed and I sobbed.

My mother, concerned about the unusual commotion from her typically quiet daughter, sat down gently at the foot of my bed. She waited a few minutes until my weeping subsided and asked what had happened.

In between gulps and hiccups and wiping generous amounts of mucous from my face, I told her that Leigh and Amy hated me. That I hated moving and I missed my old friends and I hated deacons and school and my life and I hated the church.

My mom quietly stroked my sweaty hair. I now think she was quiet because she kind of agreed with me.

Do you remember the first time you were betrayed by somebody? Have you forgiven them? Did the experience soften you or even make you stronger. Feel free to care in the comments section (and possibly get a free book from Anne!)

For the next sample essay from Anne’s book, visit Jon Acuff’s blog, Stuff Christians Like.

STOP TAKING SOCIAL CUES FROM YOUR PEERS.

Instead of taking social cues from people your age, take cues from people ten and twenty years older than you. Are you looking for a church that has a lot of people who are your age so you can hang out? That’s fine, but try looking for one where most of the people have families and perhaps a little grey hair. Why? Because the sooner you can relate to their priorities, the sooner you’ll be ready for the next stage of life. I’m in my late thirties but I’m more interested in hanging out with people who are retired. What’s it teaching me? It’s teaching me what matters later in life is friendships, family and love. In matters of faith, what matters to them is not theological debate, but closeness with Jesus and unity with believers.

“It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.”

My friend Bob, who is about ten years older than I am, told me recently that, at least in our culture, your twenties are about getting educated, your thirties are about accumulating resources (becoming financially sustainable), your forties are about building (families, houses, careers, ministries, impact) and your fifties are about enjoying what you’ve built (and perhaps pressuring your kids to get married and make babies)… He did not intend this as advice, he was only making an observation. But I tend to think it’s a pretty good path. It takes time to build influence, to establish connections, and to build confidence in others at your abilities. But delay the process and, well, you are in what psychologists call “suspended adolescence.”

To be honest, most of my friends who are in their twenties are seriously ambitious and enormously accomplished. I think of my friend Justin Zoradi over at These Numbers Have Faces, or Chase Reeves who is building his little blog empire, or Joshua Dubois who runs the Presidents Faith-Based Partnerships and Community Initiatives Program, or Jenny White who is heading up Charlie Peacock’s Art House Program in Dallas. It’s hard for me to see twenty-somethings as kids (unless we start talking about music, in which they trade in bands like children with baseball cards, hardly taking time to actually listen to the music! Call me an agist. I know I am an agist) but apparently the phenomenon is real. So if you’re in your early twenties and it’s just after noon and you’re crawling out of the bed you grew up sleeping in and surfing internet sights with a laptop on your belly, here’s some tips:

1. Lose your friends: If your friends aren’t ambitious, if they don’t have clear plans, you probably won’t either. This doesn’t mean to reject them, but it does mean if your friends want to lay around doing nothing all day, get some new friends. The single greatest influence playing on you is your friends. You will become like the people you hang around.

2. Read books: Try to read a book a week for the next six weeks. This alone will stimulate your mind and you’ll start being bored with being bored. You’ll want to explore ideas. Your conversations with friends will become boring. You’ll wonder how many more conversations you can have about what happened the last time you guys were drunk.

3. Write down your goals for the next five years, one year, one month and one week: Do this now. If you don’t know what you want, that’s a very serious problem, so just write down anything and start moving. A body in motion stays in motion. It doesn’t matter if you change your mind later. You can’t change your mind about what you want until you start moving forward.

4. Ask your parents for criticism: Criticism from people who love you is a gift and a blessing. It’s going to be hard to take, and the first thing you are going to want to do is criticize them back, but don’t do it. Just soak it in, then act on whatever they say. Nobody is perfect, but people who don’t accept criticism end up worse off in the end.

5. Accept hardship: Hardship is part of every life, and God intends it to purify you and prepare you. If you reject hardship, you reject life.

6. Cut the cynicism: Leaders don’t roll their eyes, children do. Is the Dave Matthews band so yesterday? Great. You and the kids in the high school cafeteria can talk about it all day. People work very hard to do what they do, and when you roll your eyes you’re being insulting. Children are insulting, adults appreciate craftsmanship over fashion. That said, the last Dave Matthew’s record really wasn’t that bad.

7. Accomplish something: Nothing builds true confidence like success. Want to be a filmmaker? Make a short film and enter it into a contest. Want to write? Write an essay and submit it to a journal. Pick something and practice and work until you’re good at it. You can only change direction if you are in motion.

And of course there are a million more. But this should get the ball rolling, or at least get you out of bed.

Know any twenty-something bucking the trend? Provide a link in the comments section…

We all live life asking questions, questions about how to get ahead, how to make life more meaningful, questions about how to survive or help people survive. The question how is an American question, and it rests on the presupposition that we know what life is really about.

Some friends and I were walking down the street in Vancouver, BC last week and I stopped our group and asked them to look around and count the ads that they noticed. We were downtown in a major shopping district, and even though we could see for blocks, we found only two billboards or posters advertising stuff. If we’d been across the border in the states, we’d have counted, perhaps, hundreds. The difference was striking.

Advertising is part of the reason we have become a how culture. Commercials make us think we need things, and then the dominant question (thus the story we end up living) is about how we get what we think we are missing, so we wake up every morning wondering how we are going to get ahead, how we are going to get paid and so forth.

The problem Christians face is the Bible is not attempting to answer how questions. And if it is, it’s a terribly written book and not practical in any way in terms of addressing how to succeed, how to get married, how to be more sexy, how to lose weight, how to organize your finances or how to build a business. Instead, the Bible is a why book. The Bible is answering much larger questions: Why do we exist, why do we not feel loved, why is there pain in the world, why has God left us and so forth. Are there exceptions? Sure. The Proverbs has some wisdom on how to live, and there are other examples, but they are few.

So the question is, are you trying to answer small questions with your life or big questions? If you are trying to answer small questions (how do I turn earth into heaven because there is no greater epic for me) then the Bible fails. But if you are trying to answer larger questions (all of this will someday go away, and life is short, so what is really important in light of this) then the Bible is a book for you.

American culture is a how culture. We ask almost exclusively how questions, because our commercialized culture is not interested in why. If we really started asking why questions, our entire economy would collapse, and honestly, we wouldn’t care because once we answered the why questions, we wouldn’t want all that stuff in the first place.

So what does the Bible say to the Average American? Among other things, it says this: You are asking the wrong questions.

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 has always been involved in your story, you’ll learn where His leadership interacts with your personal responsibility and how much of our lives is a wrestling for control over our futures, a control that must ultimately be given over to God. And yet, we will also learn how much God loves for us to dream, to want and desire and to create a better world for ourselves and for those around us.

But you won’t learn all of this by listening to me lecture. I’ll do plenty of that, but I will also be interviewing guests, and we’ve even rented another facility nearby where we will have some fun “off the schedule.”

A good story is about something. Scott Pilgrim is about a guy who wants a girl. Inception is about planting an idea via a dream. Toy Story is about a group of toys reuniting with their owner. What is your story about? Is it clear? Are you making decisions that make it clear? Are you wandering? Is your story wandering. These are the very difficult questions we want to tackle at the seminar itself. Come with a pen, a computer, a journal, a Bible and an open mind. Lets live better stories because the world lives on stories, and it’s consuming stories that aren’t as good as the one you can live with your life.

If you’ve never experienced Portland in the fall, get on a plane and come join us. You are going to have a great time.

See you soon.

Writing is not like painting in that a painter can sit down in front of a tree and paint, and when he is done, he can turn his chair around and paint some other tree, or building, or waterfall. Ideas aren’t so plentiful.

So what do I do when the inkwell runs dry? I fill it up. Or at least I try. Here are some tips:

• Don’t panic. As a writer, you are good at processing and communicating ideas, but you didn’t come up with the ideas. They existed before you and will exist after you. You are simply the filter through which ideas get poured and processed. There are more ideas out there.

• Get some rest. Your filter is not a fixed mechanism, it’s a living brain, and it needs rest. Take a break from all things philosophical for a while. Attend a movie, read a book, take a nap, but let your mind recover.

• Pray. I’m a firm believer that God brings us things to write about, word pictures to paint, ideas that are good for the world. Pray and wait.

Sooner or later you’ll be writing again.

What do you do when the words won’t come?

What Women Really Need from Men

Here is an excerpt from my book Father Fiction. It made quite a splash when I released it. Apparently, lots of people have opinions on what what the opposite gender should do to be a good mate.

What Men Really Need from Women

And of course, turning the question around seems to get a lot of interest, too. What is it that men really need from women?

Can I Tell You a Story

If you’re not telling a story to and with your family and friends, somebody is. We are all consuming stories, and if we’re not telling one, we are living a story somebody else is dictating to us. Scary stuff!

Time is running out to register for the Living a Better Story Seminar, the antidote for a boring life.

Does Your Personality Influence Your Theology?

We all seem to think the particular theological positions we hold are true, but are there other factors that are leading us to believe so? Are certain personalities drawn to certain theological positions? Are we defending the truth, or our identities?

Is Telling the Truth More Important Than Selling the Truth?

This article explores the temptation to not be honest about our struggles because we fear  people might not “buy” our religion if we do.

Why Doctrine is Only Half the Message

I believe it was Ghandi who said “I like your Christ, I don’t like your Christian.” This popular article explores the idea that right theology espoused in arrogance is, effectively, wrong theology.

Time is running out to register for the Living a Better Story Seminar, the antidote for a boring life.