When Philip K. Wrigley succeeded his father as chairman of the Chicago-based chewing gum company, he continued the firm’s practice of heavily spending money on advertising to create and maintain consumer demand.   During an airline flight one day, a seatmate asked him why he continued to spend so much money on advertising a product that was already one of the best-known in the world.

Wrigley quickly replied, “For the same reason the pilot of this plane keeps the engine running when we’re already 29,000 feet up.” (Source: Louis E. Boone, “Quotable Business,” Random House).

What engine do you need to keep running?

• For the church to stay in flight, individual believers must stay on mission.  Putting in a good word for Jesus is the fuel that keeps the engine running.
• For a marriage to stay in flight, husbands and wives must work on the little things and deal quickly and directly with the big things.
• For students to stay in flight, it requires an uncommon willingness to work hard and not settle for mediocre results.

What else?

As parents, we have a wonderful opportunity to speak into the lives of our children at crucial times.  Our words carry the power of life; they can also create wounds that may last a lifetime.

We have always spoken to our girls in terms of “when you go to college” instead of “if you go to college.”  In this way, it becomes an expected next step in life.  It also reinforces our belief in their capabilities and potential.  It’s part of creating a culture of positive expectation.

When talking about taking a family vacation to Europe or Hawaii, we often joke that “when you become a big-short attorney you can take all four of us.”  I have no assumption either girl will be an attorney (nor do I really want them to be), but it’s another way of conveying to them … “You are capable of great things.”

As a father to two daughters, I’m also aware of how important it is for me to place a higher value on the internal beauty within than the beauty on the outside.  Our cultural forces present an image of womanhood that is partial and often partially (if not totally) inaccurate.  The messages they see in print or on television is that external beauty is what wins the day … gets attention … gives value … provides significance.

As a father, I have a responsibility for helping them see their inner beauty and draw strength from that.  But how?  It’s not as easy as heading to the mall and buying clothes straight off the mannequin.  It requires capturing and honoring those moments when the inner beauty surfaces through compassion or generosity or unselfishness.  It’s more than positive reinforcement, it’s a values realignment.

Use your words to create …

• hope
• dreams
• security
• confidence
• contentment

Use your words wisely.

It’s been a busy week and it’s only Wednesday night (Thursday morning for those of you readers on the East Coast).  I spent Monday and Tuesday deep in the bowels of PowerPoint — the first time I’ve plunged into PowerPoint in a few years.  We used a program called MediaShout for our multimedia presentations in San Diego.  I discovered that I liked the Mac version of PowerPoint better than the Windows version of PowerPoint … and wondered, “How can that be?” when Windows is PowerPoint’s native environment.

I also dusted off my InDesign and Illustrator skills and did a few fliers for our women’s ministry at church.  That brought back good memories of cranking out design pieces for Blue Haven Pools and Spas Supplies Direct.

Of course, there have been meetings, both planned and otherwise.

And we still have children.

And I’ve been working on a sermon I’ll preach this weekend at LifeChurch in Aurora.

So … It’s now 10:00 PM and I’m thinking I may do a little reading before bed.  No blogs.  Old-fashioned paper.

I came across this post on Ryan Geiger’s blog (he found it from someone else) and thought I’d share. Since I’m preaching on marriage in a few weeks, I thought it was funny.

*****************************

Dear Tech Support ,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewellery applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0. In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable programs such as NBA 5.0 , NFL 3.0 and Golf Clubs 4.1 . Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.

What can I do?

Signed,

Desperate

After being snowed out a few times, we finally had a softball tournament this past weekend.  Hope played down in Castle Rock and did a great job.  Here’s a snapshot of an at-bat.

We kicked off a new series this weekend at Mountainview called “Chase the Lion.”  It’s based on a book by Mark Batterson that features an obscure character from the Old Testament – Benaiah.  I had the privilege of kicking off the series with a message entitled, “Defying the Odds.”  The basic premise was this: your view of God will determine the size of the challenges you tackle.

Our creative arts team did a fantastic job of designing the stage.  Our music was good, as it always is.  At our second service I had the opportunity to baptize a young lady into Christ as her mom stood near by.

Tonight we hosted “Laugh All Night,” a Christian comedy concert to benefit mission efforts in Haiti.  It was very well attended and everyone seemed to enjoy it.  I was a bit disappointed that there was no open mic … but that’s probably for the best!

And to top things off, today (March 7) is our daughter Hope’s tenth birthday. We took her and several of her little buddies to Benihana’s for lunch.  It’s hard to believe our little baby is now ten years old.  Time flies.

All in all, what a great day it was!

This is a picture of my dad’s family. Dad is the one in the checkered shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

Grace & Elmer Hensley (front & center) and their children; (back row) Maxine, Lorene, Elmer Jr., Flay, Vivian, (front left to right) Bonnie, Grace, Elmer, Vivian & Wilma.  Special thanks to my cousin, Donna, for posting this picture on Facebook.

I know it may be hard for some of you to believe that anyone who shares my DNA could possibly be in the Honor Society … but it’s true.  On Wednesday, Hannah was inducted into the Honor Society at Ranch View Middle School here in Highlands Ranch.

Here’s what it takes to be selected:

Students with a 3.5 average in Knowledge and Work Habits with no “C’s” are eligible.  Students will need recommendations from their teachers and an application telling about their community service, leadership, and scholarship.

Tonya and I are very proud of Hannah.  She has worked hard in all her classes and has done a tremendous job making new friends.  Congratulations!

It’s confession time.  Saturday morning I woke up, worked out, and decided to stop at the grocery store before going home.  Why?  Because I’ve developed this unreasonable attraction to King Sooper’s chocolate donuts.  Not the puffy, glazed variety.  But the solid, devil’s food cake.

So … I went through checkout with a dozen donuts, three cases of diet drinks, and a copy of the Denver Post.  In my sweat pants.

I bought my wife for Christmas a Samsung Moment (see below) that runs Google’s Android OS.  Here’s my first take: I really like it.

As you may know, I’m a big fan of all things Google.  Apart from the “big brother” concerns of collecting all that data, I think Google has done a fantastic job of bringing innovation and usability to the web.  For years, Google.com has been my standard home page.

Well, enough about that.  Back to the phone.  Samsung’s implementation of Android seems pretty slick.  It flows well, looks beautiful, and installs apps easily.  One of the great things about the Android OS is it’s open source approach.  I’m a believer in open source (PHP, MySQL, etc) — the idea of opening up code to the programming community to use, tweak, develop, and improve.

At first blush, I would be tempted to make my next phone an Android-based phone.  I’m on my second generation of phones using Windows Mobile (currently I’m carrying the HTC Touch Pro and love it).  The big benefit for me is the ability to use Microsoft Office products, sync with Outlook and Exchange, and familiarity with the OS interface.  It might be hard to break-away from this platform.  But with the right apps, I could easily replicate my Office experience on Android.

Hmmmm.  I love dilemmas like these.