I saw this tweet the other day from John that made me think a minute.

See at first I started to say, “ya me too, I am tired of mediocrity and its mediocrityness” but then I realized

I love mediocrity

Mediocrity calls me to settle
Mediocrity calls me to play it safe
Mediocrity calls me to be content with little
Mediocrity calls me to do nothing

Mediocrity is not sexy or even something to be desired, but it is easy and doesn’t call for much.

For someone who is afraid of failure, mediocrity might just be the best thing to be.

How do you reject mediocrity?

*kyle

This post is tough to write and yet very liberating at the same time. I have been blogging everyday (I miss some days) for 10 months now. I have been working on gaining a community as well as being apart of other communities. Inside of this process I have interacted with many of you on twitter as well as on your blog. It has been a great time, but to be honest, has overtaken my life and become my idol.

I never meant to let it run me, or for that matter hold my emotions and happiness. But it has taken over my life and has moved my emotional happiness up and down. Mainly, my love/hate relationship with this blog is stealing a piece of who I am everyday. Its not that I do not enjoy writing and being apart of a community. I have really enjoyed the process and all the interaction we have had over time. What I do know is that it is taking away from my time and energy.

I have decided to change things up a bit and slow down in my posting. I know this will hurt my numbers and stats, and therefore will hurt me personally. I like to be able to have a measurement for how effective things are. I would be lying if I told you that I did not check my blog stats or that I do not care about them. I do, and I often can let them dictate my emotion on how “effective” I feel like I was that day. But to be even more honest, I was getting so caught up in maintaining my blog stats that I was putting crap out there just to have content out there.

The new schedule that I am looking to set up is a every other day type posting style. This is subject to change and could go all over the place. My hope is that I will be able to cut back from all the BS that I was writing and focus in on great subject material as well as other projects and ideas that I am working on.

Thanks for being an awesome community and I hope that we can continue to walk through life together here on the blogs and in person. Looking forward to another season of life and blogging. Oh ya, and watch for a new name and blog title coming soon.

Have you ever thought about your blogging strategy and its effectiveness?

Early morning sunrises and coffee make me happy. I remember a couple of years ago driving back to school early on Monday mornings and soaking up the sunset. I was not upset that I had a two hour drive ahead of me, that it was early, or two or three classes later that day. All I was paying attention to was the way the sun was rising in the east. Maybe it was the way the light penetrated the darkness and brought warmth to the cool air that brought a smile to my face. I like to think that it had something to do with being in the presence of God. I loved seeing the sun rise in the morning.
The only problem was I hardly ever see the sun rise any more.

I think it would be safe to say that happiness is associated with light and depression is equated to darkness. We always see light associate with good things.  Which then makes darkness bad. I feel like the light or happiness is having a hard time penetrating the darkness or depression. Unfortunately it seems that depression and fear are easier to be consumed with then happiness and trust. Depression for me is fear of the unknown, the uncertainty that plays in my head about the future. This darkness over takes my vision and I find myself stumbling around with my hands in front of my trying to find my way. I get momentary glimpses of light to see where I am headed but just as I start to see darkness creeps in and takes over.
Why is it that depression is more prevalent then happiness?
(more…)

Sorry for the up the noise look, but I had this idea and recorded this qik video.

Check out Tony’s post here

What would it mean for you to unplug from things that zappppp your energy?

*kyle

You would think silence would be a welcomed break from the noise that is life, for me it is the opposite, it is unbearable, and I hate it.

But the very thing that I cannot live without, Noise, is slowing zapping all my energy out of me.

What is bringing you down right now?

*kyle

My friends have been popping out babies like no tomorrow. Seriously, get cable or something, but slow your role. I am happy for you, but I feel left out or something. To be honest, lately I have been feeling fertile. No, I am not talking actually having a baby, I am talking more about babies in general. In the last 4 months I have had 5 friends have kids. All of these friends are my age (23) and all of them have been married for about 2-3 years. I am not player hating, I am just amazed at how the pregnant bug spreads faster then swine flu. In all of this baby making I feel pretty left out.

When someone else is doing something, you want in on the action. The way I know this is true is by twitter. I read peoples tweets all day, and am constantly in tweetnvy. Wanting to be the one going to concerts, or eating at that restaurant, or writing that blog post, etc…I am constantly hearing about what other people are doing and becoming jealous all at the same time. There is no except for all my friends that are married and are now having babies. I went through this 3 years ago when all my friends were getting married. There is only so many weddings you can be in and go to and not feel like the loser that never catches the garner. I started to really wonder if I was going to be the third wheel friend that never gets married. That kind of went away when I realized that it really was not that bad and the upside was that I had a lot of freedom to do things. Well, that feeling is back. After hearing about all of my friends having babies I start to really wonder when my time will come. But I really start to wonder if there is something wrong with me?

This is not a “pity party for Kyle” post, no it is more of a self reflection that I think we can all identify with. I have come to realize that what I want is never enough. I am in constant search for more, and when I get what I was looking for I often find that it is not enough. I think my biggest problem with feeling like I have accomplished so little is that I was taught by the world says that you are one step away from looking perfect, feeling perfect, or all of the above and often you are left wanting more. I feel like the church teaches that you have grown up when you get married and have kids. When I see my friends doing this and realize that I am so far away from that I feel like the 16 yr old kid in 8th grade, like I was held back in life. You just start to wonder if you are doing something wrong.

This is a constant battle for me. I have a hard time not judging myself by other peoples standards. Keeping pace with the Jones is what I believe it is called. If I was to look at others standards of where their life is right now I am way behind. In fact I am so far behind that I feel like I have not even taken off. But I do not feel alone in this marathon called life.  I think we all do this. We all look at what each other accomplishes, or how many kids “so in so” has and what kind of house they live in and compare ourselves to them. Isn’t that the American way, look at other people and then see where you stand?

I love babies. I love the how small they are and how they have that baby smell (the good clean smell, not the dirty smell). I just love babies. Maybe because my mom use to run the nursery at our church and I would help her out every Sunday, or maybe it is just unnatural for a human to not love babies. I just love babies. But I think I am more in love with the thought of a baby instead of an actual baby. I think sometimes I find myself drawn to the idea of having a baby and what my life would be like then. You know, I would have a wife, a house, a dog named Jack, and a job. I still love babies and love to hold them, but I can get more caught up in what a baby symbolizes rather then the baby itself.

We all feel fertile at some time. Capable of producing grandiose ideas of what life could be like. But that is not what God has called you and me to live like. He has not called us to live someone else life, or to envy what they have. He has called us to be ourselves and to be who He has created us to be.

You might feel fertile now, but is it an envious fertile? One that wants the “success” or life of another?
Or are we feeling fertile in a way that God has created us to be? In a way that uses what God has given us now to bring glory and honor to His name?

Do you ever feel this way?

*kyle

This verse has hit me like a ton of bricks this morning….
“Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.” (Galatians 1:10).

Honestly, for a long time, I have been working towards the approval of men and not God. In some sick and twisted way I knew that I would always have God. But I never seemed to feel like I had mans approval. This drove me to be the best I could be, know that right people, and look the best I could. All the while, God was left in the background. I had the attitude that God would always be there, man would not, and all I needed was to become popular and liked by man so that I can feel good about myself. How foolish was I to think that I was working for the approval of man?

Over the last 4 months I have been on a journey of discovery. Finding out about who I am and what I am doing. Learning and discovering passions and gifts, but also learning what it looks like to be in love with people and not God. It has been so easy for me to get caught up in the idea that if I am liked by others than I will like myself. This has been slowly shattered, and shattered in a very painful way. Many things that I have pursued or went after have fallen flat on their face. It has taken me this long to even see this let alone learn all of this.

I am in the process of rehabbing from working for man and not for God. But I am slowly working out of this and working towards God. In light of all of this I am going to be changing some things that you might notice or you might not notice. But am getting back to working for God, not man.

*Kyle

“The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved”
-Mother Teresa

Loneliness is a problem, it is something that no one should ever feel or deal with. And yet, the reason we can sympathize with Mother Teresa and ones that are lonely is because we have all been there ourselves. At some point in life we have felt the deep and suppressing feeling of loneliness.
I was all alone yesterday. Standing in the open with no one around to join me.

“How Can I Pray For You?//http://bit.ly/OsKkb” This was the tweet that greeted me Tuesday morning from Loswhit. It really caught me off guard. For a brief second I thought he was referring to my post I published the day before called “prayer service” where I called for people to leave comments on how I and others could pray for them. It was a pretty simple task and was hoping that we could all meet up on Thursday at 4 and pray together. Why did I think he was referring to my post? When I published the post I also sent out an email to everyone in my address book, which loswhit just so happened to be in my address book because he emailed me about calling him a whore (long story). I clicked the link hoping for the best, what I got was not exactly what I was looking for. This was where the link took me.

Now I will be honest, I got the idea from loswhit, I even blogged about the last time he had a prayer service and he blogged about me here.
I already understood that I was stealing from him. But when I opened up his page and realized that he was doing the exact same thing as me my heart kind of sank. I knew immediately that I couldn’t compete with the beast that was carlos whittaker. Needless to say, he got 121 comments and I got 3.

You are probably sitting there thinking, “are you kidding me Kyle, you are upset because someone got more prayer request than you?”
Great point, trust me I said the same thing to myself. Selfishly I would have loved to had tons of people want me to pray for them. But that really was not my motive when I posted the idea for the prayer service. I knew that there were several friends without jobs, other friends who just had a baby, and other friends that really needed prayer (including myself). This was the reason for the prayer service. The deflation became the issue  because I had pretty high expectations of what it could have been (based on how it went in the past with other prayer services) and was hoping to spend hours praying with people.

I know that God can listen to everyone’s prayers. And no, I do not think I am the only one who should be allowed to pray for others. What hit me in the gut was the reality that I would be lucky to have 10 prayer request compared to 110 and that others wanted Carlos to pray for them and not me. But I went about my way and decided to go through with the prayer service even if the only person that was going to join me was my dog (all dogs go to heaven). Well that was about how many people showed up. It was me and my sister. The funny thing about it was that she was in the room next to me watching while I was praying over my web cam. Pretty humbling….

Inside of my loneliness I realized that it wasn’t about me. Pretty crazy idea? Prayer is not about you. But really, that was what prayer had been for me in the past. I was going to pray and people were going to be helped and all was going to be right in the world. But in reality I sat in my room alone, getting ready to pray in front of an audience of one. This hit me like a ton of bricks. And as I sat there debating on praying or not, I realized that at that moment I was missing the point completely. I had to get back to my original intent of the prayer service, to lift up the needs of others to a loving and gracious God.

I prayed for you yesterday. Yes, each and everyone one of you. I realized that at that moment I was going to do what I said I was going to do, pray. And that is what I did. For 30 minutes I sat there in my office chair and prayed out loud in front of a computer screen. It was so boring that my sister stopped watching after a couple of minutes. It is funny for me to type this out. Because I can almost hear what people are saying right now, “you got upset because no one showed up?” Ya at first I did, but then I realized that I do not pray to any of you, I pray to a loving and gracious God.

Thank You Carlos for being you and having the desire to care for others and lift them up in prayer.
Because of this I was able to get back to why I pray and who I pray too. Not to you, or a statue, or a person, but I pray to a God that hears prayers and loves His children.
Sometimes you just have to laugh at yourself for trying to get ahead of God by doing what you think is a good thing.

*Kyle