A Busy Week After a Couple Days Off

We spent the weekend in Brimingham with family for a wedding, so we had a couple days away during which it was impossible to do any work. This was ultimately a good thing because we were able to spend more time (8 hours in the car each way) talking and dreaming about our ideas and the work that God is doing through us.

It is interesting to think about building an organization from the ground up. Much of our conversation surrounded ideas in Jim Collins' book "Built to Last." Here his research team analyzes what he considers "visionary companies"--organizations that, among other things, balance cult-like faithfulness to core values and relentless drive for progress. Reading the core values of Sony, Hewlett-Packard, and the other vissionary companies in Collins' study spurred long conversations about the values we wish to anchor our organization through the different projects we will take on.

While we have not established the explicit values themselves, we have made several decisions already in the "pre-dawn" of our organization that have expressed some of what will become our core values. First, our decision to start an organization of our own rather than working with another organization did not come lightly. We met with a friend who runs a missionary organization and he questioned the need to "reinvent the wheel" by starting something on our own. Logistically this makes sense; if there was an existent organization under which we could accopmlish the goals we have set, it would in the short term be easier to work with that organization. However, with much prayer and deliberation, we made th decision that going on our own was part of the plan for our work. The risks associated with being on our own requires much more faith than the relative comfort of working for someone else. Furthermore, to work with another organization at some point requires the our goals come under the direction of another organization's leadership and vision. We see this willingness to take risks in the name of faithfulness and clarity of vision ultimately crystalizing into our core values.

Earlier this summer, we made the decision to leave a full-time job with benefits to take on the work of laying the foundation for the 1000 Words of Hope Project. We did this without any fundriasing. We have lived the summer on savings and faith that after our first trip we will have an even clearer vision of the work God is preparing us for. At that point, the contacts we make for support will be out what we have experienced rather than what we hope to accomplish. We will be able to confidently share about the work that has begun with our project. Hopefully, taking htis trip on our own demonstrates our willingness to step out without the security of a base of support, believing that showing others what is possible based on what we have begun is more effective in demonstrating our personal commitment to this work. Similarly, we see this relemtless trust in the success of the work we are a part of as a seed of the faithfulness that will contribute to the core of our organization.

We are inside of a week until we test all our equipment at Adventure Christian Church on Sunday. Tomorrow we will purchase the camera and lens and spend the afternoon hooking everything up for an in-home trial. We are inside of a month before we leave for Ghana. Aside from getting ready for our practice shoot, we are getting ready for the travel and the trip itself. We are so excited, but have to keep focused in order to ensure that all our arrangements have been made. Once we are there, we are there with whatever we have packed and no way replacing anything that has been forgotten. Soon I will begin my obsessive ritual of packing and repacking. It will begin small and remain in my thoughts until about a week before we leave. Then I will begin to lay everything out, pack it, check it, unpack it, pare it down, repack it, check it again, and then it will be time to leave for Ghana.

We'll update on the camera and post some test pics tomorrow. Until then...