MacFrazier.com

The personal opinions of a New Christian pastor entrepreneur geek punk.

Posts Tagged update

Life Gets Complicated

Jan 25

Posted by Mac in News, Personal, Status Updates | Comments off

So, my publishing plans at the end of the year didn’t work out so great. Partly because I skidded from the end of a Christmas vacation into the beginning of an unexpected period of quarantine when a member of my household came down with COVID-19.

Don’t worry, they got through it with minimal difficulty, and they successfully isolated within our home to such a degree that no one else was infected. They’ve recovered and we’ve all tested negative, and we’ve waited out our timers and life is now (finally) getting back to normal.

Sort of. Like it was normal before, right?

But that’s not the only reason I fell behind. the weeks leading up to Christmas turned out to be more complicated and stressful as well. It turns out that planning and executing safe and responsible church celebrations of Christmas during a pandemic can be like that.

Anyway, the podcast episode on why resolutions fail never happened (some irony there), and I put a general pause on writing and producing new material apart from the weekly newsletter I do for the church. In fact, I even went three Sundays without preaching–something I haven’t done in my 15+ years in ministry. The only content I produced was the beginning of a long series of short videos titled, Let’s Read: the Gospel of Mark. (By the way, you can check that out here.)

So now I’m trying to get back on the various saddles. I have no idea what to do with the podcast this week. If an idea comes to me in the next 24 hours, that’d be great. Otherwise, I may just let it go one more week. Alternatively, I may just record another chapter of my novel in progress.

I’ve got scripts for more Gospel of Mark videos already queued up, so at the least I’ll shoot a couple more of those this week, but I’m also hoping to produce something for my own channel. (The Mark series is for the Washington New Church channel, which I am the primary contributor.)

And, of course, I need to come up with a sermon for this Sunday…and in fact I’m hoping to map out a plan for the next six months of Sunday sermons by the end of this week.

Church should be about more than just preaching and teaching and information transfer. But the pandemic has made it really hard to act like a community. So, while I’m looking for alternative ways of leading the church in its community uses, I’m also using this opportunity to double down on strengthening those parts of the work that are still very possible. Hopefully when this is all over, we will be able to both benefit from this period and get back to the real work of being a church.

In the meantime, I still need to move all of my studio equipment (camera, lights, tripod, various mics and stands, miscellaneous electronics, etc.) from my home back to my office, and I’m not really looking forward to that. But at least I will have a quieter (and less echo-y) space to record things in again.

So that’s the update. Nothing fancy or thought-provoking or important. But for the curious, that’s where I am at the moment. Talk to you next time!

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Don’t Call It a Reboot

Oct 27

Posted by Mac in Housekeeping | Comments off

I’ve decided that I’ve been neglecting my passion for the written word far too long. I’ve experimented with video and audio, but in the end my personal expertise and also my passion are just not in all of the details needed to produce great recorded media. I’m not saying I won’t continue to experiment with recording, lighting, editing, etc, etc, etc, and trying to produce additional audio and video content. But my native land is the written word. And it’s something I do have a passion for.

By “passion”, I mean it’s something I happily and willingly spend my time doing without thinking about it. If I examine how I naturally spend my time when not constrained by outside obligations, then I can see I have a passion for the following:

  • Writing;
  • Public speaking;
  • Complex thinking;
  • Reading;
  • Listening to Music;
  • Playing games.

I do other things. I have other interests and pursuits. I have things that I have consciously dedicated myself to. But the above list is the essence of what I would spend the majority of my time doing if I were to just let go and allow myself to live completely unregulated by duty, conscience, obligation or self-compulsion. The lower half of the list, as you can see, is fairly recreational, as most normal people would see things. The upper part of the list, though, are things I know a lot of people just aren’t that interested in, and generally expect to be paid for doing. But I would do them for free. I do do them, all the time, regardless of whether there’s any profit in them. For me, they are also recreational, in that doing them rebuilds my inner self, giving me energy rather than draining me.

So anyway, I want to get back to writing in some more formal ways. Those of you that have been hit regularly with my facebook posts, tweets, and long, highly theoretical email missives on various topics may now be saying, “But Mac, you already write a ton. (Please stop?)” And yeah, that’s true. But it all feels so very fragmented, talking to different people and different groups at different times. I feel like I want to get back to talking to everyone at once and no one in particular at the same time. There’s a special kind of satisfaction for me in that sort of “broadcast” style of communication, despite everything I’ve ever said about the decline of one-to-many and the rising supremacy of many-to-many communication. In practice “many-to-many” often really looks more like “some-to-some”, and I love a crowd. And the ability to just develop my thoughts in long form.

Anyway, so I’m doing two things about this, for now:

  1. I am going to resume fiction writing, using this year’s NaNoWriMo to kick-start me again.
  2. I am going to (well, I just did) resume blogging.

I’m really looking forward to getting back on this track of my life. I hope some of you out there get some benefit from my recreational works of passion as well.

What are your passions? What would you think about, talk about, learn about, practice and do if your time were totally your own and you had no material needs to attend to?

And what are you doing about that?

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