I posted this morning about #teampatrick and how 70 watches would put Patrick through an intensive leadership program in Rwanda. Then I went to have lunch at my daughters’ elementary school. I tweeted a second time when I got home that we were going to close out the #teampatrick roster in ten minutes and then after that, I called Manny to see if we had hit our goal of 70. We did.

In 59 minutes.

You guys are awesome!

In less than an hour we hit our goal. And because I wasn’t available to announce it, we actually kept going. We ended up with 148 watches, which means we just formed #teammorri too! This is Morri Mpenzi. He’s 16 and will be going through the program too because of your immense generosity. 

We’ll be doing fun stuff like this in the future with Hello Somebody, and there are some wild ideas we’re tossing around right now. Whenever we do this kind of quick, unexpected project though, my friends on the West Coast always say, “Hey thanks for starting/finishing the project before I’d even woken up in my time zone you punk.” Fair enough.

If you want to add a third team to the SCL roster and still get involved, here’s the link to the rest of the 98 kids who are available for this program. (You can read about what we did in this post).

For now though, let me just say thank you!

I know the word “community” gets overused sometimes, but I love being part of the Stuff Christians Like community. I am constantly amazed at what God can do with friends that get together on a blog and Twitter.

Jon

Six months ago, I started wearing a Hello Somebody watch. Why? 

Because someone gave it to me and I thought it looked cool. They come in a million colors and remind me of old school Swatches. But then people started asking me about it and I started to wonder “Who is Hello Somebody?”

Turns out they’re a mission organization out of Dallas. They were using the watches to provide a million free meals to people. They hit that goal. And then, because I was curious about what they’re were going to do next, we started to talk.

Manny, the co-founder of Hello Somebody came to the Quitter Conference and hung out with me. Then I hung out with him in Dallas and Atlanta. The more he shared his heart for what they were working on, the more I felt like we could have a lot of fun changing the world together.

Which brings us to today and Team Patrick.

Hello Somebody’s mission is to support causes that are already in motion with any and every resource they can muster. They recently partnered with Africa New Life, who has been in Rwanda for the last 10 years feeding and educating kids from the street. They’ve developed a special program where 100 young leaders in the community go through an intensive year long experience. The new program provides meals, spiritual training and after school tutoring five days each week in a first-class facility. Here’s what Charles Mugisha Buregeya, the Founder and President, of Africa New Life said about it:

“Africa New Life already had many children that we were sponsoring to go back to school, but these kids were different. I realized that if someone didn’t reach out to these kids soon, there was the potential that much of the progress we were making as a nation might be destroyed by these boys as they became men. Men who had learned, through no fault of their own, that no one loved them, no one cared for them and that the only way to survive was to become criminals.”

So here’s the really simple thing I think we can do today.

Meet Patrick Niyifasha. He’s 11 and his favorite food is potato chips. (I need to introduce him to Salt & Vinegar Pringles.) He wants to study English and eventually be a deputy in Parliament for Rwanda. 

I’d love to send Patrick through the year long program with Africa New Life. What will that take?

70 watches.

The watches, despite being ridiculously cool, cost only $25.

If there are 70 folks who will join “Team Patrick” with me and buy a watch, we can knock this out with a quickness.

I bought a watch today. A red one. It was fast and easy. I’m probably going to give it to a friend. All you have to do, is click on this link and buy the watch. Make sure you click on “note to seller” which is under the shipping info and write “Team Patrick” in the comments. That way we’ll know when we hit our goal. We’ve only got 70 spots and they’re probably going to go fast.

To up the ante a little, I saw my friend Carlos at Catalyst yesterday and he is going to do the same thing with one of the other 100 kids Hello Somebody has committed to help.

I want to beat Carlos today. Let’s get to 70 first.

If you get a watch, please write in the comments on this post, “I’m on Team Patrick. I chose yellow!” Unless you chose red or blue or, you get it. You could tweet “I’m on #teampatrick, you should be too! http://bit.ly/rpITH3 ”

If you can’t get a watch today, but still want to support the project, Tweet or Facebook, this, “Watch what @hellosomebody and Stuff Christians Like are doing in Rwanda! http://bit.ly/rpITH3 #teampatrick”

To recap:

1. 70 watches = Patrick going through the year long program.

2. The watches are cool and cost only $25 even though other sites sell them for $60. Buy one today.

3. You can give them to a friend for Christmas or to yourself for “Happy October 7th day.”

4. We need to beat Carlos and RagamuffinSoul.com because SCL is surprisingly competitive like that.

Thanks for going on adventures like this with me. I’ve got a big announcement next week about one SCL went on a few years ago and Matt Chambers of SafeWorldNexus is going to Uganda in November to continue distributing the mosquito nets we did last year. Folks have been receiving the GPS coordinates of where their nets went and that’s awesome.

Go Team Patrick!

Jon

(It’s guest post Friday! Here’s a great new post from Jessica Kuck, a writer from the land of 10,000 lakes. You can find her on Twitter and Facebook. If you want to write a guest post for SCL, here’s how.)

Amen Etiquette – By Jessica Kuck

Have you ever been caught in the quandary of the “You say ‘ey-men’ I say ‘ah-men’” predicament? I have.

Allow me to set the stage. You’re visiting a church and in the middle of the service it suddenly creeps up on you. Maybe you’re singing a song. Maybe you’re ending a prayer. Or maybe you’re corporately reading out of the bulletin. Either way, when it hits you’ve got a decision to make–fast, and you better choose wisely, or else the person standing next to you will be stuck in their own quandary: needing to exercise the fruit of the Spirit in order to resist the urge to look at you funny out of the corner of their eye.

If you’re like me, you may have received an “F” in this department before. Oh the shame! No worries, though. We all make mistakes, and there is grace enough for us all. But shall we continue to fail so that grace may abound? By no means!

Is it “ey-men” or “ah-men”? Wonder no more. The next time you visit your brother’s church you can feel confident in your amen application. Simply follow “The Quirky Christian’s Guide to Amen Etiquette.”

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A few months ago, I wrote a post titled, “Can our generation end poverty?” The post was about an organization called “Live 58.” They had a trailer for a new movie in which they said, “Yes, our generation can end poverty.”

The conversation that followed in the comments was robust to say the least. A lot of the comments centered around this statement:

“Extreme poverty is ending. In just 25 years the 
percentage of people living in extreme poverty has been cut in half. (52% to 26%).”

That’s a pretty powerful statement and one that I admitted when I wrote the post, was surprising to me.

Now, Live 58 has just released a film that expands on the reality of extreme poverty and what it looks like to eradicate it. You can watch the trailer below. (I watched it and thought it was great!)

I love the conversation and actions that films like this start. If you want to participate in the conversation there are a few ways:

1. Request a complimentary screening kit of the film for your church or group.
2. Check out one of the 50 premieres happening nationwide. (Enter the access code: JONACUFF)

Sometimes it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the size of the hurt this world is under right now, but folks like Live 58 are answering that hurt with hope. And finding creative new ways to challenge us to rethink things we’ve always accepted.

Question:
What do you think it would take to eradicate extreme poverty?

I once wrote a post about how we Christians tend to make music that is impossible to exercise to. The idea was that, as much as I love songs like “Blessed Be Your Name,” those don’t amp me up for working out. As someone who clearly spends a ridiculous amount of time working on his core and doing P90CrossFitsanity, workout music is important to me. And I believed Christian music had no good workout songs.

Well, I was wrong.

This song, by the City Harmonic, is my favorite “Get up. You got big stuff to do” song right now. It’s been out for a while, but check it out if you haven’t seen it.

What’s a song do you love to exercise to?

One of Satan’s most brilliant lies is that if you surrender something to God, you’ll receive something less beautiful in return.

If you empty your hands, God will place something less amazing in them.

You’ll surrender gold and, in return, receive dirt.

This is one of the lies of pornography: That when you let go of that secret it will be replaced with humdrum, boring, vanilla, sex with your spouse.

This is the lie of chasing your dream: That when you let go of your plans and trust God’s, he will call you into a mission that you will hate.

This is the lie of holding on to hurts. That when you let go of your wounds, they’ll be reopened, not healed and redeemed.

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A few months ago, someone ripped me apart online. This happens sometimes and, although it’s never fun, I’ve written before about how it’s a good thing haters still hurt my feelings.

Normally, I like to settle these kind of things with a dance off, but a lot of people don’t own the right size cardboard square to breakdance on. That’s understandable. Not everyone is so fresh and so clean.

But as I read the comment they left, one sentence stuck out to me. Here, after tearing me apart, is what the person told me, “So sorry if this sounds harsh, but I pray it’s ultimately for encouragement…”

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One of the best things about the Catalyst Conference, which starts this Wednesday, is the depth of the content. They have a ton of different speakers from a ton of different backgrounds each year.

With so much fun content to choose from, I thought it might be good to give you a little background about my lab this year. Here’s a snapshot of what I will be talking about at 4:30 on Wednesday:

1. The secret thing a lot of leaders on getting drunk on right now.

2. The biggest challenge leaders face while building a platform.

3. The 3 ways to “Be Present.”

4. Jesus Jukes

5. What social media really costs.

6. The single question that can fix 84% of the urgent situations you face.

7. Why we don’t need to be a generation of dreamers.

8. The curious relationship between Vanilla Ice and the 3 steps to great ideas.

9. How being awesome later, is awesome now.

10. What your morning shower is trying to tell you.

11. How to get a billion dollars of research for free.

12. The surprising reason God goes quiet sometimes.

13. Why you might need to break up with your moleskine notebook.

14. Knowing when it’s time to stop brainstorming.

15. The unexpected gift of a fake deadline.

16. Six ways to finish 100% more projects.

17. At least 2 Deep V-neck jokes.

That’s not everything I’ve got in my head right now for my lab at Catalyst, but it’s at least a start and gives you an idea of where I’m headed.

I hope to see you there at 4:30 in Atlanta, this Wednesday!

In high school I had a friend who only knew one Bible verse. Can you guess which verse it was?

Genesis 9:3.

Don’t remember that one? You must not love smoking pot. Because my friend did and here’s what he would say to me:

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I’m not good at being friends with people. That’s a weird sentence, but it’s true. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but for years I’ve not put a priority on friendships. I’ve been a bit of a one man wolfpack. Until we moved to Nashville.

Over the last year, I’ve made a serious effort to invest in relationships. In addition to connecting with a bunch of folks, I’ve also been exploring the idea of “What does it mean to be someone’s friend?” Recently, my wife texted me a photo that I thought perfectly captured one of the things friendship looks like.

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