• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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For Friday, May 15, 2009, a random assortment of things on my mind:

1. I can’t believe it’s May already. Another year flying by. I don’t remember being any less active when I was a kid, but life seemed to move so much slower 20 years ago. It might be that when you’re ten years old, a year is 10% of your life. When you’re 30, a year is 3% of your life. Life is indeed a mist, and then we’re gone.

2. My first visit to a Foursquare Convention was in 2002 when I rented a truck and drove 15 hours from Los Angeles to Denver to deliver a project (Foursquare was a client at the time). I’ve been every year since and for the past six years, I’ve be a co-director/producer/whipping boy. I love it and hate it every year. Next week I’ll move into a hotel for nine days and see 4,500 people come and go. A year’s worth of work and poof, it’s done.

3. I work with a really great team at Foursquare. In spite of major budget cuts (or shall I say decapitations?) and losing over half my team in layoffs, those that remain have been nothing less all-stars. I’d work with these people anywhere on anything.

4. I sat in a meeting earlier this week with a well-known and well-respected futurist. He spent 90 minutes talking through his notes on general expectations for the next six years. Amazing thinker. Amazing moment.

5. Jamaica and I have a big summer planned with trips to northern California (June), South Africa (July) and Hawaii (August). It’s our last hurrah before Jamaica starts law school this fall.

6. I’ve been working and consulting with two really cool clients the past eight months. They are both—in their own unique way—taking risks and shaping culture in ways I’ve always dreamed of. Having a front row seat has made the ride pretty exciting.

7. I think I’m done with Twitter. I appreciate its ability to connect with so many people I know and respect, but I don’t believe it’s realistic to think I can keep up with it. I could probably find a few minutes a day to keep my “updates” fresh, but that’s not a conversation, that’s a platform. That’s not me.

8. The nonprofit Center for Church Communication (CFCC) is finally gaining some momentum. I think 2010 is going to be a big year for the CFCC community, and ultimately for the Church.

9. Personality, the company I started in 1998, is going to take longer than I expected to become what it is meant to be. For someone that often lacks in the patience department, this has been a struggle. It’s a project that will take a lifetime to bring to fruition, but the results are going to be worth the wait.

I’ve been a longtime fan of Brennan Manning. From reading his books to hearing him live, he’s one of the most profound one-hit-wonders I’ve ever encountered. His message is the same in all he writes and speaks, told in many different ways. His latest book, The Furious Longing of God, is another concoction of re-told necessities. If you’ve never read Manning before, this book is any easy way to begin. The following are a few of my highlights:

“I believe that Christianity happens when men and women experience the reckless, raging confidence that comes from knowing the God of Jesus Christ.”

Theology is “faith seeking understanding” and spirituality is “the faith-experience of what we understand intellectually.”

“The men and women who are truly filled with light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.”

“The furious love of God knows no shadow of alteration or change. It is reliable. And always tender.”

“Love by its nature seeks union.”

Referencing Luke 11:2-4, “Jesus is saying that we may address the infinite, transcendent, almighty God with the intimacy, familiarity, and unshaken trust that a sixteen-month-old baby has sitting on his father’s lap—da, da, daddy.”

“How is it then that we’ve come to imagine that Christianity consists primarily in what we do for God?”

“Our religion never begins with what we do for God. It always starts with what God has done for us, the great and wondrous things that God dreamed of and achieved for us in Christ Jesus.”

“I’ve decided that if I had my life to live over again… I would devote not one more minute to monitoring my spiritual growth. No, not one.” “What would I actually do if I had it to do all over again? Heeding John’s counsel, I would simply do the next thing in love.”

The ordinary pablum of popular religion caters to the idealistic, perfectionistic, and neurotic self who fixates on graceless getting worthy for union, while allowing the prostitutes and tax gougers to dance into the kingdom. Our strategies of self-deception persuade us that abiding restful union with Jesus is too costly, leaving no room for money, ambition, success, fame, sex, power, control, and pride of place or the fatal trap of self-rejection, thus prohibiting mediocre, disaffected dingbats and dirtballs, like myself, from intimacy with Jesus.

“The idolatry of ideas has left me puffed up, narrow-minded, and intolerant of any idea that does not coincide with mine.”

“What is the sign, par excellence, of authentic discipleship? The night before Jesus died, he left no doubt in anybody’s mind. ‘A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you… By this all men will know’ (John 13:34-35 NASB).”

“You have the power to give someone the courage to be, simply by the touch of your affirmation.”

“By extinguishing the spirit that burns in the gospel, we scarcely feel the glow anymore.”

“To prefer contempt to honor, ridicule to praise, humiliation to glory—these are some of the classic formulas of Christian greatness.”

The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand new creations. Not to make people with better morals, but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all…

Thanks, Brennan, for the reminders, the reprimands and the relentless way you pursue the heart of God.