It’s official!  Back on October 12, 2009, I made a goal for myself to blog every day for a year.  Well, October 11, 2010 came and went.  Yup.  That was a couple days ago.  Did I remember?  Nope.  I even blogged at 7 days remaining.  I still forgot.  Oops.  I never said my goal was to be smart for a whole year!

So, yeah!  365 straight days (or 367 actually since I can’t seem to remember the major milestones)!  Turned out to be a little more difficult towards the end than I thought.  But now that my goal has been reached, it’s time for a new goal.  Fortunately I already have that goal and will be filling you all in very soon!  But for now, I’m gonna take a break!  I mean, it’s been forever since I didn’t write a blog post.  So, as of midnight tonight, I will be going into Maintenance Mode and brookjames.com will be under construction until next Monday.

Make sure you come back next week because I will be back with full steam ahead for something bigger AND you will not want to miss our next big thing!

But until then, as always, if you need me, I’m sure you can find me.  Thank you so much for all your thoughts and input and support for the past year!

Stayed tuned!  We are officially…

As I am headed back to work today and thinking about how great it was to be with all my family on vacation I’m wondering how to get my mind reengaged with life, how to kickstart my heart again if you will.  If you take a vacation well, I believe you should disconnect yourself from work as much as you possibly can.  If I am on vacation but constantly worried about work and things that I have already gotten covered, I’m not getting much of a break from one of the main things that vacation is.

So that’s what I did.  I haven’t read any emails or answered phone calls or made setlists.  I haven’t worked on the Web site or played with a single graphic.  I haven’t even picked up my guitar.  But now I am back and vacation is over.  Now I have to get my mind going again on all things normal life.

What do you do?  How do you reengage?  Or do you find yourself not actually taking a break?

Well, the time has come to say goodbye to Alaska.  We are excited to get home and see our dog (who we haven’t seen in like 10 days)!  We are excited to get back to our bed!  We are excited to get back to our beach and weather!

But, we are sad to see the end of vacation.  Sad to say goodbye to all of our family again (still haven’t convinced them all to become Californians yet).  Sad to see me get beat out of the Spades tournament yet again.  Sad that Jessi Girl won’t get to see her aunts, uncles and grandparents for a while.  Sad that I won’t get to see my brother for several months.  Sad that my wife and sisters won’t get to hang out and have girl time (whatever that really is).  Especially sad that I have to use Delta again.

It has been an amazing trip.  I think I have gotten to do everything I wanted to do (except for a few things that need a different time of year).  Alaska is beautiful and fun, but my family is way better.  I can’t wait until family vacation next year!  The location isn’t quite as pretty but it will be hot and there is a lake and boat involved!  I’ll have to teach the little one how to wakeboard (15 months old isn’t too early for wakeboarding is it?).

But for now it is back to our real lives.  We are flying back to Orange County today so please pray for safety and a happy baby (she doesn’t like the descending part).  Family, I love you all.  Thank you so much for another amazing vacation!  Mom and dad, thank you so  very much for everything.  We absolutely couldn’t have done this without you!  Love you guys!

Well, since we are on vacation still and I have never had a golfing experience like I did a couple days ago, I thought I would share it all with you.  I wish I would have gotten better video of the whole round, but here are a few highlights from someone else’s camera.  Keep in mind that I’m a terrible golfer (I know I suck so I go to have fun), moose are huge, bears are fast, bears are strong, glacier water is cold, I’m a terrible golfer, and this was Moose Run Golf Course (Creek), which is listed as the #49 hardest course in the US (as well as the world’s northernmost 36 hole course).

Yeah. That’s right. I said it.  I didn’t go to church on Sunday. We are on vacation and just didn’t go.  We are out in Anchorage, AK and I’m sure there are some great churches around here, but we didn’t attend one.  We didn’t even try.  Occasionally it’s nice to have some different God time (like the amazing scenery in Alaska for instance). Then I started thinking.

I wonder how often we as churchgoers or Christ followers, however you prefer to look at this, go to church just to go to church.  We aren’t going to serve someone.  We aren’t going to pray.  And we really aren’t going to meet with God.  We just go because it’s church and that’s what we are supposed to do.  Maybe you grew up in church so you have just always known that on Sundays you get up and go to church.  Maybe you go just to see your friends and instead of with a godly heart.  Maybe you feel like you need to be there because it makes up for the other bad things you did last week.

Don’t get me wrong.  Church is a great thing.  The messages and community that is hopefully found in your church is a HUGE blessing.  But for me as a follower of Christ, I wanna go to church because I am hoping and waiting to hear from God there and not just because that’s what we did when I was growing up.  I wanna be there to serve others and not just talk to my friends.

What about you?  Why do you show up on Sundays?  Is it just because or is it because He is there?

Every year for as long as I can remember, my family has taken a vacation together.  And for as long as I can remember we have taken that vacation with a few other families, recently dubbed the Family Fun Network.  We have been to the mountains, the beach, the lake and many other random places in between.  We board, ski, hike, climb, camp, cook, play Spades, play Hearts, play ladder golf, hang out, make fun of each other and love each other.  Not bad if you ask me.

I didn’t know that this wasn’t normal until college when I started meeting people whose families had never done anything like that before.  I didn’t know how blessed I was to have such a large family around me that would sacrifice time and money in order to get together like that every year.  I’m so thankful that we do since we don’t live near them anymore and don’t get to see them very often.  The families are growing larger and larger and we can barely fit everyone together under one roof, but it seems the more the merrier!

This year in Alaska has been no different than years past.  We are only halfway through our trip and it has been amazing.  I think that if God could pick the model for family community, this would be it.  Totally loving and supporting.  Take some time today to thank God for the family He has placed around you and pray for them.  If you don’t have family around you, pray that He will help you find it.

Right now as I am writing this we are driving along the Alaskan coast.  On one side of me are mountains covered in green with touches of snow.  On the other side is the ocean separating us from more gorgeous mountains.  It is definitely an amazing sight.  But usually when I see this kind of thing or any kind of creation, I don’t think to myself, wow, we have an amazing God.  I am not just drawn closer to Him because of the amazingness around me.  I think to myself, that’s cool or that’s awesome, but not He made that.

Many of us live our lives oblivious to the God around us.  God is a Sunday morning/small group/study type of God and nothing more.  We can see the amazing mountains or beaches or oceans or kids or whatever but we don’t see God in them.  We might appreciate their massiveness or awesomeness or complexity or beauty but we are acting ignorant of the Creator since it isn’t a Sunday morning at church!  We might as well be like my 4 month old baby.  As we are traveling around Alaska she just sleeps through all the scenery and all the wildlife.  She doesn’t know she is supposed to see and appreciate what’s around her yet.  She may see the creation around her but her understanding of the beauty and complexity of it is not there.  And so are we.  If it isn’t during the prayer time or while we are reading the Bible or while the pastor is driving his point home we miss God.  We miss the truth and deepness that the creation around us teaches us.

My mom is not this way.  She sees the things that God created for what they are: evidence that there is a powerful, amazingly creative God out there who has chosen us out of all the things He designed from scratch to love on.  That’s pretty amazing.  So while we have a week left in this gorgeous painting, I hope to see it for what it is and not just more cool sightseeing spots on a map!  I pray you do the same!  It doesn’t have to be mountains or oceans.  See him in your kid’s face.  See him in the complex human race.  See him in the trees and bushes.  He is there.  We just have to stop acting ignorant and arrogant and look for Him!

As some of you may have noticed this morning, I am on vacation and therefore not at church!  My gorgeous family and I have trekked up to Alaska to vacation with the Family Fun Network (or so it has been named) for family vacation this year.  We are only 3 days in and we are having a blast.  So since I’m not there and I don’t have setlist for this morning, I thought I would give you a few songs that I’m loving right now for you to check out!

We Will Shine – Nick Thurmond – Not Alone
Beautiful Things – Gungor – Beautiful Things
Wake Up My Soul – Andy Kirk – Wake Up My Soul
Our God – Chris Tomlin – Passion: Awakening

Welcome to Alaska!