Greg Adkins

A break from the you-tube onslaught...

I just realized that I haven't really actually WRITTEN anything here in quite some time.   Not that anyone is asking but a blog just isn't a blog if I don't actually tell everyone what is going on with me lately.   Here it is in convenient, ordinary bullet point format.   

1.  We're going to Taiwan!   No, our adoption hasn't progressed or anything but we've decided to visit our future daughter's homeland now.   Our initial motivation for this was a desire to know our way around Taipei a little bit before we're handed a 6 month old baby and told to take good care of her in a country where we don't speak the language and don't know our way around.   Spending a week there with no one else to take care of will give us a great chance to get to know the culture and learn our way around.   

That was the initial motivation for me to suggest the trip to Jessica but it's turned into a lot more.   When the actual adoption happens, we'll go into the orphanage and pick up our sweet little girl, say thank you, and leave.   The more we thought about that, the stranger it seemed.   We won't know anything about the people who are going to be raising Claire for her first few months of life.   We're treating this trip as a "thanks in advance" to the folks at Cathwell Orphanage... we're going to be spending at least 2 days there working with them and serving them in the orphanage.  We're also planning on collecting supplies for the orphans who live there at church in the months before we leave and taking them with us.   Our hope is to build some friendships, encourage the workers, provide them with some much needed supplies, and hopefully let them know that we deeply appreciate what they are doing in the name of Jesus.   

We are flying out of Nashville (cheaper airfare) and leaving early in the morning of Saturday, December 27th.   We'll be back on Sunday, January 4th late at night... we'll get to spend New Years Eve in Taipei which should be pretty wild.   My dad reminded me that I'm going to miss Tennessee's bowl game more than likely... on second thought, cancel the trip! 

2.   We've been having a lot of great family fun this summer.  It's really nice when Jessica is off in the summertime and she does an awesome job of making everyday fun for Connor.   You can keep up with all of their adventures over on her blog.   They're my 2 favorite peeps and we always have a great time.   Just last night we went blackberry picking and it was awesome... you should see these blackberries!   My cousin Alan owns a U-pick blackberry farm and he let us take all we could carry.  We took about 3 gallons of blackberries.   Pies and cobblers are in our future.   Life is good. 

3.   Work has been going really well lately.   We just hired Jesse Watkins as our new tech / creative arts guy and I've been having a lot of fun getting to know him and working with him.   He's only working a couple of days a week right now but hopefully that will become full time sooner rather than later.   Jesse and I are going to be working closely together to supervise all areas of contemporary worship and technical / creative arts at Powell.  

The band has really been clicking lately and we've worked in some great new players.  It's been really exciting to get to work with and get to know them a little bit and I'm hoping to keep that going.   My brother Adam has been playing drums with us along with Jeff Bills who used to play with a really great band called the V-Roys.   Dave Eckman has been sitting in on saxophone sometimes and Rose Williams has been playing violin a bit with us.  It's also been good to get to play with Skip Tanaka again as he's been joining us a little bit on electric guitar (and also his giant wooden tambourine).   

On that note, this coming Sunday is BLUEGRASS.  I love bluegrass Sundays!   We're opening with a Dolly Parton song!   If anybody wants to say anything bad about Dolly you better come say it to my face because we love us some Dolly Parton in the Adkins' household.  

4.  Not much else going on...  one final thing I've been enjoying is free wi-fi at Starbucks!   They just started offering it a couple of weeks ago and since my office is 15 minutes from the nearest Panera and about 1 minute away from a Starbucks, I'm in heaven.   I've been hoping for a good place to get out of the office and work and now I have one... I've found I can be a lot more efficient if I can get out of the office for a couple of hours every day.   This is a great place to work... no distractions and lots of caffeine = Greg being productive.   

Top 5 Subject Lines in my Email Spam Folder Right Now.

5. Don't want to buy unknown them at strange stores?

4.  What a stupid face you have here gadkins.

3.  Attack your girlfriend more times each day!

2.  Bestseller: Man Poison

1.  You look really stupid gadkins.

It seems that the mocking over my hair has overflowed from my blog into my spam folder.   Wonderful.

Apparently CNN is now being run by teenagers

Here is the main list of news stories from Cnn.com this morning. Notice the 2nd to last headline. Since when do major news outlets use words like this in their day to day reporting? What's next? "Ridonculous floods hit Southern California"???

My New Job

So I've kind of hinted around that my job has changed a little bit... I've obviously been leading worship a lot lately which has been a change from what I've been doing for the past couple of years. This week, that new part of my job became official.

For the time being, I am going to be supervising and leading the worship in our contemporary service at Powell while I continue to lead all of the technical ministries I was doing before. If that sounds like I'm now doing two jobs... well, kind of. Yes, I have more to do but our tech and worship teams have been nothing short of amazing. We've got a lot of people with a "I'll serve wherever you need me" attitude which has really made the transition pretty great. I've already trained a handful of new tech volunteers to cover some of the things I was doing and that has allowed me to move to being on stage every week without anything we were doing falling through the cracks. They have stepped up huge and kept the workload manageable for me. It's been fun.

However, part of my new job is that I've been given the directive to find some help. Our leadership recognizes that I'm no good if I'm burned out and my family is mad at me because I'm gone all the time. Praise God for wise leaders! So... I'm looking for someone. I don't know who and I'm not totally sure what it is they will do, I just know that I'm looking for the right person to come join the team. I've been given a lot of freedom in seeking this person out. Here is what I'm looking for in the ideal person:

They would be able to help lead worship (especially when we launch our Wednesday night service probably sometime in 2009).
They are comfortable behind a sound board.
They know a little bit about stage lighting and can run a lighting console.
They are proficient with computers and web savvy.
They can edit video and are familiar with Final Cut Pro / Motion.
They have graphic design skills.
They are highly passionate and creative.
They love Jesus.

Now, I realize something... that person might not exist! That's a pretty broad set of skills... still, I thought I'd put that out there. Obviously a person need not have every skill listed but the more the better! So... if you know a passionate, Jesus loving, video editing, sound mixing, light board running, Mac using, worship leading, unemployed person, send them my way! We're hiring for real and I hope to start interviewing people within the next few weeks.

Do I Look Like I Care?

So here is something I've been wrestling with lately... I'm not even sure how to articulate it but I'll give it a shot. 

I don't spend a ton of time reading facebook, myspace, and blogs, but I do spend a few minutes every day reading through my list of regulars.   Almost everyone now has at least a few of the following:

A "Make Poverty History" banner
Invisible Children in the Top 8
Facebook causes such as Blood Water Mission or Darfur
A picture of them in an invisible children t-shirt
An invite to attend an awareness raising event

Here's my problem... as my friend Bill might phrase it, is awareness the new activism?   It seems to me that a whole lot of people feel like if they can trick out their social networking pages to make it look like they really care about this stuff, maybe, just maybe... that will be good enough.

Now I'm not taking any kind of moral high ground here because I'll openly admit to being selfish and full of excuses.   I could do more.   Lots more.   God help me get up off the couch.   God help me stop lying to myself with "I'm too tired... I'm too busy... The bills won't get paid if we give to this or that."   That's me and I've got to work on it.   That said, I am still bothered by this new form of "activism" that I see blossoming across the internet.   

I'd like to propose a challenge or a thought.   If you're going to put a "make poverty history" banner up, do something to help make poverty history.  If you're going to blog about going green, change something in your life.   If you saw "Invisible Children" and were moved by it (I've seen it and I was moved by it), find out how you can support something financially and then do it (I'll admit, I haven't done this either so yes, call me plankeye).

I'd love to hear your thoughts.   Am I getting old, cranky, and cynical or has anyone else been feeling this too.   Don't get me wrong... I think awareness is essential and the more people know about these causes, the better.   I just think that for too many of us, we think that if we do just a tiny bit to spread awareness, it's the same as actually doing something.   I just don't think it's the same thing.   

I may have gone green, but I ain't no hippie

So today was earth day and I can honestly say that this is the first time in my life I actually gave that fact a second thought. Jessica has been on a real "green" kick for the past few months. I'll admit... I was one of those people who thought it was just for dirty hippies and tree huggers. But... listening to some really excellent preaching on creation care and how God views the creation and how we have been entrusted to care for it has changed my ways. I exaggerate a bit... I wasn't anti-green really, I just wasn't proactive about it in any way... but now, mainly thanks to Jessica, we've begun to change some things.

So, today for earth day, I decided to do a few things. First of all, instead of driving to lunch I rode my bike. About a 2.5 mile trip down Emory road... would have been great except I was misinformed on how far the sidewalk went. Trying to navigate the curves down by the train tracks on a bicycle wasn't the smartest move I've ever made... I about got run down by a Pepsi truck. Still, it was nice to be out in nature and it was an absolutely beautiful day.

After that, I drove down to the Halls recycling center where they were giving away big recycling bins. I put one of them in the church's copy room for paper recycling. Our church does not do any recycling to my knowledge and we go through a LOT of paper. 500 bulletins every Sunday and I'm certain that almost all of them end up in the trash. If we could just recycle our paper it would be a great start.

I'd like to hear some other ideas of how a rather large church that really doesn't do ANYTHING can start to take steps towards going green. I believe that Christians need to get our heads out of the sand and start leading the charge on environmental issues. Heck, if I can do it, anybody can. Seriously... I'd love to hear any suggestions on what we could do at Powell. It's one thing to change what I do at home but I think we could make a much larger impact by changing what we do at church.

So am I a hippie now? Let's see... did I bathe today? Check. Do I still hate Widespread Panic? Check. Am I still not the owner of a hacky sack? Check. Have I played a djembe in the past 24 hours? Nope. Are there any illegal substances in my car? Not unless you can smoke a 6 month old Wendy's chicken nugget.

Looks like I'm in the clear. I guess you can care about the environment and not be a giant hippie. Who knew?

Insane Week

Twice every year I run sound for the Christian Academy of Knoxville's musical theater department. This week it's the high school musical and I've had to be out there for about 4 hours every night this week and that will continue until Saturday night. It's exhausting working all day and then going to do that until 10:00 every night but it pays well enough that I can't really turn it down. They have a pretty amazing musical theater department as far as high schools go... great bunch of kids.

Last night we had worship band rehearsal at 9:00 which is 2 hours later than usual. We're doing an all acoustic setup this week and I can't tell you how edgy I was all day yesterday wondering if it was going to come together or sound like junk. I need to learn to chill out... the rehearsal went great and I think it's going to be a really great Sunday. The instrumentation will be me on acoustic, Rob on bass, Tim on mandolin and acoustic guitar, my brother Adam on cajon, djembe, congas, trap kit, shakers, and tamborine, Adam Whipple on piano and accordion, my new friend Rose on violin, and Sarah, Andrea, and Michelle on vocals. Should be a lot of fun.

I didn't get home though until midnight. I'm completely wiped out today so I guess it's a good thing I get Thursdays off. I'm going to relax and spend the day with my little man... at least until I have to go run sound tonight.