Cody Thomas

Recently, I have been feeling a mixture somewhere between conviction, regret, and frustration.

Do not misunderstand though. I love life right now. Marriage is wonderful. My wife is amazing. My design business is continually growing, which means I have cut back my hours at Chick-fil-A down to two days a week! I love my church and see great potential for the Kingdom there.

However, despite all of the good, I have still felt this mixture of unsettling emotions lately, and I think I know why. I think that I am tired of living with a lack of discipline in my life and tired of not seeing myself be a better leader in certain areas of my life.

Conviction because of the wrong that I see in myself.
Regret because of all the things I don””t do.
Frustration because of continually seeing the tension between who I am and who I want to be.

So, I have decided to take some action in order to right the ship that is my life. I am tired of seeing such a gap between who I am and who I want to be. I know that tension will always exist in my life, but I do not want to become complacent with it. Here are some steps I am taking.

Marriage:

• 10-10-80 approach to finances. I handle the finances in our house. I work with the budget. I pay the bills. But I have not done the best job with it. The most convicting part about my leadership in this area is the lack of tithing. We have not tithed 10%. Not even near 10%.
  My plan: Start the 10-10-80 approach with our finances. For every paycheck, I will immediately write out a 10% check to the church and transfer 10% into savings. Then, pay bills with the remaining 80% and live off what is left.
• Get into the Word with my wife. As the spiritual leader for my family, I have not done a good job of helping us grow spiritually or keep spiritual disciplines. I am tired of us neglecting our personal spiritual growth.
  My plan: As we were packing away a bunch of stuff to put into a storage unit (this apartment just is not big enough), I found two copies of the One Year Bible, which is a Bible with readings each day from the Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs and goes through the whole Bible in one year. One is the NLT translation. The other is the ESV. I decided we would each read those Bibles each night and discuss what we read.

Design work:

• Wake up and get working earlier. Right now, my wife gets up at 6am to get to work by 7am. If I am working at home, I generally sleep in until 8am. Then, I will just go straight to my computer and start working. However, I am still kind of dazed as I am trying to wake up. This makes it very hard to work efficiently, let alone be very creative.
  My plan: Get up at 6am with my wife. Get a shower immediately to wake myself up. Brew coffee and eat something. Get to work by 7:30am.
• Be strategic with my day. Right now, I am not the best with time management when I am working from home. There is no boss yelling, “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean!” I find myself easily distracted while working on design projects. (Do not worry. I do not charge for the time I get distracted in the middle of a project.). The problem is that I can do a lot more with my work time if I focused my time more.
  My plan: This plan is not quite as tangible as the others listed so far. I am not exactly sure yet what the answer is for creating more strategic time management. I have begun using Google Calendar to break up my day (i.e., 1 hour on Project X, 2 hours on project Y, 1 hour learning this new web feature, etc.). This has helped me stay on task and not spend all day on one thing either. However, Google Calendar has not been the complete fix. So, I plan to continue researching time management and task management strategies/applications.

These areas of work will be enough to tackle at this point. There are still other areas of life that I want to improve upon, but these few changes listed here will take a lot of energy and attention to implement. I will focus on these for now.

What areas of life are you most unsatisfied with? What tangible steps can you take to change it?

In my previous post, I talked about some new perspectives on my understanding of a “call to full-time ministry” and, more specifically, my own call to ministry. (For context, you should definitely read that post before diving into this one.)

So, where does this leave me now? Where am I at and where am I going?

So far, this refocusing journey has culminated in me making a few big decisions/goals.

1. Launching my own freelance design company. Actually, I have already been doing freelance design work for about a year now as a self-employment job. It is my goal this year to launch a media/design studio as an official LLC. I’m open to do graphic design and web design/strategy work for any business, but I really want to focus on partnering with churches in order to help them advance the Gospel wherever they are. Pastors, if you are interested in hearing more about me partnering with your church to do design work (sermon series branding, print media, etc.) and/or web design and strategy, just shoot me a quick email to get the conversation started.
2. Getting a legit degree in web design & new media. I’ve been doing graphic design for some time now, and learning web design quickly. However, I want to continue that learning process in the right way. In February, I will begin a Master of Fine Arts degree in Web Design and New Media at the Academy of Art University. (If you don’t know what “new media” means, click here.) The school is in San Francisco, but I will be doing my entire degree through their online school. I will be doing the degree part-time (only 2-3 courses per semester) and I should finish the degree in about four years.
3. Hoping to work on a church staff someday. Although this isn’t a decision in my life right now, it is still something that I hope could be on the horizon someday. I still have a strong passion for the local church and I feel that God has called me to serve in a church staff capacity. I see myself serving in a hybrid position, somewhere between a “Pastor of Technology & Media” and a “Church Communications Director (CCD)”. The first is more focused on the technical side of media and communications (the person doing all the graphic/web/video design) while the second is more of a strategist position, overseeing all communications from the church (overseeing a team that does graphic/print/web/video design) while exploring better communications methods and strategies for the church. Every comm. director position is different depending on the needs of the church and the skills of that particular person. It’s hard to find one person that excels at all forms of design/communications (graphic, web and video) while also being a great leader of volunteers and a strategist/idea generator. I definitely have more thoughts and ideas about all of that. I’ll have to save them for other posts.

So that’s where I’m at. And that’s where I’m heading. I can’t wait!

I know I have been absent from here for awhile now. I haven’t posted in almost four months. But I’m back and I hope to get back to some more frequent writing on here. First off, I want to tell you guys about some new paths in my life. However, for you to know where I’m going, you have to know where I’ve been.

Let’s go back to my teenage years. Before I was 15 years old, I had my path planned out. I was a computer nerd. I wanted to go to college to get a degree in some field of computer science. I enjoyed learning about computers, software, and web design. Just to date myself, I was designing personal web sites on Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire back in those days. Some of you reading this aren’t even old enough to know what those hosting sites are. I used to spend my spare time with Netscape Composer and Microsoft Frontpage Express 2.0. Seriously, does anyone still use Netscape software?

I loved being a nerd. I planned to make a career being a nerd. But then it happened. I had an experience that I felt was a call from God, a call to stop living nominally for Him. A call to learn to live a life for Him. This event led me into a journey of trying to figure out what that call meant for me. Over those next few months, through what I knew, what I was learning and through my mentors, I felt that God was calling me into full-time vocational ministry.

But here’s the dilemma. The church (in general) has an extremely small scope of what full-time ministry means. In general, there are two or three basic tracks: preacher, youth pastor, or maybe music minister (and most churches don’t even consider their music minister as a “pastor”). So, not knowing any other way, I was put on the “preacher” track because “that is what you do if you are called to the ministry”.

No one thought to consider that maybe God wanted me to use the gifts and passions I already had. No one considered that maybe God wanted to use me to equip the local church and grow His kingdom in ways that didn’t involve a Sunday morning pulpit. No one realized that you don’t have to stand in a pulpit or lead a youth group to advance the Kingdom and the name of Jesus.

So, I began a journey that led me to college to get a degree in Christian Ministry. I’ll cut out some details, but this journey led me through some amazing experiences and leadership positions. After college, I went to seminary (thinking that was the next step for me) only to realize it wasn’t what God had in store for me. What followed after my year at seminary was a journey of searching, losing, frustration, and a forced destruction of the pride that I had been slowly building for years. I knew leaving seminary for an unknown adventure with God was going to be hard, and I knew He had some humbling in mind for my journey.

Here’s the light at the end of the tunnel (for those who have made it reading this far). Through this journey, I feel that God has expanded my perspective on the “call to ministry”. I don’t want to dive deep into that here (maybe a blog post in the near future). I feel that God calls many into the ministry and never intends them to step a foot behind a pulpit or ever lead a youth group (despite what every small church staff looks like). I feel that many are given skills and passions, but if they feel a call into ministry, we make them drop those skills and teach them to be a preacher.

And that is exactly what I feel has happened to me (and countless others who get pushed through the exact same “preacher track” at small, Christian universities). I could blame my mentors back then, but they didn’t know any better. To them, “call to ministry” meant you were going to preach. Period. They only did what they thought best to prepare me.

However, when I look back, I wish someone would have told me that God had already been preparing me for His vision for my life. All that time being a nerd, designing websites when I was 14 because I thought it was fun, was really preparation, not a distraction. I was told I had to pursue a pulpit to serve God, when, in fact, 10 years later, I’m beginning to realize that someone should have told me to pursue a computer to serve God and advance His Kingdom.

I’m beginning to realize that a call to full-time ministry doesn’t always mean a change in vocation. Instead, I feel that a call to full-time ministry just changes your vocation to become an avenue for the advancement of the Gospel, His Kingdom, and the local church.

Sometimes you don’t have to stop being a web or graphic designer to serve God and His Church. You just become a different kind of designer. A designer with a purpose bigger than himself.

Here’s some updates about life for me. What I’ve been doing, what I’ve been thinking, and what’s next on the horizon.

• In three days, I will be married for two months. Wow. Sometimes it still blows me away that we are married. It took so long to get there (I don’t suggest engagements longer than a year by the way…16 months was way too long) that it’s hard to believe the wedding has already come and gone.
• Marriage is probably the greatest litmus test for pointing out my selfish tendencies. Nothing in my life has been able to so easily and so often point out my selfishness as marriage has. Now don’t get the wrong idea. Kindel doesn’t point out these selfish tendencies to me. She’s not nagging me or calling me out all the time. It’s not like that. It’s just one of those things that I feel so often when it happens, like my own conscience became so much more sensitive to pointing out selfishness. It’s like having a car alarm and turning up the sensitivity so high that it goes off just from loud noises in the parking lot.
• So what am I doing about my selfishness? I’m learning to serve and love. The key word here is learning. I’m certainly not doing all of this right and I know I fail sometimes. But I’m learning to serve my wife more and more and love her more and more. I thought I loved her before we got married, and I did love her. However, I now feel like I am only beginning to learn how to love her.
• Design work is picking up. I’m excited to get to do more design work. Not only because it allows us to pay our bills and put food on the table, but also because it allows me to grow as a designer. With each new project, I learn new functions in the software I use, new techniques to design more efficiently, and gain more perspective. My “designer’s eye” is not perfected by a LONG shot, but it continues to get better. Currently, I’m designing three new church logos for 2 different churches, branding sermon series packages for two churches, and doing some oddball design for a couple churches.
• Barista life to begin again soon. I should be going back to work at the coffee shop in less than a month. Gotta pay the bills.
• New website concept coming soon. This week I’m starting to work with a programming guru to put together a new website idea. More details to come later.
• Last week, I read The Call to Discipleship by Karl Barth. It’s an excerpt from his large book, Christian Dogmatics. It was a good read, but definitely a hard read. It was originally in German and translated into English. The sentence structures were very complex and many times confusing to follow.
• Now I’m reading God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It by Jim Wallis. So far, it is awesome! It is great to read the perspective of a Christian who doesn’t buy into the concept that God is partisan. It is also great to read someone who brings to light that abortion and gay marriage are not the only moral issues. War, poverty, education, and healthcare, for example, are all moral issues as well. So far, Wallis has done a great job of presenting an un-partisan view of politics with Scripture as its basis. I can’t wait to keep reading. I already recommend it.
• Free entertainment. By the way, the copy of God’s Politics that I am reading is from the public library. After Kindel got her name change done and got a new driver’s license, we went to the public library to get library cards. Instead of renting DVDs so much, we can go check one out for FREE. Plus all the books. Definitely an entertainment budget saver!
• I think we’ve finally settled into our apartment. It took almost two months, but I think we finally did it. There’s still some work to do here and there, and there is still parts to improve upon, but, for the most part, I would say we have finally settled in.

Overall, life is good. We are depending on God for direction like never before.

Right now is the Lenten season. It’s the time of the Christian calendar in which we fast and pray for 40 days, preparing ourselves for the annual celebration of Easter, the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection and reconciling creation back to God.

The 40 days is supposed to symbolize the 40 days that Jesus spent in the “wastelands” and was tempted. We can read this story and it’s easy to see the whole picture. However, I’m beginning to wonder if Jesus knew it would be 40 days. When the spirit led Him into the desert, did He know that the fasting and the sacrificing would only last for 40 days or did He willingly go into the desert not knowing how much He would have to give. How long He would have to give. When it will finally be over.

It’s easy to see the end in sight when we read it in a book, but imagine being in His shoes. We have no reason to believe that Jesus knew the testing would only be 40 days. Could you imagine? Imagine if you knew that your testing and fasting would last 40 days (such as lent). You can see the end in sight. You have a goal and a finish line to keep pushing towards. You can keep reminding yourself that the end is coming soon and you can soon have all that you gave up.

Now… imagine if you were led by the Spirit to fast, pray and go into a time of testing, but you were not told how long the fasting would last. Every day could be your last test. Or the end could never come. You wouldn’t know. Every day you would wonder, “Could this be the final day of my testing?” Every chance you had to eat, you would have to wonder, “Maybe this will be the last meal I have to skip… or maybe this is still only the beginning.” Your body and mind would be constantly reminding you that God is not going to come through for you to end your testing, so you might as well quit now.

It’s easy to be tested on day 40 if you know there’s a buffet waiting on day 41. Real testing comes when you can say, “Today is day 40 and I have given all I have to give. All that is in me wants this to end, but there is no end in sight. It could end today. It could end next year. I have no clue if there are another 40 hours or 40 days or 40 months or the rest of my life ahead of me, BUT I will continue to trust that He is going to come through for me at the right time.

Every day could be the day that the testing of your spirit is done. You wouldn’t know when that feast would be given to you. You wouldn’t know when the end would be. You wouldn’t know how much longer you would have be pushed. You wouldn’t know how much more you would have to give. Every day you would have to say, as the king of Ninevah decreed, “Who knows? God may yet relent…”  They didn’t know if God would relent or when He would relent. They only could trust and hope that God would come through for them in the end.

Thoughts?

Through this journey of living in SC since graduating college has taught me a lot of things. Currently, I am having to work whatever job I can find while Kindel is finishing school down here. Once she graduates, we can open ourselves up to moving and finding opportunity elsewhere. But for now, I am working whatever job will pay the bills so that Kindel can finish her education.

Here’s what I’ve learned from working some not-so-good jobs. I will no longer allow myself to be defined by what I do to get a paycheck. I will not be defined by where I clock in or who signs my checks.

I will be defined by what I do for free. What I do by choice. What I do in my free time.

I will be defined by who I love, not who I work for. How I serve people in my own time, not what I do for people on company time.

I will no longer be defined by how much I make each paycheck, but instead by how much I invest in each person in my life.

I will be defined by how much I gave of myself off the clock, not how much I earned on the clock.

I will not be defined by how I pay the bills. I will be defined by how I live as a servant in the meantime.

I will not be defined by titles, positions, job descriptions, credentials, district appointment, licensing, or the lack thereof. I will be defined by love, mercy, grace, generosity, and servanthood. I will strive to be the latter, not the former.

My Mom. I don’t know where to begin. This attempt at thanking my Mom will probably be the understatement of the year. Yet I will at least make a feeble attempt at it.

Thank you, Mom, for…

• carrying me around for 9 months and giving birth to me (that couldn’t have been fun)
• loving me unconditionally, no matter what mess I got myself into
• believing in me
• encouraging me
• being that cautious “make sure you think about this or plan for this” voice when I needed it (even when I didn’t feel like I needed it!)
• playing board games with me when I was a kid even though I was a sore loser
• cooking meals and cleaning up after me after working all day too
• being very gracious to me through this crazy journey since leaving college
• for not killing me while Dad was in Iraq
• always reminding me that you are proud of me
• being the rock in the family when we needed you to be
• not giving up when situations seemed hopeless
• supporting me in everything I’ve attempted in life
• consistently reminding me that I am very special to you

This morning, I read about Babe Ruth and his strike out record via Ben Arment’s post this morning. I never knew this, but Babe Ruth held the strikeout record from 1926 to 1964. Yet, at the same time, his home run record (60 in one season – 1927) also stood the test of time until beaten in 1961 by Roger Maris. His career home run record of 714 stood until 1974 (beaten by Hank Aaron).

The Great Bambino had 714 homeruns, but he also had 488 strikeouts. He knew if he wanted the home run, then he had to swing. He had to risk the possibility of a strikeout for the chance of a home run.

All in all, Babe Ruth swung a lot, but he didn’t always connect. He didn’t always point to the outfield and knock it out of the park. However, if he had not swung, he wouldn’t have hit it there.

We have to do the risky things. We have to swing for the fence. Who wants to settle for bunting for chances at first base? What sort of life is that?

I want to look back and know that I swung for the fences. I want to know I tried to do impossible things. I want to know I didn’t play it safe. I want to know I followed my ideas and “what if…” thoughts.

Even if I just end up striking out.