Ten years ago today I married the most incredible woman.

I have to be honest with you, all things considered it hasn’t been hard. In fact it has been one awesome adventure after the next. Sure there have been some trials along the way, but being together through the tough times only makes us closer.

Together we continue to shape each other into one inseparable being along with the two most precious gifts, Ashtynne and Steele. I literally can’t remember what life was like without Tami and our family…and that’s a good thing.

We continue to remind each other; If you are strong then I am strong.

I love you Tami

I love you Ashtynne

I love you Steele

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Another gem from James Wilson and Tony Harrison:

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• I get to work with some really amazing people

I asked my son to clean up his legos and 15 minutes later I came back to check on him and he had made zero progress and was riding on the lego box like it was a horse. I was intrigued and decided to document what the heck he was doing. it ended up taking him 22 minutes to finish the job. Here it is in 2:50.

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My kids, 5 and 7, run almost everywhere.

They usually get out of bed in the morning before mom and dad and every morning we hear their bare feet running across the tile from their rooms to ours. Running. First thing in the morning.

At the store, they run from one thing to the next.

At the house; they run.

At church; they run.

Walking is boring and slow.

Walking wastes time.

When did we stop running everywhere? Why?

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I get tweets, emails and phone calls weekly from people asking various questions about how we rock the internet campus at Gateway Church. It’s probably a good idea for me to put those thoughts and answers in one place.

Read the rest of the series – internet campus answers

Some of these things will seem obvious to some readers…bare with the new guys for a minute.

Twitter & Tweetdeck

It’s a non-negotiable that you have twitter and use it, and I have yet to see a Twitter client that can match Tweetdeck. In Tweetdeck I am managing 5 Twitter accounts via 19+/- different columns. I can manage Twitter search feeds, lists and more.

Personally I have two Twitter accounts because I use one for missional content and one for leadership content. I was finding that the conversations I was having with church leaders around the country was so much different than the ones I was having with everyone else that I was selling someone short and hurting my message, so I launched @vincemarotte for churchie stuff. You can read my thoughts on Missional Social Media at ChurchCrunch.com.

Gmail & Google Apps

You gots to have Gmail to be a communication Ninja. For real. Stop asking why and just get an account. Calendar, docs (with sharing and collaboration), chat, video chat, RSS reader and even manage multiple email accounts, I mangage 7.

TokBox

Tokbox.com is a multi-user video chat platform and 90 percent of your needs can be accomplished with the free account. Online meetings, online small groups, interviews and more. It’s hard to believe something so rad can be free.

Android

I love android. Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is incredible, but since I live in Google, the real time syncing and the communication features of Android are tough to beat.

Textmate

Andrew turned me on to Textmate and it quickly became my text editor of choice on Mac. Light, fast and clean; everything you could ask for.

Devonthink

With the exception of my journal, I more or less run paperless and Devonthink helps with that. In a nutshell it’s a searchable dumping ground for all my data.

What are your weapons of choice?

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I saw a link come through my twitter feed today that mentioned the cities with the most Twitter users and I was a little amazed that Austin Texas was even on the list let alone in the top twenty; after all Austin is only 1.7 million strong in the metro area, which is much smaller than all the cities in the top 20. I immediately got to thinking that we must have a bigger Twitter per capita than the other cities. Since its my job to have a handle on this kind of data I went to work.

I grabbed data for the top 12 cities  with the most Twitter users and then ran the numbers:

And the winner is, Austin Texas!

I’m not a statistician by any means. I pulled my numbers from wikipedia and grader.com.

*update // population refers to roughly the ‘metro area’ of a given city.

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Jennifer Knapp has been AWOL for around 7 years now. Her new album, Letting Go, drops in May and apparently she is gay (please keep the jokes about how you saw that coming to yourself). Speaking to the Christians who read this blog; what are you prepared to do? How does this make you feel? Does it matter?

My worry is that there will be Christians with big platforms that will say things that will hurt the global cause of our faith and/or statements will be taken out of context that will also hurt our cause?

While you’re at it, watch this conversation on homosexuality from Gateway Church

*due to the domain restriction settings on this video, it won’t play in your reader. If the video doesn’t load right, refresh the page.

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I love my job and I love the people I get to work with. John Burke is the lead pastor here at Gateway Church in Austin and we recently launched a video blog for him called No Perfect People Allowed, the title of his book which tells the story of what we’re all about here.

I’m constantly amazed at John’s vision and heart for raising up a church out of the culture and It’s a blast to listen in and help shape the conversation as we make the videos for his blog in my office. My office is cooler looking than his and we’ve all seen way too many videos of pastors talking in front of bookshelves anyway.

Here’s a clip, go check out the No Perfect People Allowed Blog for more.

What is Out of the Culture? from John Burke on Vimeo.

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