Swaziland (part 4).

We had our Swaziland open house on Sunday.  I've previously said some things about the trip.  I said some similar things there..

Here's another video that I made for this last weekend.  I expect to make a few more before the footage gets archived for good, so you can look forward to that.  Or, you know, not.  That's cool, too.

Grad School.

This is a big time of year. 

At work, students have just finished their midterm projects.  They're crewing up for their final projects (which means I've had producers asking me lots of great questions). 

At church, we're really into the swing of the school year again.  We've started new small groups - both in student ministry and in adult ministry.  To be successful, both of those require a high level of investment.

Oh.  And I'm applying to grad school.

I've applied a few times before.  I was even accepted once, which was great.  $90,000 was a bit steep, though.

This month, I've decided that I'm going to use every spare moment to get into school.  If I don't make it in, I'll at least have done everything in my power to try and I'll have a year to try again.  (And I have plans for that year...)

Right now, the Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz is my top choice.  But I've made some connections at USC that suggest that could be an exciting program as well.

Over the last year, I've discovered that publicly saying that I'm going to do something helps.  (See my Blogging Challenge from a year ago or my recent Points Project...)  So this is me publicly saying that I'm going to apply to grad school.  Both of them.  And work really hard to do it.  This month.

That is all.

Personal Branding.

So I made this about.me page today: about.me/kemplyons

We live in a world where it's so easy to push your ideas and image out there.  My thoughts wouldn't be worth the paper they're printed on if this was thirty years ago, but, thanks to the magic of the internet, anyone can read my blather any time of day!

We have Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Instagram, Wordpress, and I know I'm missing some.  About.me claims to be able to be a one-stop shop for your online identity.

But why do we need an online identity?  Since when did Personal Branding become a thing?  What happened to buckling down and working hard at doing something - not just marketing yourself until someone hires you?

Sound off in the comments.  I genuinely want to hear some thoughts here.  Personal Branding: necessary evil in an information economy or penultimate egotism that takes away from our ability to create anything outside of our own image?

Swaziland (part 3).

Here's the first video I made for our Swaziland trip.  I'm currently working on putting together something more full.





For more stories about Swaziland, check out part 1 and part 2.

Swaziland (part 2).

(This is part 2 of this post.  I split it up because long blog posts are annoying.  And I hate being annoying.)

It's funny how forgetful we are.  I came back on a Wednesday.  The next day, new students arrived at work.  And I've been going ever since.  The few conclusions I made have been buried by two months of doing, creating, teaching, leading.  After chewing on his questions these last couple of weeks, I remembered.

The Swazi people believe in prayer.  Like, really believe it.  If they pray something, they know it's going to happen.  Period.  Full stop.

Most of our days were spent doing home visits.  We'd go to the homesteads of families in the church (and several neighbors), bring some gifts of food and hygiene items, share some scripture and pray with them.  It was awkward.  Swazis are difficult to read, so half the time, it felt like we were being invasive and rude.  Pastor Maziya had to continually comfort us that people were happy and appreciated our presence.

Anyway.  On one home visit, we talked to guy that explained his faith in prayer.  He said that he rarely knew where his next meal was coming from.  He was incredibly poor.  No family to take care of him.  No job prospects.  No good land.  And yet, he had never gone hungry.  He had never gone a day without some kind of food.  When he would pray, God would answer that prayer.

Boom.  Do I have that faith?

Perhaps a more telling story of this was on our very first home visit.  His name is Sofiso.  He was a deacon and leader in the church and lived on his homestead with his mother and sister.  When we visited with him, we shared some verse and talked about life for about 30 or 40 minutes.  He and his mother worked at the hospital in town.  In fact, his  mother should be coming home from work any minute and we could meet her, too.  We decided to stick around a while longer.

She was probably 20 minutes late when we decided we should probably move on.  So we asked Sofiso what we could pray for with him.  He said that his brother was very sick.  He was in the hospital where his family worked, but they had been faithfully praying for him and he was getting better.  In fact, they were hoping he would come home some time that week, so we could come back and meet him, too.  We prayed something fierce for him.  These people see enough death.  God would heal this man.

As we walked down the driveway, Sofiso got a call.  It was his mother.  His brother had just died.

Literally as we were praying for this man's recovery, God was taking him home.  Down to the minute.

Sofiso didn't cry.  Swazis don't.  Our team did.

Later that week, we were blessed to be able to provide most of the funeral costs.  It was too close to our hearts for us not to be able to help in some way.

But just think about Sofiso's faith.  Maybe the severity of his brother's condition wasn't communicated to us.  Maybe he took a sudden turn on that day.  Either way, Sofiso, just minutes before, was laughing and smiling and confidently trusting that God would heal him.  Despite numerous prayers for healing and provision not being answered in the past, he believed and trusted that God would heal his brother. 

When do I have that faith?  When, if I pray something, do I believe it's going to happen?  And when, after I've prayed something and the exact opposite happens, have I continued praying and praising God for his goodness?

If that man from my church asked me again today, I would tell him this story.  This faith, that I've so quickly forgotten, challenges me to trust my God.  I want that faith, darn it.  I want to, despite numerous disappointments before, still believe that God will answer my prayers when I ask something in his name and with his heart.  My hope is to not forget that faith as I have for the past several weeks, but to have that kind of faith.

Points Project (round two).

Apparently a few people liked this idea of the Points Project.  I'd love to hear about your system in the comments.  Does it work for you? 

Swaziland (part 1).

Last week, after church, one of our members took me aside and asked me, "Tell me about Swaziland.  Tell me about your experience."  I guess it's really more of a demand than a question.

So I told him some of the generic stuff.  Stuff I've told so many people about the trip (though I realize I've never written about it on here).  It was great to see believers around the world.  It was an awesome opportunity to explore possibilities of a ministry partnership across the globe.

The slightly longer version is that I'm not sure how Swaziland was.  As most of you know (maybe?), I went primarily as documentarian.  My job was to capture the story of our team's experience and to tell of God's faithfulness.  It was to capture the story of the Swazis.  What is God doing there?  Who are these people?  How do they follow him?  How can we be blessed by them as we have blessed them (We sent several thousand dollars of funds ahead of us)?

To develop a functional ministry partnership, our people needed to know their people.  I took a camera, a decent mic, and my laptop to log and edit footage in country.  The whole trip, my mind was consumed with questions: What's the story here? How can I tell that story best?  How will it cut with other footage?  What's the best framing?  How's the lighting?  Is the audio coming in clearly?  Am I holding the mic so that the cables aren't making noise?  What questions can I ask to get deeper into this story, this emotion?  What's my battery life?  How much time do I have left on my card?  How likely am I to need the battery and the card space later?

I tell people that it was pretty lonely.  Not in the "Wah, I miss home.  I wish I had a girlfriend." kind of lonely, but I constantly felt like I was holding a council of one.  Every artistic decision, every technical difficulty, every question I asked was my idea and I decided if it was good or bad.  No one to help with sound or to interview while I worry about tech.  I've told most people that I'm never doing video on a missions trip again unless I have at least one more person to help.

At no point did I feel like what I was doing was not ministry.  I was keenly aware of video's power to do ministry to peoples' hearts while shooting every day.  Video has the amazing power to stir peoples' hearts in such a way that they experience, in some small measure, what our team experienced while we were there.  With a good video, they will love the people as much as we did.

Really, my ministry was not to the Swazis.  It was to Impact, my home church.

I can't wait to share the fruits of that work, but it made for a pretty unemotional trip to Africa at times.  (There are plenty of emotional stories, too.  Maybe another time...)

But this guy at church wasn't content with that answer.  He kept pressing.  In retrospect, I'm really glad.  Very few others have.

He said, "Traveling overseas, serving others, going on missions trips... it changes you.  How did God change you?  What was not the same about you when you came back?"  I kept trying to BS some answer, but he kept rephrasing, kept asking, kept pushing.

(There's much more to tell, but I hate long blog posts.  I'll continue this next posting.)

Endnote.

There seems to be a huge backlog of content to update this blog with, so over the next few days, I'm hoping to write up a bunch of posts and automate them for the next few weeks.  Maybe a slow drip of Kemp-thoughts will be helpful for someone.  Or maybe just me. 

Endnote was the short film that occupied my "What I'm Working On" tab up there for far too long.  Here's the final product:

Endnote from Kemp Lyons on Vimeo.

I've been an employee of Cornerstone University now for three and a half years.  In my position, I get the joy of helping students with their film productions.  There came a point last year (at about this time) that I said to myself, "Kemp, you haven't actually been on a film set since you graduated...." 

"You know what, self?  You're right!  We should do something about that."

So I wrote something.  And made it.

I learned many things in the process.

1. Making short films on the cheap is difficult.  You really do ask a lot of people.  If it weren't for Producer Sarah Schaefer and Director of Photography Mike Brown, I wouldn't have been able to do this.  These two people suffered through a lot of phone calls, emails, and production meetings just to help make this film happen and I am deeply grateful.  It's because of Sarah that we were able to have any sort of decent location.  Mike Brown helped transform my blocky ideas into beautiful shots. 

My editor, Leesa Lehmann, is equally amazing.  We originally scheduled out that she'd have all the footage ready to go during some vacation time she had coming up.  That didn't work out.  So she spent stolen hours here and there over a period of four months getting this film cut together.  I couldn't be more happy with the result.

Our actors were amazing.  Flexible, talented, good spirited, and just amazing to work with.  I'm deeply grateful for their sacrifices to make this film.  Largely because of this next point.  Lesson: love your people.  Shower them with praise.

2. Getting back into shooting scheduling was...  difficult.  I was an idiot.  Big time.  I signed off on a schedule that alotted us 8 minutes per shot.  Madness.  Sheer madness.  Poor Ujwal and Whitney pretty much hung out by the back of the shot for take after take after take.  We scheduled them until 11pm but they stayed until probably 1am.  Rock stars.  Lesson: 20 minutes a shot.  At least.

3. Professional practice really does help you teach.  This might be filed under, "No, duh.", but I was able to draw on this experience many, many times over the last year.  It has given me more confidence working with students and, hopefully, has resulted in them getting a better education through me.  Lesson: do this more often.


I'm currently working on ideating for some new short films.  As a faculty and staff at Cornerstone, we want to make a short film over the summer.  My problem is that I'm always coming up with ideas that take a few more effects than we have the resources to accomplish.  There's a blog post coming about that, too.

Anyway.  I hope you enjoy Endnote and it makes you think just a little about relationships and how we process them.

The Points Project.

For a few months now, I've been engaged in something I call the Points Project.  It started as a way for me to keep myself accountable to actually doing something with my days in the summer, but it's morphed into a general metric of becoming, I guess.

Here's how it works.  I made a little spreadsheet in Google Docs.  It looks something like this:

I figured out the goals of my life.  Not in the sense of what I want to accomplish as much as who I want to be.  There's a place for emotional development, spiritual development, physical development, whatever.  Then, I made up some activities and disciplines that need to be present in my life in order to grow in that area.  Each one gets a point score, depending on how difficult it is or how tricky it is to motivate me to do that item.

The system is not perfect.  I've tweaked it a number of times to try to be more accurate or more motivating.   I've added quite a few activities that are worthy of my time and interest so that, hopefully, my points help me track my growth as a person.

The trouble I've had lately is that I've not had a reason to get more points.  I'm far too sensible for it to be some kind of monetary goal.  I've got enough of those as it is without figuring out some kind of payout for points.  My new strategy is to post my scores online.  Hopefully, that will motivate me to keep getting my scores back into the 200 or 300 range, rather than the abysmal 100ish I've been getting lately...

So join me as I spam my blog and twitter feed with a contest that I'm playing with myself.

Award shows.

For the first time in years, I gathered together with friends in Cornerstone's media department to watch the Academy Awards.  As I watched these incredibly talented and creative people give emotional speeches thanking everyone from their agent to their dogs, I wondered why it is that we watch award shows.  Why have they become such a standard of American television, garnering viewers in the millions?

I read once that the Olympian gods, perhaps, still exist in Hollywood.  That the worship that humans once threw at Aphrodite, Zeus, and Mercury, we now give to Brad Pitt, Kim Kardashian, and Conan O'Brien.  There's something in us that wants to look up to creatures like us, but better. 

Of course, they have their problems.  They fight, they argue, they cheat.  In fact, their problems comfort us.  We really aren't that much different from what we worship, after all.

As I watched the awards tonight, I didn't find these people worthy of my worship.  But, I was... inspired. 

The ellipsis is there in that last sentence because it surprised me.  I'm not someone who gets caught up in who's marrying who and for how long and what this guy said on set that was such a big deal.  I have no need for gods in my life.  I am, however, a creative person.  I am a filmmaker, a writer, a member of an academy (however small and backwater-seeming at times).  Watching these complete strangers whose work I admire greatly receive awards with humility and gratitude rekindled in me many things.

One of the strongest was a desire to write.  But not so that I would be honored with an award.  Rather, it was because I wanted to give actors the chance to experience the catharsis I remember feeling as an actor.  I want to tell stories that move people, that cause them to think, that make them feel something they haven't felt before. 

I want to be part of an Academy.  I want to see the beauty in the creative works of others and be a part of recognizing that.  To give the sublime joy of affirmation, "Yes. What you poured your heart and soul into has worth.  It is beautiful.  It was worth it." to an actor who never expected it.  Or to the first hit screenwriter.  Or the industry veteran who has continued to move us with their craft. 

So perhaps this is why we watch award shows.  Not to participate in some kind of subtle cultural idol worship of neo-Olympian gods, but to be inspired.  To see what humans are capable of in the hopes that we, too, may achieve something great.

I need you so much closer.

Oh hey.  Long time no see.  I think I want to start blogging again.

I've been terribly busy starting off 2012 right as the Year of Being Invested.  That's meant a deeper involvement in the things that I love than I had last year.  And I love a great many things.

This last weekend, the youth ministry I work with had our annual winter retreat.  It's a story in itself that I'll spare you from, but I wanted to share a quick story from our last night at the camp ground. 

Christian bands are not known for their originality.  Worship bands, even less.  Mostly, I think it's understandable.  When leading a group of people in something, sometimes you have to hit the lowest common denominator to find community and some kind of shared knowledge.  But this band this weekend didn't seem to have that philosophy. 

We stood up to sing and I heard a familiar guitar riff.  I tried to place it, but I just assumed it was one of the probably hundreds of Christian songs I've memorized in my lifetime.  Then they started singing.  "I need you so much closer...  I need you so much closer..." 

 

Right about 3:00 in...  You'll hear that beautiful line...

It's one of my favorite Death Cab for Cutie songs.  In a worship service!

Normally, I'm categorically opposed to appropriating secular songs into worship services.  Usually this is done just to be "relevant" or "edgy".  It tends to be a desperate attempt to "culturize" the church, which almost always robs both the song and the church's message of their power. 

(My church once did this awful rewrite of "Sweet Home Alabama" that was turned into "Sweet Home Up in Heaven."  I nearly died.  They've never done it since.  Praise God.  Seriously.)

This, however, carried none of that spirit.  This was recognizing that, though the original artists didn't intend to worship God with their music, God was still honored.  God can be worshiped with songs that were not expressly created for that intent.  It was beautiful.

As the song continued, we stopped repeating "I need you so much closer", but the guitar line undergirded a transition into a more familiar song, transposed and rewritten.  It was a beautiful experience and truly worshipful (at least, to me). 

I would like to see more of this in the Church, I think.  The redemption of lines, riffs, and pieces of popular songs.  It models an engagement with culture that glorifies God and calls attention to the common grace given all of us as image bearers of the Creator.  It's something I strive for in my life and, for me and the few others in the room who knew Death Cab, it turned into one of the more beautiful moments in the weekend.