Live The Echo

This Sunday I get to preach "Living the Echo" for our youth service. I even got bracelets made to give out to the students. I have spent the last couple of weeks trying to narrow down the thoughts and points of the message. I was really having a hard time trying to find the right words or thoughts to represent each letter of the word "echo". I finally figured it out by looking through my old journals & notebooks from the past 8 years (who would have thought a journal would be that useful?! - note sarcasm). When I finally had it all written down and I stepped back to look at them, I realized something interesting. The four thoughts that I had settled on - the ones that really expressed what echo means - were things that I have been preaching/saying for the past 10ish years. I didn't try to make it work out that way, it just did.

I can see that I'm really not preaching anything new, I just finally have it in a package that makes it clear. I really feel like I have waited my whole life to preach this message - not because it's so great and amazing, but because I have finally brought clarity to the message of my life. I now have a really clear idea of what Mark Sparks is all about. It's not perfect, and it's not complete, but it's a start. It still needs focus, and it still needs tuning, but at least I know what the picture kind of looks like.

This whole process is kind of cool. I started out just trying to fine tune a concept, a message about living a life that inspires a reproducing change in others. I began talking about making an echo that others can follow - and I ended up discovering what my echo is. How cool is God?!