In a 48 day span in June and July I have been or will be out of town for 27 days. It’s been lots of fun, but also really busy. So, the blog suffereth as a result. A few random updates:

• Went Chicago and Carthage, TX on “mission trips.” I’m still struggling with them and whether they are the best practice for our young people.
• Going to a wedding in Mexico soon. Should be fun.
• I’m reading Peter Rollins’ new Fidelity of Betrayal. Interesting book. More thoughts on that to follow, hopefully.
• I’m preaching August 3rd. After being partly inspired by Rollins’ new book, I think I’m going to try and find some common (or not so common) themes between two of the lectionary passages for the morning, passages that are not meant to relate to one another: Jesus feeding the five thousand and Jacob wrestling with God. I’ll write more later.

I’ve been really distracted lately, trying to do some random things with my time that have been really draining on me personally. I don’t really want to get into specifics right now, but I was just too busy. My busyness gave me no time left over to do the things I’ve come to love doing over the past few years: reading books, checking out good blogs, writing, and generally dreaming about youth ministry and theology. The result was that I’ve been less-than-creative in my youth ministry job, generally unpleasant, and mildly unhappy.

So this morning I said the heck with that other stuff.

As a result, my day has been a breath of fresh air. I expect my blogging to come back with a vengeance, and I’m looking forward to picking up a good book tonight.

Stay tuned.

The productivity push went mildly well.  But, as you can tell, it looks like my productivity push has relegated blogging to its proper priority in my life, which is pretty low right now.  Maybe next week I can get back to writing.

That is all.

I’ve been busy lately. Very busy.

I have somehow gotten involved in a group of about 30 people (and there might really be closer to 15 who are really working hard at this) who are trying to organize about 2,000 homeowners in our area in order to negotiate an agreement with gas companies who want to lease the mineral rights to our land. And it has picked up a lot of steam in the past 10 days.

Among my tasks have been to create a website for the group (swapo.info), be personally responsible for informing 125 houses of what is going on (which includes going door-to-door meeting people, calling people, telling them what is going on, collecting email addresses, sending email updates almost daily–that sort of thing), meeting with other leaders in our group, meeting with gas companies, asking people if I can place signs in their yard, and probably a lot more.

We’re making a really big push to get the word out before a December 18 meeting for the whole community. Hopefully after that we can take a little breather for the holidays.

So, that is the reason there are cobwebs around here lately. Almost every spare minute I have (and even spare minutes I don’t have) are being put towards this effort.

It’s been really interesting, though. This is the first time I’ve met a lot of people on my street (and a lot of people not on my street). I’ve had hour-long phone conversations with other people in our group about what is going on, a guy from San Diego called me wondering about his son who has a home in our area, and I’ve spent almost half an hour at every single home where someone will open the door.

People are very interested and receptive to what is going on and want to know more. It’s amazing how people will talk your ear off about this. I don’t exactly live in a “friendly” neighborhood. I don’t mean it is dangerous, but it is a place where people keep to themselves. People drive home from work and go inside their house until the leave for work again they next morning. There are a few people within a ten-house radius that I have literally never seen after living here for 18 months. But, people want to talk about this. Usually for at least 30 minutes.

So, though I enjoy blogging, I have also enjoyed getting to speak with many new people that live near (and some not-so-near) me. If the blogging must suffer a little bit in order for me to interact with living, breathing people next door, so be it.

So, here she is, the new blog.

I decided to go with a self-hosted blog to give me the flexibility to do whatever I wanted, like put javascript in my sidebar. It’s not too fancy, but this is a content-driven blog, not a place for me to perfect my Web 2.0 skills. So, I wanted a layout that would feature the content and be simple and easy to read, and I think this design works pretty well. It will likely undergo some minor tweaks in the near future, but I like it for the most part.

So, subscribe to the new RSS feed, look around, and email me if you see any boo-boos. I’ll get back to subverting the north American evangelical youth ministry empire in a few days.

[Update: At the request of Brit, I have added the capability for people to get comment updates to specific posts via email.]

Mattopia.wordpress.com is now closed. Head on over to MattCleaver.com for my new blog.

Don’t worry, all my loyal fans. All the old content has been imported to the new site.

And for the four of you who subscribe to the RSS feed, the new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/mattcleaver.