Homecoming Hiccups

If Homecoming is coming up or you recently celebrated this annual tradition at your school, we bet it’s on your mind. Ahh, Homecoming, that fall ritual when teachers let learning slide for a day and costumes are completely acceptable school attire. Here at ec, we remember how much fun Homecoming was because we’ve chosen to forget all the bad parts—you know, like painstakingly decorating that float for the parade, the gossip and rumors that fly about why some girls got on the Homecoming court, and all the agonizing about whom you should go with to the dance.

Unfortunately, in getting this month’s issue ready for printing, the “Dressed for Distress: A Homecoming Horror Story” article on page 6 caused a few Homecoming memories to resurface that I (production editor Emily) would rather have forgotten. Like how in ninth grade, I didn’t have a date to the Homecoming dance, so my best friend’s boyfriend set me up on a date with his friend. I should have known it wasn’t meant to be when he took me to Wendy’s for the pre-dance meal. That, and he smoked the entire way to the restaurant and back. Needless to say, the “date” was basically over before it began, and I never saw the guy again. (Come to think of it, I can’t even remember his name!)

And then the next year, a fellow tenth grader asked me to the dance, two days before it actually happened. (Nothing like making a girl wait until the last minute. Hey guys, please don’t do this to your potential dates. Ask at least a week or two in advance and bail her out early from the anxiety—she’ll really appreciate it!) I was excited about being asked (no Wendy’s with a smoker this year!) until I remembered that he was the shortest guy in our grade. Now, I’m not a tall girl myself, but I wasn’t too happy when we got the pictures back and, even despite wearing shoes without tall heels, I was definitely taller than my date.

And then how about my senior year, when all the hard work my classmates and I put into our parade float went completely unnoticed by the judges? (Come on! Lions made out of chicken wire covered by tissue paper tufts are NOT easy to make!) The senior class at my school always got first place in the competition. That is, until I was in the senior class. Talk about being disappointed. To top it all off, it rained that night, which is always good for making that hairstyle you worked on for hours look just like it did when you got out of the shower, which was not exactly what I wanted to look like in my final Homecoming pictures of my high school career.

How about you? Any Homecoming misfortunes that you’d rather forget? If so, leave us the details in a comment! We’d love to hear from you.

You need to know

Oh, times they are a-changin' here at ec.

Well, they have been changing for awhile, but it seems like we're in a big time of flux right now. We're all getting new job titles, taking on different tasks, and trying to keep ec on schedule. And we're taking all the info you've been giving us about ec's redesign and tweaking things. As a result, you'll start seeing the dates for the devo weeks in the February issue. (Sorry, November, December, and January are already too far gone in production!)

Also, if you're a fan of Twitter, you can follow us there. Each morning you'll get a short devotional thought that will point you to that day's devotion. And you'll also get some behind-the-scenes commentary from the team that brings you ec each month. Follow us here.

And tell your student minister about the Hot Sheet. Really, it's important.

And then there's this poll we'd love to get your thoughts on! So answer away!

And finally, October is nearing its end. So why not answer our Question of the Month? You can do it by clicking on the link right over there on the left. Please? We'd love your forever!

Truth, Lies, and everything in between

The cover story for the October 2008 issue of ec had to do with the lies of the world we accept for truth. The story was born out of a discussion of Romans 1: 21-25.

And apparently, God still wants me to learn something from those words Paul wrote to the Roman believers so long ago.

See, we edited this issue months ago. I dug deep in the Scripture and edited the stories and wanted you all to see the truth of God at work on the pages of the magazine. And then I moved on to the next issue and the next and the next. Romans was just a distant memory.

Until last week, when the verse popped up again in a Bible study I'm doing with a group at my church. The whole week of study last week had to do with lies I'm buying into that while not seemingly bad things are pulling my focus from God. Things like dating relationships, friendships, finances, and being right. None of those things are wrong, per se, but sometimes, in my world, they wrestle first place from God. Instead of pursuing God, His standard, and His righteousness, I find myself running after people, idealized relationships, more money, stuff I want to buy, and the right to say "I told you so" and feel superior to everyone around me.

The world likes to tell me that I'm the most important person in my life. That my dreams, wishes, hopes, and needs come before anyone else's. God's Word tells me that the greatest command is to love Him. The second isn't to make myself important; it's to love others, to give myself up.

So today, a day when I'm full of self-pity and fear, my prayer isn't that I pursue all the seemingly good things the world has set before me. It's that I pursue the things I know God values and that I serve others. It's time to stop believing the lies!
—Mandy

Slave (to the day planner) no more!

If confession is good for the soul, then I hope to feel really great after writing this.

My name is Emily, and I am a type-A, planner-toting, time-conscious, detail-oriented micromanager. There, I said it. I’m pretty stingy with my time and often have a hard time finding room on my calendar for things that come up unexpectedly. When one of my free-spirit friends wants to go get coffee “sometime,” I demand to know when “sometime” is. I set up an appointment with this person, write it in my planner, and then hold them to it. That’s just one example. There is no telling how many people I’ve hurt by refusing to spend time with them in the name of maintaining my schedule.

My rigidity is not my favorite part of myself.

Last week, I threw it out the window.

It was surprisingly easy. A friend needed me. That was all it took. My best friend’s fiancé called to tell me that he was putting my best friend on a plane to Nashville from Denver so she could be with her dad, who was having emergency surgery. He wanted to know if I could pick her up at the airport and let her stay with me that night. He said she was too emotional to call me herself and too exhausted to drive the rest of the way to her hometown that night.

I didn’t even have to think about it. Of course I would take care of her once she arrived in Nashville. Moments earlier, I’d been planning out my one night of downtime for the week. But before I knew what I was doing, I was offering to take a vacation day the next day and drive her home (4.5 hours away). That ended up not being necessary (thanks to a very nice sales associate at Hertz who I’m pretty sure pulled some strings to get my friend a car), but I was completely willing to do it. Looking back, I’m a little shocked that I didn’t freeze up at the thought of doing something that wasn’t on my planner. But the thought of being protective of my time didn’t even cross my mind at the time because I knew what was important.

This past week put a lot of things into perspective for me. I learned several key lessons:
• Number one, when people you love need you, you will do whatever it takes to meet that need. (Which explains why parents go to the lengths they do sometimes.)
• Number two, a lot of the things I think are important aren’t. (Suddenly, the TV shows and manicure scheduled for last Monday night really didn’t matter.)
• Number three, I need to loosen up. I highly doubt that Jesus would have been chained to His calendar, had they had day planners back in His day. He knew what was expected of Him, yet was free to serve when the opportunity presented itself. It’s amazing the freedom that comes when you have your priorities straight.

(And I’m happy to report that my best friend’s dad will be just fine, and that I was able to spend a lot more time with her this past week than I have since she moved to Denver a year ago.)

So if you see yourself in my story, I hope you’ll loosen your grip on your planner and stop missing out on the parts of life that happen without warning. Enjoy your time! It’s God’s gift to you.

Attention Student Ministers!

Yes, we're talking to you.

Here at ec, we want to support you in your ministry. We want to help you better understand the changes that we've made to ec magazine, inform you of upcoming features and devotion topics, and help you see all the ways you could use the magazine to further the reach of your ministry.

In order to do that, we're introducing The Hot Sheet. It's a little newsletter you'll find only here on our blog. We'll be updating it each quarter and hope to help you understand what topics we'll be tackling in future issues and giving you ideas for ways to use ec to support what you're already doing. It's a PDF, so feel free to print it off and read it at your leisure!

So go check it out. It's right over there in the left-hand menu. And be sure to leave some comments. We want to know if you like it! :)

The new ec: devotions

I talked with you a little last week about the reasons why we felt ec had to undergo a complete overhaul. And if you've even peeked inside the October issue, you've probably noticed that while a lot of the stuff you love about ec is still there, there's also a bunch of new things. And one of the most striking differences is going to be the devotions.

If you're a long-time ec reader and fan of the devotional aspect of the magazine, the new ec devotions might set you back a little. But in a good way. Over the past few years, the ec team has talked a lot about the best way to do devotions in ec. Taking them out of the magazine was never really on the table, since devotions are an important, vital part of ec and one of the magazine's founding principles 13 years ago. And while completely ditching devos wasn't an option, pretty much everything else was. Meaning the way the devos were written, how many we included for each month, what we wanted devotions to do in your life.

So we started asking ourselves a lot of questions. Was our current devo writing style really the best? What did we want you to take away from ec devotions, both on a daily level and over the long haul? Did our current style meet your needs?

So we dreamed of new ways to write devotions. We talked to each other. A lot. I took several days away from the office and sat in coffee houses and my desk at home, plotting out my ideas and writing sample devotions. We shopped those around to writers and teens at various focus group meetings and refined, reworked, and refocused. The end result is what you see in the October issue.

The first big difference you'll notice is that the devotions are all grouped by weeks rather than dates. Depending on the month, there will be four or five weeks of devotions in each issue. Each week contains 6 devos (one for the weekend and one each for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday).

An intro page will open each week and explain the over-arching theme for the week—the theme all of the devotions will be dealing with in some way. You'll start the week with the weekend devotions, which follow the familiar "story" devo style you're used to if you've read ec's devotions for awhile. The M-F devos follow a new format designed to teach you how to dig into Scripture and study it for yourself. The last paragraph of each day is designed to help you understand the one big truth we want you to take home for the week. We've also included a "journal" page at the end of each week, which is designed to help you see what it means to put the truths you've studied into practice this week—how to make God's truth "known" to the world. You'll also find suggestions on how to go deeper in Scripture about those topics and guides to help you read through the Bible in a year.

Our goal with this new style of devotions is to help you learn to read Scripture and really study it. We want you to see that God's Word does have something to say about your life today. We want you to know it, read it, love it. We want you to search Scripture and understand more about the God you serve. The new style of devos is our way of helping you along that journey.

So dig into God's Word. It has the power to change lives.