Atl. 45-49.
Another recap! This week has just been WAY too busy to even have time to tumblog!
Wednesday, we received a LOT of print materials. I picked up the new shirts and the reprint of the old shirts, we got the three huge banners for Gift Card Giver, and we got a bunch of signage for Plywood. I stayed up all night Tuesday designing a 2’x3’ sign for Plywood to have at its booth, and spent a lot of the day Wednesday actually painting it and sawing it out (because anyone can PRINT a sign; not everyone will design it, and then make it on organic materials. THAT is corporate branding, my friend =). Wednesday night we set up all of the booth stuff to see how it would all look, and I photographed a lot of the stuff to update it to my Behance Network profile, as well as the Gift Card Giver site. Then I stayed up until 2 or 3 that morning designing a hosting a simple splash page for PlywoodPeople.com so that Jeff and Gisele’s Plywood business cards actually had a site that led to something. I also set up the Plywood store to sell all of their goods.
Thursday morning we were all getting ready for the big trip to Charlotte, NC for the first night of the Gift Card Giver tour and the first night of Plywood’s reveal. Gisele and Jeff were on laptops and iPhones the whole time. I was definitely dancing and singing the whole time, while driving. I got on to them for being too old to just enjoy a good road trip. We got there and had dinner with Scott and Kendra Miller at Briixx (great pizza!) and then went and had the party at one of their church member’s houses. The party went really well. The group of people that came were a really solid community, and I really enjoyed getting to know them. One guy said he was going to possibly hire me to redesign some stuff for his communications company, and Scott said he wanted me to intern for their church next year. Really nice folks. Loved hanging with them.
Then I had the privilege of driving back to Atlanta that night while Jeff and Gisele slept (they really don’t understand the concept of a road trip). I got a double-shot of espresso though, and so I danced and sang the whole way back; we arrived around 2:30am. So… That’s three all-nighters in a row. Needless to say: I slept most of Friday.
Saturday was a pretty crazy day. We were getting ready for the Atlanta party all day long. We had it that night at 7:00 at Blake’s, from Mathstik Media, house. There were a TON of people there: some really influential ones as well. I met the intern for the East Atlanta Kids Club, whom the party that night was benefitting, and he was a pretty cool guy to get to know. I saw a lot of other people too, and also sold a lot of stuff for Plywood. It was an awesome night. When I got back I was exhausted though!
This morning I went to City of Refuge for church. I didn’t get a good chance to write about it last week, but I went there last Sunday too. It is really an awesome ministry. It’s over on the West End in the ghetto, and it’s a huge warehouse campus that is primarily dedicated to a project called “Eden Village,” where the ministry houses single mothers and their children when they come out of abusive situations or homelessness. Now that is a church! And they also feed people in the community every day! So on Sunday, it’s almost not like a church “service” where its some strange ceremony for people to feel obligated to come to once a week; it’s like a retreat, and a celebration, of what they’ve been doing together all week long. And the church is the most diverse congregation I have ever been a part of: racially and socio-economically. There are rich white people from the suburbs that drive in, and there are homeless people that walk there. This morning, the minister asked any who wanted prayed over to come front during one of the songs. I saw a rough-looking homeless man in a cut-off Harley Davidson tee, and long, greasy black hair, leading a blind man down the aisle, arms around one another, to pray for great things to happen in each others’ lives.
In other words, today I saw the Kingdom. Today I saw the kind of love and brotherhood that I think Jesus meant for us to have all along.
So for the rest of the day I am working on some designs for the Sojourners’ Justice Revival in Dallas, TX this fall. And that’s fine; that’s a small way that I can be a part of something good being done for the Kingdom. But I am confident that I will be thinking of those two men helping each other come forward to pray, and how Jesus said that since the first guests invited to the Kingdom’s banquet didn’t show up, He was inviting all of those out on the streets. I hope that I don’t ever act like an affluent, spoiled man invited to the banquet first; I hope that I never remove myself from being among the impoverished. I hope that I will be out on the streets so that when He calls me to the banquet, I won’t hesitate to come in.
