The Beginning

This is less about jumping on the Blog-o-sphere wagon and more about me thinking that this might be the best medium for what I am trying to do, so bear with me.

This all started with my discipleship group. For those of you who don't know, I am a co-mentor for a discipleship group run by Ambridge Youth Ignite for girls and guys in high school. We get together once a week and share a meal and do something that has to do with God. Last month we did a joint group where Eric, Director of AYI and other mentor, led a discussion. Eric talked about one of Donald Miller's, author of Blue Like Jazz, etc., new books called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. We read an entry from Miller's blog, "Living a Good Story, an Alternative to New Years Resolutions" that focused on the point of the book. To summarize, we need to live our lives as if we are writing great stories. There are three elements: Want Something, Envision a Climatic Scene, and Create an Inciting Incident. "An inciting incident is the event in a movie that causes upheaval in the protagonist life." Since people don't want to change, they have to be forced to change. So I am volunteering you all to force me to change. Congratulations you are a part of my inciting incident! But what are you inciting me for you might ask? What do I want?

I have gotten to a point in my life where I am rather comfortable in my own skin. I am no longer the insecure, overweight teenager I use to be. Now I am just overweight. I could live my life and be comfortable. But, as you would see if you read Miller, I don't want to be comfortable, I want to be great. Not in the "look at me I am a great person" sort of way, but in the "I am happy to be me because my life has meaning". So I think that the first step in my new life of greatness is getting healthy. What do I want: To be healthy. More specifically I am going to lose 50 pounds before 2011, i.e. 10 months. A quick note: I have not talked to any professionals about this, I don't know if it is a crazy dream to think that this amount is possible over that time period. But I do know the common "it is healthy to lose 2 pounds per week" and 50 is well below. So it might not be that much or it might be more, but the number isn't the point. The point is getting healthy and I need to put a story to that.

My climatic scene? Right now it's this: December 31, 2010 and I am looking back on how far I've come and how much more I can do. In Miller's book, he's going to climb a mountain or something, but I am not quite ready for that. However, I hope to maybe be ready to commit to something like that in the coming months. We will see.

As for now, this is what I am asking: will you help me hold to my story? No you don't have to workout with me, and, though I would love it, you don't have to become a vegetarian. All I am asking is that you read this and know that this is what I am trying. That in itself, I hope, will be enough pressure to hold me to it. As Miller says, "If I don’t, there’s a social consequence. I will let my buddy down, and I’ll also look like an idiot in front of all of you guys. So bringing a friend into the mix, and going public with my ambition serves as an inciting incident."

So there it is, believe me this was hard to write and I know it is going to be even harder to send. I hope to keep updates on this blog, especially for those of you who don't see me a lot. Also, I have thrown around the idea of putting other things on here, beyond the scope of "my story", like recipes and stuff. Lastly, I wanted to encourage you to read Donald Miller's book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years or at the very least the blog entry I linked above. I didn't like Blue Like Jazz all that much and sort of wrote him off, but, thanks to Eric, I am almost done with A Million Miles and I already want to re-read it.

Thank you and I hope you'll join me.