I figured this was an appropriate week to send you all over to Dan Perkin’s blog.
I say appropriate cause Dan also raced Wildflower with me last weekend.
Dan is a pastor in San Jose.  I met him my first year at Recreate.  He’s a pastor, an artist, a thinker, a triathlete, and a wine connoisseur.  Over the past year especially, he has became quite the friend and a coach of sorts for me, both in life and ministry as well as Triathlon.
Why is his blog called DoxA?  I have no idea.  But I know I’ve read it on his blog before and it made sense.  Go find out.
He also guest blogs at Wine For Novices.

He’s got a great blog with some great posts.  And you can head over and check out his race report from Wildflower, too.
He’s good.
He was on the podium.
Came in fifth in his age group.
I almost came in fifth…from last.  About 10-11 behind me.  Just missed it.  Darn.

It’s great to have someone outside my current ministry context to bounce thoughts and ideas off of.
Someone wiser.  Someone to process with.  Someone to say the hard things on occasion.
That’s what Dan is for me.
Who is that person for you?  Oh yeah…and do they have a blog?

Anyway, time to share some link love again this Friday.

Meet Ben Arment.  I started reading Ben’s blog, History In The Making, after he planted a church in Reston, Virginia.  He is now one of the organizers for the Catalyst Conference, and hard at work on Catalyst West Coast (which I’m looking forward to attending with our staff).

Of course I started reading because of my passion for church multiplication and I wanted to follow his experiences.  But I keep reading now because of his great leadership insights.  Truth is, I have other friends who have great, deep, insightful…and long posts.  I like to read them, but have to wait til I can set aside time to get through the whole post.  The thing I like about Ben’s blog is they are usually bite sized leadership learnings and principles that pack a lot of punch and really make you think.  So go by and check him out today.

What good blogs are you reading that challenge you as leader?

As I said, one of the goals here is to uncover some hidden gems to segments of people that read this blog that may not read the other segments.
A huge contingent of bloggers out there right now are all you crazy mom bloggers.  It’s insane to me the amount of traffic that some of those mom blogs get.

Well, I have a friend who has a blog, and she’s a mom, so I think that qualifies.
If you are another friend from the Revolution days, you probably already read Liana’s blog.
For the rest of you though, allow me to introduce you.

I might get in trouble for using that picture.  But hey, she posted it on her blog today.  Maybe if enough of you go over there and visit her, she’ll forgive me?

She lives in Long Beach, works as Starbucks, is married to worship leader and graphic designer who is also pretty awesome (sometimes awesome people marry awesome people, and that’s cool), and is the mom of a 2 year old little girl (she is 2 now, right?).  Whether you know her personally or not, she has a hilarious and pithy (am I using that word right?  Pithy…yeah) way of writing about life with her family and being a mom.

So go and enjoy the life of Liana at her blog, Look @ Me, Look @ Me.
And make sure you scroll down far enough to see her husband, Keith, singing Material Girl at the church.  Well worth the watch.

See ya again next week with some more link love.

So for my first week of sharing the love, I introduce any of you who don’t know him to my friend, John Voelz.

I met John over 2 years ago when I went to Recreate for the first time.  He’s one of those guys who you can be in a crowded room with and he has that personality that draws you to him and you really want to get to know him.  He pastor’s a church as a team with 2 other guys out in Michigan.  Great heart, incredibly creative, innovative thinker.  Be ready to put your thinking cap on for some of his posts.

And the reason I thought I’d start with him…he made me laugh last night with a post he put up about the similarities between LOST (he’s an avid fan) and doing his taxes.
Here were a few of my favorites:

John, thanks for making me laugh.
The rest of you, go visit John,  And tell him I sent you.
You won’t get anything out of telling him that.  It just sounded good.

Anyway, here's the deal.  Right now in my Google Reader I have 113 subscriptions. 
Some of those are "high profile" bloggers that many of you read. 
Some are personal friends who just have great writing ro interesting stories, but not much of a reader base, so you may never get to hear from them. 
Some of them are just great blogs that feed my mind on topics of leadership and/or ministry.
Almost all of them are worth your time to check out (with the exception of a few that never update and need to just be dropped off my list, or the ones whit nothing but pictures of their kids that you only care about if you know them, like I do.)

This whole blog thing is all about spreading the link love, so I thought that each week…errr…most weeks (leave some margin for error there) I will share a link to a blog that is well worth a visit.  If it grabs your attention, go by and subscribe if you see what you like.  If it doesn't, check it out anyway and never go back if it sucks.

We'll see how this goes.  If it goes well, I figure I have enough blogs in my pocket for a few years of this category.
And how I'll choose which one each week?  Who knows?
Perhaps they write something that grabs me that week.
Perhaps their life intersects with mine that week.
Perhaps I just like them and know you may not read them otherwise.
Perhaps I coupldn't decide, so I just printed out a list and threw a dart.

In any case, let the link love begin with the next post…

Oh, and who are you reading that I should try and squeeze into my RSS reader?