One of the advantages of working in the Synod Administration Building is that we have weekly “chapel” talks by staff here each Wednesday morning. Today Bryan Gerlach was up who is the Administrator for the Commission on Worship. He shared a recent experience he had with his barber who shared with him that her relatively young father had just passed away. Struggling for what to say Bryan shared with her a piece of Scripture that struck him at a recent funeral he had attended. This prompted her to ask if he read the Bible a lot? He eventually asked her the same question. Her response was a typical one, “I tried once, but it was hard.”

The Bible can be hard because it shares some “hard” things. It’s also big and one might have trouble knowing where to start. So Bryan, in his dialog with her, needed to provide a suggestion. He could have suggested perhaps looking at a particular book of the Bible, perhaps one of the Gospels. He might have even suggested a book that would have helped her better understand the Bible like Luther’s Small Catechism. But in a circumstance like that what would be the chances of her actually going out a buying something like that.

What he did recommend is something that I’d suggest we all make better use of – a website. He suggested she visit www.whataboutjesus.com. This is an excellent resource for anybody trying to “figure out” the Bible and this Christianity thing. This resource, created and managed by our synods Commission of Evangelism, is expressly designed for just such situations. Take a look. I think you will be edified by it, but even better…share it. It’s an easy address to remember as many we meet are asking this very question, whether they know it or not – What About Jesus?

Thanks Bryan for the reminder of this great evangelism tool.

One thing that most of us have come to rely on day in and day out is our calendar. Mine is electronic, but it really doesn’t matter if you use a paper calendar either. It is probably one of those things you look at first thing in the morning to plan your day and recognize the commitments that you’ve made to yourself and to others.

What if I took that tool away from you? Most of us would be in serious trouble. I know I would be. My memory isn’t what it used to be (just ask my wife), and having to rely on just my head to keep track of my appointments would be a disaster! Those of you that have misplaced or lost your calendars know what I’m talking about. It could be rightly said that we are addicted to our calendars. We HAVE to have them to function. We feel uncomfortable if not downright queasy if we don’t have access to ours. But that’s OK. They are tools we can use to practice the good stewardship of our time. At a quick glance we can see what we need to prepare for as well as how we are spending our time that day, week, month or year.

One productivity tip I’ve been following lately is to use my calendar as a reminder system of commitments I’ve made in the PAST. Here is how it works. Each week I set aside a time when I simply review my calendar. I look ahead, yes, but sometimes more important, I look back over the past weeks worth of entries. In almost every case I come across a meeting or event that spawned an action item for me that I hadn’t remembered to write down or track in some way. It would have been gone forever, remain undone, if I hadn’t “jogged” my memory with a review of the previous week’s calendar. It may be a follow up meeting that needs to be scheduled, or something that you agreed to in the meeting. It may have been a conversation you had before or after the appointment, a birthday idea, or … well you get the idea.

So the next time you look at your calendar remember that it can help with more than just where you have to be and when. It can provide valuable information about your past activities and if they mean something for today.

One thing about technology…nobody knows it all! Fortunately there is kind of an unwritten code among geeks that helping others with tech questions is part of the deal. That is something I’ve observed first hand as Sallie Draper and I produce our weekly Tech in Ministry podcast called WELSTech. We never have a shortage of listener feedback, questions, tips and suggestions. What’s been a neat byproduct of the show is the WELSTech wiki.

A wiki is a collaborative website that its visitors can add content to, or edit existing content to make the site better. Wiki is actually a Hawaiian word for “fast”. Most of you are probably familiar with wikipedia. The WELSTech wiki is the same concept, expect with the specific purpose of technology advice for those working in ministry contexts like churches or schools. The contributors to our wiki offer advice on topics like website development, audio equipment, electronic organs, live video web streaming, copyright, etc. An excellent resource if you have a tech question. Check it out at http://welstechwiki.wels.net. If you are so inclined and have something to offer, by all means add your own thoughts. It’s ok. You can join the WELS geek community. Help us out.

We live in an age where electronic content is being created at incredible rates. Just poke around your own computer for a few minutes. You probably have documents from years ago and with each successive year you create (and store) even more. Most of the programs you have on your computer are there to help you create content. Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint are all there to produce documents. OpenOffice, Mac Pages, Keynote and Numbers too. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and GIMP create images. Microsoft Publisher makes newsletters. You get the picture.

Most people try to maintain some kind of order with a logical file folder structure. However, that demands that you must remember how your mind was working last year when you stored that document you now need to resurrect. If you are like me that means hunting and pecking and clicking and … ten minutes later you find it. Even if you spend 10 minutes a week hunting for stuff, that 520 minutes a year (or a full work day of unproductive and frustrating clicking).

There are a few things we can all do to improve things dramatically:

1. Use the built in search tools most modern operating systems provide. If you are using Vista or Windows 7, they both do a great job of automatically indexing your content. Just hit the Windows key and enter a keyword or two that were either in the document title or inside the document. If you’ve entered the correct keywords you should be a click away from opening your sought for stuff, no matter where you originally stuck it. Mac’s Leopard or Snow Leopard provide similar functionality. Just hit the Apple key and spacebar and you can enter your search terms. Those still on Windows XP can download third party tools like Google Desktop to do the same thing.

2. Make use of metadata. Metadata (or sometimes referred to as “tags”) is information ABOUT your content. Most programs today allow you to enter information about the document you are creating. For instance, in Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 the Save dialog box has a field called Tag. This makes searching and finding more predictable.

3. Don’t nest folders. With the tools mentioned above why spend too much time crafting a complicated filing system? Give enough order to put your mind at ease that you could really find it if you had to, but don’t over-engineer things. Keep it simple and trust your search tools and tagging system.

4. Get familiar with “advanced search,” “search filters” and “saved searches.” Your operating system and even online tools like Gmail and Google docs search offer a more granular approach to finding content. As long as you have tagged things appropriately and can think clearly about unique characteristics of the content you are trying to find, you will be in good shape. It’s worth the time to learn these compared to the hours you might waste looking for a document in a cryptically named folder five layers deep.

I hope you find these tips helpful. They have saved my bacon many times over the last couple of years.

We all want to spend our time wisely, and these days a lot of that time is spent typing. Some are clearly more productive in front of the keyboard based on the simply fact that they type fast. Others not so much. If you are interested in how fast you type there are plenty of online typing tests that will both stress you out and at the same time measure your speed. One I like is TypingTest.com. In a quick test as I researching this blog post I scored 60 words per minute (WPM). I don’t know if that’s good or not, but I’m sure I’m not on the high end.

If you are like me however, there isn’t much you can do about it. Yes, you can practice, but at my age improvement of any significance isn’t likely. So I cheat! I use a tool called PhraseExpress. What a time saver. In my line of work I type and retype very similar things over and over. Someone asks about our web hosting program. I type a reply. Someone else asks about resources to consult for setting up audio and video in their church. I type a reply. Still others want details on our ShopWELS program. I type another reply. I probably type at least one of these responses every week, if not more.

PhraseExpress sits quietly in the background waiting for you to type the magic key combinations that let it know to wake up and automatically type for you! And believe me PhraseExpress types A LOT faster than I do. So what you do is identify text, phrases, email signatures, paragraphs, etc that you type frequently, and then tell PhraseExpress to type it on command. For instance, I use two different email signature — one for business emails and one for personal. So I have asked PhraseExpress to type my business email signature when I type mb#. Similarly, mp# enters by personal signature. The key combo can be anything you like.

I can’t tell you how many keystrokes I’ve saved over the last year or so. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. PhraseExpress. It does much more like:

• Expand abbreviations as you type.
• Launch programs with text shortcuts.
• Auto-complete repetitive phrases.
• Quick access to the Windows Clipboard History.
• Correct spelling mistakes in any application.

It even has a statistics function that tells you how much time you have saved. For instance, today I saved 11 minutes by having PhraseExpress type 17 phrases or 832 characters for me! Cool. That is 11 minutes I can use elsewhere. I think that’s good stewardship.

There are many other tools out there that do similar things. Some for free others for a fee. PhraseExpress has a premium version that they charge for, but the free version seems to work very well for me. Others to consider are Texter and ActiveWords. Whichever you choose I think you will be surprised how nice it is to have somebody else do the typing for you!