Living Rarefied

I guess people do read this thing, so I hope I am not selling out here, but thought I would use my blog as a way to invite me readers to be a part of the Young Life portion of my life. I'm gonna post a status ticker on the left navigation bar of this blog under "Young Life Golf $ Raised"

Its that time of year again!!!

First off, I want to thank those of you for supporting me and Young Life
last year in the annual Golf Tournament. I am posting this out in hopes that you are willing to sponsor me again or for the first time this year.
This year's golf tournament fundraiser is being held Monday June 19th. Again the goal is to raise money for the local area of Young Life, a non-denominational national Christian organization focused on high school kids. There have been 2 major fundraisers the Minneapolis South Young Life area each year, the Fall Banquet and the Golf Tournament in the spring. This year Young Life partnered with World Vision in a silent/live auction event May 11th at the International Market Square that was a great success!

I am a big supporter of Young Life because of the positive impact they have had on me and the lives and faiths of thousands of teenagers in the Twin Cities area alone. I have just completed my 10th year involved with Young Life at some level, either as a kid, camper, supporter and now leader! We have seen substantial growth in the ministry I am involved with in the last year. We took 10 kids to Frontier Ranch in Buena Vista Colorado, which was more in 1 summer than we had taken in the previous 4 years! God has blessed our ministry again this year with some major additions. We have a new staff leader in charge of our group, Andy Swanda. He's been a blessing to me as he has taken over some of the responsibilities I had, which has enabled me to expand relationships with the students. A few new volunteer leaders have joined us too! My younger sister Alexis joined us last summer after she graduated from college and moved home. Another leader who joined us in the fall is John Hilbelink. John has been a great addition and the students have been very excited and full of energy each week! As we move into this next season of YL, a few more leaders are ready to saddle up, Katie Pretzel and my older sister Leah. We're extremely excited for some new female leaders! Alexis is especially excited!

There is a change in venue this year that we are very excited about, we will be playing at the Edina Country Club. We are looking strong to fill out 28-32 foursomes this year. We are also very excited to start a relationship with ECC and look forward to keeping this tournament in close proximity to the communities we are involved with. Also our hopes with a consistent central location are to be able to partnership with businesses in the area. There are hole sponsorships available as well and I can send you an attached form. If your business or if you know of a business that would be interested in helping our ministry and gaining some exposure at the event, let me know!!

If you are interested in blessing the ministry to students of the Minneapolis South area, please let me know. Last year I was able to raise $4000 for our foursome! If you are interested and willing to, please simply e-mail or post a comment with your response with the $ amount. "otterlei [at] gmail [dot] com" (spelling is to keep spammers from harvesting my email…)

Thank you for the time to read this and your support. If you want more information on Young Life, please let me know.
Ethan

Ethan testing

Saw it last night in a pre-release deal.

Interesting, yet my thoughts aren't fully grounded as I haven't read the book yet. I may now read it for more details. I guess the movie left large chunks of detail out.

I struggle with the big deal everybody is making about this book/movie. Isn't our faith supposed to be founded on the experiences we've had with Jesus? Not seeing him on the big-screen or pages of a fictional book. My faith is grounded on Jesus' love I experience daily. I think that questions are a great way to open yourself up to let Jesus' love pour in. I think even the tough questions that may shake the ground the Church was founded on are good questions for you on a personal level. I don't want to belittle the history of the Church with this post and thats not my point. My problem is that we focus on facts facts facts.

I wonder why we put all of our energy towards a book/story like this to have people "boycott the movie cause we dont want to line Dan Brown's pockets with even more money" Yet we sit and don't even know most of our neighbors names, have no idea about the life of the person behind the Caribou Coffee counter, or go to happy hours with co-workers and talk about nothing and go home with no idea of how they are loving their wife/husband or families and neighbors.

CHALLENGE: meet a neighbor you haven't met. learn their names… I've wanted to meet this couple for some time now, they moved in 2 houses away a year ago. But I have done nothing but wave from a distance, hoping they'd make the first move.. I am going to meet them this weekend…

Ethan Daily, Struggles, testing

FedEx, here's a few free tips on how to cut costs and customer complaints. The next ones will be billed at my regular rate…
Don't even think about delivering an item to my house when a signature is required. Don't pick it up off the shelf at the local office, don't move it to the loading dock, and most definately don't put it on a gas guzzling truck.

Since you require a signature for most packages, (i've never requested that I sign for it) you have a 110% chance of missing me at home and not getting your precious signature. If I am worried about a package being stolen at my house, I will ask for you to require a signature, or ask to pick it up at the facility. But when your trucks leave the dock at the bright and early time of 8:00 AM, you'll save money by not coming to my house, and most likely most of your route. Here's a new thought maybe for you: I, like most people, have a life and don't look forward or have the time to sit by the front door wait to sign for a package. Please publish your success rates for home deliveries and tell me I am wrong…
Here's another thing to think about. This is regarding businesses who use your services to ship their products. I am very happy for you and your relationship with them… But here's what you need to do… Force them to allow you to ship to a different address than the billing address. That way when a customer wants an item shipped to their offices, you have a better chance of finding somebody to sign for it and thus haven't wasted a driver's time and our beloved earth's natural resources by a useless trip to Mackey Ave. I cannot stand when FedEx is my only shipping option and they will not allow you to submit with seperate billing and shipping addresses, even though they make you enter each one in. You are hurting your business because of this. Its funny that I am not upset with the businesses I buy from, but am upset with you?? Should you be worried that I am not the only one?
Your commercials claim that you save your customers money. How about letting them save even more by making some changes so that you, FedEx, can save some money yourselves!!

(and the "GO" button on the homepage is a little redundant as you redirect the page as soon as the option is changed, and you have a favicon.ico image in your webroot with a Netscape logo.. Might want to look into using your FedEx logo there…)

Ethan Community

I hope you've seen then new VW Passat commercial.  It shows a couple driving through town and as they pass other cars of the "luxury" variety the drivers are all heads out the window with a megaphone chanting phrases.  On is of a blond woman in a convertible, claiming that if people look at her it gives her worth.  Another is a man yelling out "because I make more money than you, because I make more money than you, because I make more money than you…"  Over and over.  And the last is a guy in a red Viper saying "because I am overcompensating for something, because I am overcompensating for something, because I am overcompensating for something…"

I love this commercial because it is so true.  But about 3 times a year I get all worked up about getting a newer/cooler car than my 99 Passat.  My car works fine, gets great mileage, is in 1 piece, never a hassle, always reliable…  Now something is telling me that the Passat isn't cutting it for me anymore, something inside me wants to scream out through a megaphone and that megaphone maybe a new car…

I ran into a friend from HS who I haven't seen in 8 years… His 3 questions were, where do you live, where do you work and are you still playing a lot of golf…  I think the 1st 2 questions were to measure up.  Size Ethan up, how's he doing.  And the last question must just be what people think of me as.  I run into countless people who associate me with golf and thats it.  "Ethan? oh he's the golfer…"  I am passionate about golf, but it doesn't even begin to define me, especially these days…
As I prepare to head back to El Salvador in July, I am pondering these items as to what exactly am I screaming through my megaphone.  I think the things that we scream through the megaphone are things that are actually holding us back.  Last time I went in 2004 I think I was screaming out "because i am the best employee around, because i am the best employee around, because i am the best employee around…"  Well I got back and within a week I quit my job. I'm not looking to do the same this time, but I am ready for another change and would love to hear what I am screaming into a megaphone about and hopefully make a change there as well.  Eventually I would like my megaphone to be silent…  I would like my life to speak for me, in a way that nobody tries to measure me, or measure up to me.  But in a way that somebody can admire the silence of my megaphone.

Ethan Community, Daily, Feeling, Surprise Me

Last night my Momma and I went to the 1st World Vision/Young Life auction event.  The place was filled with familiar Young Life faces from the 10+ years I have been involved at some level.  I wanted to bid on the Mohammed Ali signed boxing gloves but she wouldn't let me!

As she was talking with the regional director, Brad, I was talking to his wife Sue and heard the best things you could hear about somebody.  She talked about her praying.  She said how her prayer led to such a positive change in the way they went about things.  The importance my Momma put on prayer and the amazing results of her faithfulness served as an lesson to them about praying.

I was amongst a great group, my Momma, who has served me and supported me my whole life, who has served Brad as the chair of the executive committee for our Young Life area.  Brad who was my Young Life leader in HS, who has been behind me all along through HS, through my ups and downs of college life, and now as a leader.  Brad who is behind his wife Sue. And Sue who has been behind us all, all along.

It was a great moment in my life…

Ethan Feeling

Because its not only open to just your friends…

I signed up for myspace a few years ago as a way to learn about music.. The times have changed…

A week ago I cancelled my account for many reasons. One most is a waste of time for me. I would rather "connect" with people in person vs. comments and myspace messages. Secondly, Myspace is getting a bit shady. I have seen many news stories about the presence of sexual predators, schools and businesses using myspace as an additional background check, and many other things I consider wrong and don't want to be a part of…

Quite a few of my youth group friends found me on there, I thought it would be a great easy way to communicate what we had planned for the week, quick hellos and such. Which it was until I started to realize the content people put on their pages. I don't need to get into it, but its enough to make me very uncomfortable being a part of it. Another reason is that about 1/3 of my friends were my youth group friends and should somebody come across my page, they may take the reason i have 40+ HS friends on there out of context.

Mark Cuban wrote a great post about his addition to IceRocket.com to help parents track whats going on in MySpace… the space their kids are in.

I heard a story recently of a student who was expelled from school for some "extra curricular" activities that happened at school afterhours on a weekend. Photos were taken and posted on somebody's profile on one of the social networking sites such as myspace.com or facebook.com. The photos are public, perhaps the students forgot that, but served as proof to what happened and was enough to get the student expelled.

I end with a quote from a detective who was on the Dateline I saw.

"As a parent, I dont think I could hire a private investigator to get me more information than these kids are giving away on their pages"

Follow up video of a kids perspective…

Ethan Community, Daily, Surprise Me