As this group continues to grow, I realize that I don’t know as many of you personally as I would like to. I don’t know what music you listen to, what movies inspire you, what you are reading, or what God is doing in your life right now.

So, as a step in that direction, I have decided to share with you some of my current vices… This is by no means a best of list, just more of a sampling of what art is moving me these days.

Music
This weekend, I was introduced to the latest project to have the indie superstar Sufjan Stevens attached to it, The Welcome Wagon. I am smitten. If you dig Sufjan’s style and love to hear a lot about Jesus, check them out. Kristian Stanfill, former worship leader at Young Adults gathering 7:22, just released his second EP Attention this week. He is unbelievably gifted at crafting electric guitar driven worship songs – and when you combine this 6 song EP with his first 5 song EP, Hello, you have one of the most stunning full worship albums by anyone. Beautiful Jesus, Spring of Life, Jesus Paid it All, Lord of All and more put him at the top of the Lighthouse Sunday night setlist count. I have been listening to the Fleet Foxes as well, and my gut description is that if the Beach Boys had beards, flannel shirts, and drank strong coffee instead of Sunkist, they would have sounded like this. I have been following a small indie band from the Athen GA music scene for a few years now called The Modern Skirts. Their first album, Catalogue of Generous Men, is one of my all time favorite albums, so my expectations were sky high for their second album, All of Us in Our Night which dropped last week. Big disappointment. I keep listening to it, hoping that it will “grow” on me. No dice.

Movies
I have seen a lot of movies lately, most of them very good (Defiance, Frost/Nixon, Gran Torino among others), but there is only one that has continued to haunt me and impact me deeply. Slumdog Millionaire moved me so deeply at my first viewing that I had to physically leave the theater and go splash water on my face at the Main Art Theater in Royal Oak. I was so stirred, so pierced by the story that I could barely contain my emotion. I wasn’t afraid of a tear gently trickling down my cheek, I was trying to hold in an uncontrollable explosion of broken blood vessel weeping. I felt it coming up from the very depths of my heart. Watching the story unfold, watching the unstoppable love of Jamal toward Latika, and then watching the final moment of “the kiss”… Even now my heart starts to get dizzy and forgets how to beat properly… Let’s talk more about it after you’ve seen it… If I write more I will spoil a lot.

Books
I am finishing up Malcolm Gladwell’s latest offering, Outliers, which although infinitely interesting, I found to be a little uneven. It is definitely the weakest of the Gladwell trilogy, (The Tipping Point and Blink) but yet still full of facts that can dazzle your friends at a party. While sputtering to the finish of Outliers, I grabbed a copy of Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover. Now on a literary scale, this rates somewhere on the level of an athlete memoir (translation: poor), but in regards to content, it is revolutionary. It is profound in its simplicity, yet if I follow Dave’s sage financial advice, I have no doubt that what he promises will come true. What he suggests is only innovative because it is so outdated in our credit obsessed culture. Dave tells us to pay cash. For everything. No credit cards. No 36 months financing on a flat panel television. Save. Deny yourself. His credo “Live like no one else so that you can live like no one else” will be etched into your cerebral cortex by the time you finish the book. It worked for me. I have stopped spending like a Hilton and started living like a Ramsey.

What I’m up to…
I am gearing up to begin another Lighthouse Collective book project in time for this summer, as well as dreaming about what the future looks like for all of us… Pray that we can risk and reach and dream dreams as big as God, so far out of our reach that only He can make them happen.

Thanks for listening,

Cliff