Five Things I’m Reading & Listening To

1.  Sabbath: The Ancient Practices - Dan Allender Think Sabbath is about rest? Think again. Allender gives the idea of Sabbath a spin I have never heard before. In a nutshell, imagine Sabbath as time to delight and be delighted in.

2.  It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be This little gem of book by famed creative director, Paul Arden is a collection of pithy maxims for the creative mind. Whatever your field this is a great handbook to have, um, on hand.

3.  Future of Forestry - Advent Christmas EP After a recent call for Christmas song submissions on Facebook and Twitter, someone suggested I check out Future of Forestry’s Christmas EP. It has provided some great inspiration as we’ve started thinking about Christmas in July. Travel, their newest venture has provoked a number of new ideas as well.

4.  Urban Hymnal For the last couple years some good friends of mine from Seattle have been creating what I think is the next movement of worship. Led by Zadok Wartes, UH is group of artists who create a quarterly event that thoughtfully combines music, silence, film, prayer and art installations. While their site takes some patience to navigate (The Past, Future, & Present tabs take you to titles of their historically respective offerings), you’d be well advised to spend some time gleaning all that you can from their work.

5.  Kings of Leon - Only By The Night This is fourth offering by KOL. In fact, the first four tracks are well worth the price of the whole album.