pat loughery

In the spirit of my tribe’s commitment to leaders being transparent and humble, and in the hopes that I can continue to show you what it means to be a stay-home/emergent/church planter type, may I present to you Pat’s Office As It Currently Looks:

Several things you may notice:

First, my wife describes me as a pack rat who keeps things in piles. Detect any of that here? (Who first said, “a cluttered desk is the sign of an active mind” ? I like that guy.)

1. Digital camera (Canon Powershot S20, terrible in low light and with flash on flesh). Underneath that: A road map of the USA, for the day’s motorcycle trip dreams. Under that: a pamphlet on the prophetic gift written up by the Anaheim Vineyard early in its days. I need to get that back to the people I borrowed it from at Mama church.

2. My laptop, viewing the sermon text for this weekend. Also open: Another Word doc containing my list of weekly goals so I don’t drop too many things. Outlook for email.

3. The desktop upstairs. Opened to Bloglines, and currently looking at a baseball site discussing the aftermath of last night’s Boston Red Sox win (Yankees suck!) I never use this machine; it acts as a print server, wireless network gateway and a few other things for my wife’s business (her office is downstairs).

4. Missional Church by Guder. My 1st gen PocketPC, which I never use anymore because it’s only 16MB and won’t store as much info as I need.

5. Celtic Daily Prayer book, on top of my paper journal. Between (4) and (5) you’ll spot my nightguard – I stumble out of bed in the morning, take out my nightguard and try to wake up by doing CDP and reading psalms.

6. The church checkbook, The Message, the Visual Bible portrayal of Matthew’s gospel. Underneath: A receipt for a new windscreen for my motorcycle, which needs to get filed.

7. The obligatory candle. Big honkin’ 3-wicker; I light it up when morning prayer begins.

8. The Mother Of All Piles (unfiled junk). N. T. Wright’s book The Challenge of Jesus that we had a lunch discussion group about. For about 4 weeks, then it dissolved due to confliscting schedules. I need to put that book back on the bookshelf, but I want to organize my bookshelves (4 in all in this room), so I tell myself that it would just clutter up the bookshelves if I put it away. Under that, all manner of misc. stuff that needs to be filed. Family pictures, interesting articles, a couple of good magazines. The clock that reads 7:20 and always will, since it clicks unbearably loudly when I actually put batteries in it.

9. The last issue of Guitar World magazine, with a cover story on Trey from Phish, and a focus on jam bands. Underneath: Some photo paper (Note, printing my own digital photos onto glossy photo paper always sounds like it would work much better than it actually does, and this is after 3 iterations of photo-quality printers now. Sigh.)

(Yes, it definitely took me longer to take and select and edit and annotate this photo, then write this blog entry than it would have taken to reorganize my office.)