In light of the recent tragedy in Japan, I thought I’d post a few links on how you can donate quickly and easily.

1. Text REDCROSS to 90999 to give $10 towards the earthquake and tsunami relief. This is a free text message for most carriers. Click here for more info.

2. Text 4JAPAN to 20222 to give $10 towards the relief on behalf of World Vision. To give more click here.

3. Text SUPPORT to 85944 to give $10 towards the relief on behalf of ADRA. To give more click here.

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This is part two in a series. To check out the first one click here.

I’m going to walk you through our journey of how we raised $5,000 to partner with Charity: Water to build a well. I’ll share the good, the bad, and the ugly, and then I’ll share some parting lessons that I learned in the process.

It all began last December. I was speaking and dreaming with one of our church leaders, when we came up with this idea to partner with Charity Water to raise funds to build a water well. Every year leading up to Christmas we do a big push for a special giving campaign that goes towards evangelism or some mission project. So we thought, let’s do Charity Water this year for our giving campaign. We had about three weeks to go, and I was convinced that we’d be able to make our goal. So here’s what we did to set it up.

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The short answer is…because I have an iPhone 4. I’ve been trying to think of a really good reason why I should get the iPad 2. I don’t have the first generation iPad, and I have to say I haven’t missed it. I can’t think of anything I would want to do on the iPad that I can’t already do on the iPhone 4. As a matter of fact, my iPhone 4 already has a better screen (retina display) than the iPad. Sure, on the iPad there are bigger and more functional apps than on the iPhone, but if I really want to do some fancy stuff, that’s why I have my MacBook Pro.

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Have you ever had an idea or thought of some to-do that you have to work on while away from your desk?

I know for me, it seems like these things pop into my mind at the most inconvenient times. If i’m at my desk, of course, I’ll just write it down in my notebook. So what are some options?

One option that I’ve tried in the past is to make a digital note on my “Notes” app on my iPhone. So I’ll pull it out, and begin pecking away to jot down the idea or to-do. Guess what? For me, anyway, this hasn’t worked very well. I found that I’ll write it down and just forget about it. Days later I might think to myself “hey! I think I wrote something down in the Notes app. Maybe I should check it out.” But the truth is that I often just forget about it. Also, this doesn’t work very well if you get the idea while you’re driving on the road and have 30 seconds at the red light.

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Have you ever lost an important document before?

Perhaps you’ve been in the process of writing, when all of a sudden, you get some glitch in your word processor and you lose some content? It’s happened to me before and every time it’s made my heart drop. It’s really painful.

A few weeks I began working on a really important paper and I couldn’t afford to have anything go wrong with it. So here’s my really simple method to automatically backup your documents.

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I received my Square a few days ago. Haven’t heard of it? It’s a great little device you can use to receive credit/debit card payments. Let me give you a closer look.

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A few days ago I wrote this post on having an iPhone/Android for your church. Interestingly enough, within a day, each of those companies responded to my post by leaving a comment with a little more information. I was pretty impressed by that.

Obviously, each of those companies are hooked up with Google Alerts or some similar service, and because of that they can help to shape the conversation that’s taking place concerning their company. Smart organizations definitely do this.

The questions is….is your church doing this?

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