Marc's Musings

Today the Pitman family is celebrating God’s goodness in our lives.

You see, after the political campaign, we decided it was a great time for me to be self-employed. I had a couple books to finish writing. I was going out to Seattle to record a couple fundraising training DVDs. And there was an online community that was getting started. All three things looked profitable in the near term.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. Five months later, neither book had been picked up by a publisher, neither DVD had been produced (despite both being filmed), and the online community was helping people but not generating any revenue.

Things weren’t going exactly as we’d planned. But we still really believed that God was calling us to this journey of self-employment. So I’d fallen into a pattern of trying to promote FundraisingCoach.com and looking for a major gifts job.

Talk about split vision! “How is your fundraising training plan for this year? Oh, you’re alset? Ok…could I apply for that a job you have open?” I never did that but I probably came across that way! I was trying to provide for my family but it was not exactly inspiring confidence in clients!

You have a year

As I remember it, on this day last year my wife and I had another teary, stressed out conversation about our life. At the conclusion, she said, “You have a year to make this work.”

What a gift! You see, she didn’t say it in the tone of, “You idiot, you have one year to get your act together!” She was giving me permission to focus 100% on Fundraising Coach. Trusting that that would provide for our family.

What a year it’s been

The books still aren’t published, the online community isn’t producing income, and only one of the fundraising training DVDs has been produced. But this year has been amazing:

• But I’ve been able to speak all over the country and even internationally.
• I’ve gotten a lot smarter about running a business. (I use contracts now. Hadn’t even done that before!)
• My wife and I have started blogging about being a traveling spouse and staying married. (She’s an excellent writer. And we make a great team, if I do say so myself!)
• I’ve received some great honors.

As my wife said recently, “This is our life now!” And it is.

So today we celebrate

We’ve worked our tails of as a family. Last week, when we were asking the kids what they’d be grateful for, our 9 year old said she thanks God that I’ve taken all the risks I have since the Peter Mills campaign because we get to do what we are doing.

And today, we’re taking a cue from Deuteronomy 14:22-26 and celebrating God’s goodness in our lives. Today is filled with family, a new Wii game we can all enjoy (Super Mario Kart), steak and garlic mash potatoes, and reveling in God.

What about you? How do you celebrate?

Update: For my wife’s take on this year, check out her post We Did It.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve reached the last meat pie in my meat-pie-a-month journey! I’ve now made dozens of meat pies. So this this month, I chose to take a risk. I chose to make a pie without consulting any recipes.

Here’s what I made and how I made it:

2 pounds of steak (chopped into small pieces)
3 potatoes (Maine of course! Yukon Gold are amazing)
3 carrots
1 large onion
1 cup of beef broth
3-4 strips of bacon (I used premade bacon bits)
garlic salt
garlic powder
fresh pepper
2 bottles of beer

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

1. Open a beer and take a sip. (I’m particular to porters.)
2. Peel the potatoes and bring them to boil. I like to sprinkle some garlic salt
   into the water.
3. Peel and chop up the carrots and onions.
4. Test the potatoes with a fork. Mash them if tender.
5. Put some oil in the skillet and brown the meat.
6. Add in the carrots, onion, broth, and the other beer.
7. Add some garlic salt and pepper. I like large amounts of each.
8. Cover skillet and simmer for 20 minutes (until the carrots are soft).
9. Take of the cover and allow it to simmer down. I liberally added garlic powder here. Stir occasionally.
10. Enjoy the sound of your kids saying how amazing the house smells!
11. After a while, I threw in some flour to thicken it up.
12. Check that first beer. Sip if needed.
13. Take the skillet off the heat and stir in the mash potatoes.
14. Spoon this mixture into the pie crust. (There might be too much. Don’t feel compelled to make it all fit.)
15. Sprinkle the bacon over the top. I added a few pats of butter so the mixture wouldn’t be too dry.
16. Cover with the top crust and bake at 400 degrees for 40 minutes. (Covering the edges of the crust for all be the last 10 minutes.)

The house smelled as great as the pie tasted! A perfect end to a year of meat pies!

I’m definitely keeping this recipe. Next time, I’ll add mushrooms.

Some pictures from the process

In 33 days, I’ll be 40.

Last week, visiting the place where my 39 year old cousin lives, I was asked, “Are you his father?” [Click on that link to see my Facebook update and the resulting comments.]

Really? He’s just a few months younger than I am!?

*sigh*

Perhaps it was that comment that finally spurred me on to this nostalgic “turning 40″ blog post. 4 whole decades on planet Earth. Honestly, overall, I’m really looking forward to the 40′s.

The 20′s were great

I traveled alot internationally (living in Jerusalem; extended visits to Greece and India; and a missions trip to Mexico). I moved at least ten times. And it was largely filled with the newly married emotional mix of the amazing possibilities for our future and the startling reality shocks of life. Trying to figure out employment and budgets and parenting and wanting to discover what I wanted to do with the rest of my life while honoring my wife and my role as a new dad.

The 30′s were great too

Wonderful in many ways. Our family grew to five. I completed my Masters and become a Certified Franklin Covey Coach. I even got to fulfill a life long dream of planting a church and pastoring it for almost 4 years.

Thanks to encouragement, and a kick in the pants from my wife, I started brewing my own beer. My first book was published. I did my first radio and TV interviews (and loved them!). I even started teaching a college course in internet marketing.

And in what seems nicely settling, I think we only moved 4 or 5 times. (And what was not “nicely settling,” my already slow metabolism seemed to go in reverse. *sigh*)

Is this it?

But so much of my 30′s was filled with my desk job, haunted by the nagging question, “Is this it? Is this what the rest of my life will look like?”

I felt a constant pressure to “settle for” what I was doing. I found this particularly pulling–and depressing–in my day job in Central Maine. “Settling for” did make sense. I had an great wife and three cool kids to think about. I should just grow up, give up on the dreams I’d written in my teens, and accept that life isn’t about dreams. After all, I had a great job and a wonderful family. Who was I to want more?

“Who are you to want more?” and “Just accept this as God’s best and settle for what you’ve got” haunted me during my work days.

Ok. Re-reading the stuff that happened to me in my 30′s makes the “settle for” question seem laughable. Some amazing things happened to me. Hey, I even was honored by being chosen one of Maine’s first “40 under 40″ a few months ago!

But to me, “settling for” amounts to do something that felt less than living my life’s purpose. I want to use my gifts to God’s glory and to their fullest extent, providing not just a comfortable life but one that would let my wife and kids each excel at their life callings while actively helping expand the Kingdom of God.

The 40′s will be awesome

I think I’m really looking forward to the 40′s largely because I have an amazing wife and because I serve an incredible God. My wife has been really supportive in some end-of-the-30s career choices that have opened up the world of speaking and training for me. And I’m really excited to see her re-discovering her voice. We’re a great team and will get to explore that even more in the next decade. We’ve even started doing a fun “He said. She said.” blog thing together!

In the last year, I got to speak all over the US and in New Zealand, Bermuda, and Mexico. I’ve got a couple more books ready to come out and another fundraising training DVD. My existing writing is currently being translated into Polish and I have requests for it to be translated into Russian and Spanish too.

As I approach 40, I’m far more confident in who I am and what I do well. And I’m really comfortable in what I don’t do well. (I focus on strengths but I firmly believe God has endowed us with limits to force us to rely on other people.)

Are you his father?

So as I am less then 3 dozen days away from 40, and despite having been perceived as the father of a 39 year old, I am looking forward to what lies ahead!