Jared Herd

Lately, watching Rosanna’s stomach at night has been far more entertaining than watching television.  We are officially in the third trimester (Saying “we,” isn’t true, technically I have done nothing except move some boxes) with a January 7th due date.  We still don’t know what the gender of the baby is, we are hippies at [...]

I do not fancy myself an art buff, I have taken some classes on the subject, but I do believe good art is as good for the soul as it is pleasing the eye.  I have studied here and there on different artists, I have watched many of the biographical films on their lives, and [...]

I am hesitant to write this blog, because I don’t want to throw one more Christian cliché into an unending swirl of pain-related platitudes.  I do not mean to say that I believe the statements we say about pain to each other aren’t true, I just believe that dealing with real tragedy when it occurs [...]

In the summer of 2001, when I was 20 years old, I sat crying in the hallway of a convention center in Panama City Beach, FL.  I was a small group leader of 5 energetic and rebellious 10th graders that week, a group I’d invested the previous year with, so I highly anticipated getting away [...]

The greatest gift to give those around you is the gift of self-awareness.  No one walks away from someone because they have faults, but everyone walks away from someone that has faults they refuse to acknowledge.  All of our problems don’t begin with self-deception, but self-deception always makes every problem worse. As Chris Hedges states, [...]

“Children aged 9 to 11 now hold “fame” as their No. 1 value. Fame ranked 15th in 1997.”- Journal of Psychology Research on Cyberspace Youth workers, our job is getting tougher. We wake up every morning to invite students to follow a guy who said the first are last.  These same students have already been [...]

The other day I drove past a car that had a plethora of old campaign bumper stickers on it. There was the “Bush-Cheney 04” sticker right next to a “Reagan-Bush 84” one, divided by a “Clinton- Gore 96” sticker.  In my head, this conversion van was driven by a church librarian who let her hair [...]

A stroll through Barnes and Noble reveals that leadership is a hot topic, as it should be.  Great companies, churches, governments and families are impossible without good leadership.  All of our lives are affected by our leaders- for better or worse.  So for that, I applaud the recent surge in leadership conferences, books, blogs, and [...]

In a world that has invented sound bytes, headlines, instant coffee, fast food, gogurt, 140 characters, and hot pockets, I am developing an increasing affinity for anything that takes awhile.  Rosanna and I spend an odd amount of time discussing the benefits of French press coffee over instant coffee, slow roasted meats over the salted [...]

I haven’t had much desire to write as of late, between finishing my first book (yay!) and writing for a living, sitting down at a computer to put thoughts on a screen brings to mind that same feeling I get when I trudge to my basement to do P90X. (Which I don’t do very often) [...]