Living With Purpose

The Engagement Story

/ Alex Doriot / 3 Comments

I always dreamed about having the perfect engagement story.

Long before I ever had a girlfriend, I wanted my future fiancé to be able to recount a magical tale – an elaborately orchestrated scenario which led to me on one knee asking her to get married.

At times I envisioned there would be rented-out movie theaters, trips to far-off destinations, family members flown in from across the country. Fireworks, flowers, farm animals – all were involved in various scenarios over the years.

Of course, I could never settle on the perfect engagement setup. I couldn’t afford it. I couldn’t find the time to make it happen. I couldn’t make it just right.

Last year I knew I had found the girl I wanted to marry. After years of dating around, I was ready to take the plunge and pop the question.

But I could not get over the crippling fear of finding the perfect engagement story. So I kept putting off the proposal.

In my head I could not propose to my girlfriend until I could create the greatest proposal of all time.

Then, right around Thanksgiving, something clicked. Continue reading →

Live Like It’s Live

/ Alex Doriot / 2 Comments

SNL-imageLive From New York, It’s Saturday Night!

For 40 years, those 7 words have been uttered from studio 8H in Rockefeller Center announcing the most exciting 90 minutes of television comedy every week.

The most important of those 7 words is the first one – Live.

“Saturday Night Live”, despite what you may think, airs LIVE. It does not air on tape delay. It does not air 3 months after it was recorded. New episodes air live at 11:30 pm Eastern Standard Time Saturday nights.

There’s no getting around this. If the sketches aren’t ready or the actors aren’t prepared the show cannot be postponed. There’s a contract with the network and with the viewers. The show must go on no matter what. Continue reading →

Add More Weight

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photo-13Life is full of routines.

You have your morning routine, your evening routine. You’ve got your school or work routine, and your afternoon-when-you-get-home-from-school-or-work routine.

You have relationship routines, family routines, holiday routines. You have your church routine, your faith routine.

With all the routines in life, it’s easy to feel stuck. Oftentimes it can feel like you’re not growing as a person or as a Christian.

Sometimes you need to do something different. Sometimes you need to break from the routine. Sometimes you need to challenge yourself.

Sometimes you need to Add More Weight.  Continue reading →

How To Have Complete Job Security

/ Alex Doriot / 1 Comment

Anchorman-2Weathermen and Sportscasters have it easy.

A good portion of their job performance is based on prediction. Each night the weatherperson forecasts what the temperature will be. One segment later the sports anchor gives you their gameday picks.

They’re both just guessing. And most of the time they’re both wrong.

Yet there they sit night after night, week after week, offering their often incorrect predictions.

You probably saw it this week with high-stakes playoff football and wacky temperatures across the country. Even with incredible technology tracking the weather and advanced analytics watching every game, no prediction can be perfect.

Forecasters and sportscasters are given gobs of grace based on their personality rather than their prediction performance percentages.

It must be nice to have a job where you’re not really judged on your performance.

I think sometimes as Christians we become too concerned with The Measuring Stick – how we are judged by God based on our performance in this world. Continue reading →

The Retail Worker’s Prayer

/ Alex Doriot / 8 Comments

photo-10The Folding. Don’t get me started on The Folding.

This holiday, after leaving my full-time job behind, I got a job at a major department store to earn a little extra spending money. I’ve mainly been running the register. But in between customers one of our main duties in the store is The Folding.

It’s incredible, really. You spend a few minutes folding a stack of shirts. Everything on the shelf looks in order. You turn around to check out one customer. You turn back around and a dozen shirts are back on the floor again.

As an employee I begin to wonder what the point is. I wonder why I bother picking up all these clothes off the floor just to see them knocked over and out of place just a few moments later.

But The Folding has to be done. We must go through the motions of The Folding and The Re-Folding day after day after day to keep the store in order. If we deny our duties just one day then the store would go into disarray. Continue reading →

The One Step New Year’s Resolution Solution

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MV5BMTkyOTM4NzgyMF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjg5ODkxNw@@._V1_SX640_SY720_Most New Year’s Resolutions end up like most New Year’s Eve concert performances – fake.  

Seriously. Watch Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve tonight to see the ball drop and count how many artists actually perform live. You won’t need more than one hand.

We can all agree that Dick Clark was a saint, but pawning off blatantly lip-synched performances as an incredible treat to watch was not his finest quality. Unfortunately, most of our resolutions have the same hollow quality as a prerecorded Katy Perry song.

Look, you’ve probably read your fill of New Year’s blogs by now. Seems like every year more and more people are deriding the idea of a New Year’s Resolution.

Every writer has a statistic backing up their bulletpoints on how most resolutions never make it into February. I read a blog by Jon Acuff the other day where he said, “Waiting until January 1st to do something awesome is stupid and fake.”

I’m a huge fan of Jon, but I’m on the other side of the fence here. I am an avid supporter of New Year’s Resolutions. Continue reading →

Do Small Things Matter To A Big God?

/ Alex Doriot / 2 Comments

***NOTE: For me, 2013 will always be the year I stepped away from my position as Director of Student Ministries at The Hill Baptist Church. Working at The Hill was a incredibly challenging and incredibly rewarding experience, one that taught me countless lessons I’m still being transformed by. As 2013 comes to a close, I thought it would be fitting to share the article I wrote for The Augusta Chronicle on the eve of my final day on staff at The Hill. As you reflect on the year that was and make plans for the year to come, I can only pray you’ll believe the small things really do matter to God. 

IMG_1524“Does it matter?”

Every morning I make the drive down Central Avenue, turning onto Kings Way and into the parking lot of The Hill Baptist Church, thinking to myself, “Does it matter?”

For five years I have served as the director of student ministries at The Hill. When I began I was a 22-year-old student in my final semester at Augusta State University. I was a fresh-faced intern with adventurous faith who dreamed of changing the world through youth ministry.

Though I thought I knew it all (as most 22-year-olds do), I never could have predicted what the next five years would hold. Today, as I prepare to step down from my position at the church, I am questioning if anything I did mattered.

Did picking up and dropping off students for an hour before and after church matter? Did the conversations over late-night fast food matter? Did silly Facebook wall posts matter? Does small ministry with a small group of students in a small church with a small budget matter to an incredibly big God?

The Hill Baptist Church is a small church. The Hill Youth is a small group, about 20 active students. When I see some of Augusta’s most vibrant churches bringing in hundreds of students to camps and lock-ins, I sometimes wonder if I’ve been doing something wrong this whole time. Continue reading →

The Conspiracy Of Hope

/ Alex Doriot / 1 Comment

denver.post.kennedy.assassination.croppedI fell down the rabbit hole. Like many others this week, I became fascinated by the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination.

The JFK killing appears to be a once in a lifetime time type event – one that only could have happened at a certain point in history where there was not enough media saturation to find out the truth but just enough media saturation to create the controversy and conspiracies which continue on some 50 years and counting down the road.

One podcast I listened to featured one of my favorite authors Chuck Klosterman giving his analysis on the conspiracy theories. Klosterman made an interesting point on conspiracies in general.

Klosterman hypothesized that conspiracies are often more comforting to believe than the more probable truth. He said believing that a few people somehow orchestrated a catastrophic event is more comforting than believing all things happen by chance. If we simply believe all the events of life are random and by chance, that can be even scarier than thinking a secret society or some evil mastermind acted outside of normalcy.

I think Klosterman is spot on. In fact, I’ll take his theory one step further. I think conspiracies can be more comforting than believing God is actually in control.  Continue reading →

Why God Wants To Burst Your Bubble

/ Alex Doriot / 2 Comments

IMG_1488“They probably don’t even know they’re in captivity.”

My girlfriend and I were visiting the Georgia Aquarium a few weekends ago when we heard these words. We were standing in awe of the magnitude of the attraction, blown away by the wonders inside one of the largest aquariums in the world.

One guide was telling us about fish who have been born inside the aquarium. He said those words to us, and that the water is so big these fish don’t even realize they’re not in the ocean.

Of course they don’t. How could they? They’ve never experienced anything other than the aquarium. They don’t realize there’s a whole other world out there beyond the bubble they are in.

Do we? Do we realize there’s more to our life than the bubble we were born into? Continue reading →

Create Like R.L. Stine

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goosebumpsWho didn’t love Goosebumps as a kid?

If grew up in the 90s, there were 3 things that were always in your bookbag: an emergency supply of Gushers, one of those different color eraser pen things, and the latest ‘Bumps book. (Did people call them ‘Bumps? They totally should have.)

One man was responsible for revolutionary children’s horror anthology. Say his name with me:

R.L. Stine.

R.L. Stine churned out 62 Goosebumps books between 1992 and 1997 – an average of over 10 books per year! That’s not including the 50 Give Yourself Goosebumps create-your-own-adventure style books, plus 74 episodes of the television series based on the books, plus the Fear Street series he published at the same time aimed at teenagers.

Before Harry Potter began weighing down children’s backpacks, R.L. Stine was the undisputed king of kid’s literature.

But this blog is not about R.L. Stine the Goosebumps author.

Last week I read an interview on The A.V. Club with Stine. The interview focused on another aspect of his career.

What I learned in the interview completely redefined my childhood. Before a page of Goosebumps was ever written R.L. Stine worked on another landmark project: Continue reading →