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Shelve your ideas.

I wrote that sentence after hearing my pastor drop some knowledge on our team at a meeting. We were deciding what route our Easter services would go, and if we would have a follow up series.

It happened suddenly; genius struck.

“What if we go with this,” my pastor said getting ready to explain this concept that had been brewing inside of him, “Terminal.” He proceeded, “it could be a play on words as in going to an airport terminal to embark on a trip, but also we could talk how our life is terminal. We all have an expiration date. I think Jesus’ life was so revolutionary because he understood the brevity of life. He only lived 33 ½ years and yet made such a profound impact on history we are still talking about him today…2000 years later.”

As I replay back this scene in my mind, he could’ve easily dropped a mic and walked out of the room. He had dropped some golden nuggets on us. There were so many ways we could go with this. Instantly we got excited and started looking up some inspiration for print, video, stage design and web graphics. The gears were cranking.

Later in the meeting Pastor Bryan recalled how he came up with the idea for the Terminal series. It wasn’t right at that moment, he actually got that idea a few years back. But back then, the circumstances weren’t right for the idea, so he just let it sit on his brain archive. And at the right moment, he went there and retrieved it. He dusted it off, and presented it to us showing us how important it is to “shelve your ideas.”

Which I should point out I did. I got the idea for this very blog post right then and there. Right away I fired up my Desk app and simply wrote “Shelve your ideas.” The person sitting beside me looked at me with one of those, “you just had a eureka moment, didn’t you” looks.

As you can see on the picture above, the DPM document was created on February 11 (with a typo and all) in the middle of a meeting because my pastor had just brought up a point that would apply to any creative out there. Shelve your ideas for later.

But be careful because this concept could be confused with hoarding your ideas. The difference between hoarding and shelving is that the former is selfish, and the latter finds the right moment to resurface. He had shelved this idea concept because it couldn’t work back then, but now the time was right to give it life.