Christmas may only happen once a year, but the preparation for it has already begun.

Here in Townsville an annual event is held down at the beach (called ‘The Strand’) during the week leading up to Christmas called ‘Stable on the Strand‘ (SOTS). It’s a huge event where 70 churches within Townsville work together to portray the true meaning of christmas to the public. It involves about 1000 volunteers who come from all denominations. The city council loves the event so much that they back it financially with $50,000. To many of us it’s unheard of a secular government supporting a chistian event.

This year I have the priviledge to work on the promotional video that will go out to the 70 different churches. The purpose of the video is to get people excited and churches invloved in the event.

I’m learning a lot through this process about what it means to work for others and cater to their needs. Here at RTO (Reef to Outback) they demand a level of excellence in anything that leaves our communicatons department. For example when we finished the video we showed it to our base director Ken Mulligan. Now he could of given us the nice ‘christian’ answer and said ‘wow looks great, you guys really worked hard’. Instead he said ‘I appreciate that you worked really hard, but there’s quite a bit of work to be done’. I had two choices, to take it as a personal attack, or to say ‘what can we do to make this video the best possible’. That’s really what I’ve been learning here lately is that sometimes we just need people to tell us that something we make is just really not that great. It’s the only way we’ll ever improve in areas of our life.

So take a look around my web site and ask yourself ‘what can be done better on Nick’s site’, then email me and let me know. Don’t worry I can handle a little constructive criticism.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2005 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Entry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.