I’m speaking at Off the Blogs tonight in Atlanta. I’m excited about that and some other cool things that are happening, but to make sure that I don’t go getting a big head, I thought it might be fun to look back at the photo from the last time I invited people to come hang out at an event with me. There are a lot of new readers, so humor me a brief recap:
Last October, I invited people to come hang out on the lab night of the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta. Catalyst gave me an empty room to use and was incredibly gracious about the whole thing. I printed out 100 little Stuff Christians Like quizzes and brought about 800 pounds of Skittles to hand out. (The free candy was for the masses of people I was expecting to descend on the room.)
2 people came the entire night.
I had my friend Jeff take this photo so that I could capture the magic. I think I’m going to print it out and frame it for my desk so that whenever I’m feeling cocky I can look at me and my companion, the trash can, chilling in a sea of empty chairs. (The weird thing is that on the morning before this happened, I actually predicted something similar and posted these three sentences: Just this week, I’ve been anxious and all stirred up with worry about Catalyst. “What if people think I’m “blog funny” but not real life funny? What if only 2 people show up to the Side Hug photo?” Seriously, check out this post.)
The whole thing ended up being a pretty hilarious experience and God is still using that empty room to teach me lessons. So today, with Off the Blogs in a few hours, I thought that instead of a normal post, it would be fun to play a quick game:
“What’s the funniest experience you’ve ever had when you expected things to go one way and they went the complete opposite?”
We’ve all had those moments and usually there’s some humor in them. My friend for instance recently told me that he scheduled raffle prizes for the hundreds of people he expected to volunteer as extras in his short movie. When a grand total of 20 people showed up he just started handing out the raffle prizes to whoever was there.
So that’s the question today …
what’s your empty room story?