The past few days I’ve been reading various blogs about “Poets, Prophets and Preachers,” which is the preachingpalooza that Rob Bell has been hosting and keynoting up in Grand Rapids. Peter Rollins (who’s also presenting) is brilliant and crazy and I love his stuff. I also love so much of Bell’s stuff. Much of it is brilliant and original; the rest of it is not new, but is expressed in such a provocative and arresting way that it’s irresistible. He apparently talked this morning about the importance of being attentive to everything going on around us as potential food for preaching. If we believe in a Psalm 139 God, then we can and should be exegeting all of life. (That’s one of those “nothing new” things.)

So can I just say (again) how much I LOVE Evernote as a system for capturing this kind of stuff? I have often been frustrated with where to put all of those clippings, random quotes, blog entries and whatnot that isn’t immediately applicable to a sermon I’m currently working on, but might be fruitful someday. And then how do you find the relevant stuff when you need it? Evernote lets you capture all of this stuff and tag it. There is a desktop app, a web app and an iPhone app, which means you can access the stuff anywhere.

It also has character recognition, so snapshots of text are searchable.

So here is what rocks like a big rockin’ thing. I’ve been reading books on my iPhone using the Kindle app, but it bothered me that you couldn’t highlight text on the iPhone version, just the full version. (And even if you could, what do you do with it then?) Ah! But you CAN take a SCREEN SHOT! So I’ve been reading along, and when I find something I like, I just zap a shot of it. This afternoon I imported about three books’ worth into iPhoto and then it’s a simple copy and paste into Evernote. I processed about 75 screen shots and the whole process took maybe an hour (including tagging).

Then to take the geekdom to a whole new level (I’ve written about this before):

I had found a cool story in a magazine recently, but had lost the magazine. I searched all over Google and couldn’t even find a bootleg copy of the article. I finally found a reference to the story in a Google book search, but you can’t cut and paste from there, just view the page. So I took a photo of the screen and saved it in Evernote. And the character recognition worked great, so the text is completely searchable.

Obviously I’ve been extremely happy with this product. I am currently using the free version, and while it is meeting my needs just fine, part of wants to upgrade and send the company some money just to help them succeed.

IMO, Evernote was made for preachers.