Well, I messed up getting to even have the interview.
If you’ve been listening to the podcast lately, you’ll know a couple of things about the Fire On Your Head podcast — especially if you have listened to the latest one with Dave Edwards.
For starters, we believe in 2016 we’re going to take the podcast another level. In terms of guests, in terms of reach, and other things that although you can measure to some degree, I don’t see how to do on my own.
That’s where you come in.
If you like episodes of the show, make sure to share them with your friends or social media followers. That is the number one way this show has grown, and on many occasions has gotten me in touch with other people who have eventually gone on to become guests on the show.
Right now though as I write this, I’m trying not to fracture my skull from banging my head on the wall (the concrete wall at that) for having bungled a really high profile interview that was scheduled for this morning.
I was scheduled to interview Dr Michael Brown.
If you are a subscriber to the podcast or a long-time listener of this show, then you have heard me refer to him on many occasions, sometimes as a point of reference when talking about certain things like hyper-grace or revival. For those who don’t know who he is, he’s a national radio show host, author of a bazillion books — and I don’t mean popular level fluff books, but a majority of them are well-researched and even academic in some cases. He was also one of the leaders of the Brownsville Revival, which birthed the FIRE School of Ministry that Dave Edwards and several other guests of the podcast went to or graduated from. Or taught at. As of late, he’s also a contributor to Charisma magazine and Town Hall.
So needless to say, this was going to be very big get for us to land on the show.
I had asked him in a private email exchange back in September if he’d be willing to let me interview him on my show. I didn’t ask if I could be on his radio show, to be clear, and sometime after I published the episode with Larry Sparks, Dr Brown wrote me apologizing for not having answered my email and told me he would gladly do it. So, he put me in contact with his assistant Dylan, and we arranged a time. It was going to be yesterday morning, but as the date neared he wrote me letting me know Dr Brown was going to need to switch it and asked me if I was good for the following morning (today) at the same time, and I *thought* I wrote back saying it would work.
Whenever I record in the morning, which is much easier for me to do schedule wise, I still need to make plans for my 2 year old daughter to not be here. You know, for reasons like not wanting her to bang on the door and come into the office when Daddy is recording, and scream and throw any fits that can’t really be edited out of the background, even if she’s in the other room. This is easy to accomplish when it’s a morning my daughter has nursery classes until before lunch. But this wasn’t one of those mornings.
So, I gave Lili some money to take her to play location at the mall and sent them on their way, and we figured out how we would do lunch and was setting my gear up to make sure everything was connected right — that I didn’t record the show without my Electro Voice mic turned on, or similarly embarrassing errors that have happened a few times in the past. I had my wife pray for me shortly before the interview was to start, so that I could get over this nasty migraine and head cold because the last thing I wanted was to look on the video like I wasn’t really interested or something.
I sat at my desk for 15-20 minutes before the interview was supposed to come on, and I kept checking Skype to see if my he have accepted my contact request yet, as often times my guests accept them shortly before the interview starts because they’re not normally on Skype other than to record with me or other people who’ve sought an interview with them.
And of course I sat there, looking at everything that was open on my screen, double checking the time because the LAST thing you want to do is make Dr Brown wait or not be ready when you said you would be. This man is carving time out of his busy schedule for me and my tiny-in-comparison podcast, after all.
Then 10 a.m. (my timezone) comes along and still no word.
I check my emails to make sure there’s no new email notifying me they couldn’t make it (you’d be surprised how often I have a guest or an interview booked and they email me the very morning we agreed to and let me know they’re not able to do it).
Nothing.
Then I double checked the conversation thread in Gmail, and to my horror, I see that the other day when I answered his assistant’s email, it’s still sitting there in my draft folder.
No need to panic, sometimes it’s in draft mode on my mail client, but in Gmail, it’s in the sent folder.
I still don’t know if I responded but just forgot to hit the send button, or if I sent it but the email client on my computer didn’t compute properly with my account or what, but whatever the case, it didn’t get to them.
Fortunately for me, his assistant Dylan answered me a few hours later to let me know there were no worries. Dr Brown didn’t decide “well, you missed this appointment, I’ll never make another one with you.” I’m sure they filled in that spot when I didn’t answer promptly (since that’s the kind of thing I would do and I’m not super busy like Dr Brown is).
I was pondering afterward how in many ways it works out OK that we didn’t do it today as I’m recovering from a nasty cold and was worried the pills I took in the morning would make me appear drowsy. Also, I can only prepare even more and have the podcast interview turn out much better after another week to prayerfully prepare for it.
