Kal-Haven Youth Bike Ride II

 

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Duct-Tape Surfing

Leadership Failure

Speaking of character:

The most common cause of leadership failure is ego, which means that someone is looking out for number one rather than the group.

-- Deepak Chopra

Content of Their Character

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Darkness Cannot Drive Out Darkness

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. 
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

8 Things You Should Not Do Every Day

It's for your own good. Cut these things out of your day and you'll see gains in productivity -- not to mention happiness:

1. Check my phone while I'm talking to someone.
4. Use multiple notifications.
5. Let the past dictate the future.
6. Wait until I'm sure I will succeed.

-- Jeff Haden

Click here for the rest of the list...

We Have a Choice

God doesn't promise an explanation,  but he does promise to walk with us through the pain. We have a choice - to be angry over what we think we have lost or to be grateful over what we were given.

-- Courageous, the movie

...or, perhaps in different times and ways, both....

Chaos and Order: Cracks Me Open

The first time I found myself today was on my routine morning run, when I finally panted, "God, I need you to crack open my heart...'.  I waited for the result, for an answer.  ...not much came, at least right away.  Often, I've observed, God needs a little time.  Or, perhaps more accurately, it is me who needs the time...to be able to receive Him.  A few bends on the wooded path later, I breathed, "...it feels like I'm reaching into something without being able to grab anything".

I need time.  Time to breathe my way into the chaos of my cluttered and spilling-over mind and heart.  So many things going on, so many concerns, so much transition, so much unknown about the future, so much that seems beyond my capacity to manage, to understand.  A swirl, it often is.

The morning sun bouncing off the crystal blue sky was reflected in the brook beside me (a Psalms-like shift here).  The waters are loading up on the unrevealed, yet imminent colors of Fall.  A slight ripple accentuated the shining rocks underneath it; all was moving somewhere.  The air was cool; the day's warmth was encroaching.  I felt that wonderous sense of anticipation.  It was great to be alive.

I ran farther than I anticipated and had to stop, to gage a direction on how much more I could do.  My back was towards the sun and my breath was forming a shadow of cloud.  Steam rose from my skin.  Hot and cool were dancing together.  I wondered, in that moment of pause, of catching my breath, how this and the earlier seemingly unanswered prayer were now intersecting.

I saw a smattering of yellow-headed flowers and wondered about the cluster of them that had so impressed me last year.  I saw trees strewn everywhere.  Plants had exploded in every direction over the summer.  Moss was verdant.  Fungus was creeping.  Birds were yacking away.  A jack-rabbit darted in front of me.  It was utter chaos.  Not unlike what I feel, at times.  Too much, too everywhere.  Too out of control.

And yet, there was a sense that all the chaos and disarray was still subordinate to an order that presides over all of it.  Nothing was really out of control.  All was still ordered.  The chaos was really only the current nature of my experience with it, in a small place, in time and space.  The stars will still watching it all last night.  The sun still arrived, right on time.  The flowers will doing their vaporish thing, as they do every year.

All is well.  And, I can sit in it and wonder about it, and wait for the greater of it to prevail.  ...even in the chaos of my mind and heart.  He did it...He cracked me open.

Meaningful Expression of Care

...a meaningful expression of care is far more dramatic than gun-fire.

-- Mister Rogers




Times have really changed...or, have they?  People have really changed...or, have they?

...thanks, Barb, for forwarding.

Nothing Wrong

No matter what people say true success does not come easily. Like everything in life, if you really want something you are going to have to work for it and put in the time and effort. There is nothing wrong with a little bit of hard work...

-- James Caan

Good Business

You can’t do good business with bad people.

-- Trammell Crow

You Don't Know

Do not boast about tomorrow,
    for you do not know what a day may bring.

-- Proverbs 27:1

A Way to Cling to God - Solitude

Few can willingly walk into the dark without anticipating light.

I felt that heading into the trails this morning; the possibility of sunrising light drew me into the evaporating night of woods-land.

Solitude can feel like going into the dark -- disorienting, uncomfortable, hard to get your bearings.  But, solitude actually brings us light...light for our souls.

When we enter into solitude to be with God alone, we quickly discover how dependent we are. Without the many distractions of our daily lives, we feel anxious and tense. When nobody speaks to us, calls on us, or needs our help, we start feeling like nobodies. Then we begin wondering whether we are useful, valuable, and significant. Our tendency is to leave this fearful solitude quickly and get busy again to reassure ourselves that we are “somebodies.” But that is a temptation, because what makes us somebodies is not other people’s responses to us but God’s eternal love for us.

To claim the truth of ourselves we have to cling to our God in solitude as to the One who makes us who we are.

-- Henri Nouwen

Perspective

Lately, I've sat in different chairs at my house and noticed things I can see from that perspective.  Like this morning, a glorious one at that, I'm sitting at one end of my porch and see an indescribably rich and bright green in the fronds of a fern hanging at the other end of the porch between me and the now easterning sun.  How can such color be?  Why is it such a pleasure to the eye?

I am again grateful for the power and magnitude of beauty, what it does to my soul, what it arouses within me, what it frees me to imagine.  What a blessing a different perspective can bring and what this morning's chair has brought.

Tragic Sense of Life and Correct Thinking

An extended reading from Robert Rohr's book, Falling Upward:

"The tragic sense of life" was first popularized by the Spanish philosopher Niguel de Unamuno as he told his European world that they had distorted the meaning of faith by aligning it with the Western philosophy of "progress" rather than with what he saw as rather evident in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. Jesus and the Jewish prophets were fully at home with the tragic sense of life, and it made the shape and nature of reality very different for them, for Unamuno, and maybe still for us.

Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things "work," but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either. Life is inherently tragic and that is the truth that only faith, but not our seeming logic, can accept.

Unamuno equates the notion of faith with truth as an underlying the life force so strong that it even includes death! Faith also includes reason, but is a larger category than reason for him.

In our time, it is quantum physics that shows how true Unamuno's explanation might really be. Most of us were formed by Newtonian worldviews in which everything had a clear cause an equal effect, what might be called and "if then" worldview.  All causality was clear and defined.  The truth we are now beginning to respect is that the universe seems to proceed through a web of causes, just as human motivation does, producing ever-increasing diversity, multiplicity, dark holes, dark matter, death and rebirth, loss and renewal in different forms, and yes even violence, the continual breaking of the rules of "reason" that make wise people look for more all embracing rolls and a larger "logic".

Nature is much more disorder then order, more multiplicity than uniformity, with the greatest disorder being death itself! In the spiritual life, and now in science, we learn much more by honoring and learning from the exceptions then by just imposing our previous certain rules to make everything fit.  You can see perhaps what Jesus and Paul both meant by telling us to honor "the least of the brothers and sisters" (Matthew 25:40) and to "clothe them with the greatest care."  It is these creatures and those humans around the edge of what we have defined as normal, proper, or good who have the most to teach us.  They tend to reveal the shadow and mysterious side of things. Such constant exceptions make us revisit the so-called rule and what we call normal -- and recalibrate! The exceptions keep us humble and searching and not rushing toward resolution of our anxiety.

Our daily experience of this world is almost nothing like Plato's world of universal and perfect forms and ideas; it is always filled with huge diversity, and variations on everything from neutrino light inside of darkness, to male seahorses that bear their young, to the most extraordinary flowers that open only at night for no one to see.  Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions, whether they were prostitutes, drunkards, Samaritans, lepers Gentiles, tax collectors, or wayward sheep. He ate with outsiders regularly, to the chagrin of the church stalwarts, who always love their versions of order over any compassion toward the exceptions. Just the existence of a single mentally challenged her mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of "salvation."  Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not "think "right.

I remember the final words of my professor of church history, a very orthodox priest theologian, who said as he walked out of the classroom after four years of study with him, "Well,  after all is said and done, remember that church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus."  After our shock started to dissipate  we realized that what he meant, of course, was that we invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question -- even when it's not entirely true -- over the mercy and grace of God. Jesus did not seem to teach that one-size-fits-all, but instead that his God adjusts to the vagaries and failures of the moment.  This ability to adjust to human disorder and failure is named God's providence or compassion.  Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules did not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.  Just the Biblical notion of absolute forgiveness, once experienced, should be enough to make us trust and seek and love God.

But we humans have a hard time with the concrete, the individual, the anecdotal story, which hardly ever fits the universal mold. So we pretend. Maybe that is why we like and need humor, which invariably reveals these inconsistencies. Our mind, it seems, is more pleased with universals: never broken, always-applicable rules and patterns that allow us to predict and control things. This is good for science, but lousy for religion.  Jesus is never upset at sinners (check it out!); he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners!


The genius of the biblical revelation is that it refuses to deny the dark side of things, but forgives failure and integrates falling to achieve it's only promised wholeness. 

-- Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

Hallelujah - Street Artist Style

Enlivened

We seem to be enlivened in areas where we are the most comfortable.

We are energized where we feel natural.  And, these tend to be areas that make us feel alive.

Conversely, we seem to feel tired or depleted in areas where we are less comfortable, ill at ease, or out of our element.  Perhaps, at least in part, because these are areas where we have to work harder.

The same thing can sound 'fun' to some people and 'tiring' to others.  Many times, what sounds like fun or energizing are tshings we enjoy because they are familiar to us.  We understand them, how they work, how things will likely turn out.  Where these things are more unknown - less familiar - we feel less comfortable and, often, more shut down.

My observations of myself and others is that this works pretty consistently in both our external and internal worlds.

Familiarity

We tend to see truth mostly through the lens of things we are comfortable with...things familiar to us.

Or, to say it differently, we are less able to recognize truth in contexts we are less comfortable with or that are less familiar to us.

A Mindset

Proactive bonding is a mindset. You actively look for the common goal between yourself and the other person or team. This helps eliminate any built-in adversarial filter you bring to a meeting or project. It stops that inner-dialogue of tribal seeking. The brain is looking for tribal behavior: you’re like my tribe or you're different from my tribe. You're a friend or an enemy. It's you or us. Looking for the common goal, or a positive outcome, can also help you feel open minded and calm – an ideal state for finding creative solutions.

-- George Kohlrieser

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Forgiveness

To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. 
In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.

-- Robert Muller

Sin

I am mindful of my sin today. Sin is ugly. It is damaging. It is evil.

I am only a couple of choices away from the kind of thinking and behavior that I can often easily think is only in the most awful of people.  I am those people.

We might as well close the door. Shut the book. No relationship can survive the destruction of sin.  It's hopeless.

But wait...the finality of this reality is not final after all. A way has been made for us; a path towards the unexpected...towards restoration.

My kids drove by me yesterday. "Where's mom?" they asked. "She went another way", I said, "we got in a fight."

...the path of restoration starts with confession. I just had to admit it; to them, to myself. And confession leads us to the great light of forgiveness that out-shines the deep dark forest of sin.


Forgiveness is the final form of love.

-- Reinhold Niebuhr

Science Believes

Science believes. It believes that something is knowable - otherwise, why bother. It believes that knowing matters, perhaps because knowing can or should make life better.

Science believes that knowing is based on verify-ability. If believes that if you can verify something, it must be true. And, it can tend to believe that if something can't be verified, it isn't true. This is where science falls in love with itself and begins to work against itself, because science is based on the ethos of verification.

Here science claims a corner on truth; it strives to provide evidence for it. The reality is that truth simply is. And, only some of it is knowable. Science is an attempt to know it and, at times, a good attempt. But, it remains highly subordinate to truth. Good science likely always supports truth, though not necessarily the other way around.  It has discovered, at a human level, many rather amazing things.  And, it has often discovered that what it thought it had discovered was actually wrong.  Science, after all, is another form of the quest of the human spirit, subject to the limitations of the investigator, to interpretation, and to mis-interpretation.

Besides, Twain wasn't too far off when he said:

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

-- Mark Twain

Science, among other things, is still belief.

With, Not Above

To become truly great,
one has to stand with people, not above them.

Through Each Other's Eyes

Could a greater miracle take place
  than for us to look through each other's eyes
                                                      for an instant?

-- Henry David Thoreau

Change Your Habits with a Good Checklist

Despite how unfashionable they are, some old ideas are still quite good, like this one:

When I was 21, the U.S. Navy taught me how to fly an airplane.

We practiced for a while in a flight simulator, and eventually the opportunity came to do the real thing.

With an instructor sitting behind me in the cockpit, I started the engine, taxied out to the runway, got clearance for takeoff, set the power, scanned the instruments and released the brakes. For a guy who had always dreamed of flying, this was pretty exciting stuff! As we raced down the runway and lifted off, I savored the moment.

“Is there anything you want to do now?” the instructor asked, shortly after we were airborne.

“No,” I said. “Everything seems to be going well.”

“Do you notice anything about the aircraft?” he insisted.

Well, now that he mentioned it, the plane was kind of slow. I re-checked the power settings, which were correct. The instruments looked good. What was dragging us down?

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Door

When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.

-- Helen Keller

Shock & Grief

Our celebration of Tami's Dad was soon over as we left town last night and learned that his sister was killed in an auto accident just two hours into her trip home. And, to think that not just a couple of hours earlier we shared hugs and anticipation of other times together.  We are still shocked as we grieve her loss.

How precious and fleeting this life is...and loss has a way of thrusting us into many deep and otherwise unfathomable places.  Places where only God can meet us.

Ironically (or perhaps not), I heard this quote by A.W. Tozer earlier yesterday morning:

When I realize that everything that happens to me is designed to make me more like Jesus, a lot of anxiety is relieved.

–– A.W. Tozer

Inexcusable

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

-- C.S. Lewis

Happy 80th, Lennart Gustav Anderson!

 

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Seasons of Grieving

It takes seasons of grieving to be reconciled to it. 

-- Holly Benyousky

How You React

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.

-- Charles Swindoll