Calling (vs Ego)

Your calling is the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need.

-- Frederick Buechner

Continued from prior post on Ego:

If your ego is what assembles your personality and manages your identity, then your calling is invested in making sure it’s authentic—who you really are—not just a persona you show the world.

A calling expresses itself quietly, through the expression of subtle clues throughout your life. It is unconcerned with you attaining or accomplishing anything. Its primary function is to be a conduit for expressing your true self to the world. What you do with that expression is less important.

Calling needs silence to survive.

A calling, on the other hand, is discovered through observation and reflection, which is rarely found in a noisy environment. Listening to your life and discovering what it’s asking of you is your calling and it requires more silence than most of us are comfortable with.

Calling focuses on the process.

A calling reveals itself through self-discovery. Your calling comes from within and can only be revealed by paying attention to how your life is unfolding. Instead of managing the outcome, your calling can handle the stress of ambiguity. It knows that the tension is revealing something that you couldn’t otherwise learn.

A calling might begin with the expression of the self, but it moves toward the needs of others.

-- Shelley Provost

Best Advisors

Your critics can turn out to be your best advisers…They might say something we need to hear.

-- Hillary Clinton

Open Candor

A seminal study in safety makes the value of habitual collaboration clear. Post-moon-landing NASA researchers studied how to improve air flight safety. In one study, cockpit crews made up of a pilot, copilot, and navigator participated in flight simulations in which a potential crash situation occurred. The study found that pilots who acted swiftly and decisively based on gut feelings were much more likely to crash the plane than pilots who turned to other crew members for their reading of the situation before deciding how to respond.

In a look at underlying causes, the researchers found that the condition necessary for crew members to speak up and wasn’t whether the pilot asked for others' opinions during the crash simulations, but whether the crew had a history of open exchanges with the pilot. Crewmembers voiced their opinions to pilots who had habitually solicited their input. In other words, without a culture of open candor established, pilots found themselves on their own when they most needed the help.

-- Keith Ferrazzi

Status Threat

Many everyday conversations devolve into arguments driven by a status threat, a desire to not be perceived as less than another.

-- David Rock

Managing Your Identity With Ego

I've been reading an interesting article comparing the ideas of ego and calling. Here's some thoughts from it on ego:

The lifeblood of the ego is fear. Its primary function is to preserve your identity, but it fears your unworthiness. As a result, ego pushes you harder in order to achieve more. Ego communicates to you through “oughts,” “musts,” and “shoulds,” persuading you to believe that by achieving more and more, you must be worthy, right?

Ego needs anxiety to survive.

Wherever you feel the most insecurity is where your ego will work overtime to ‘fix.’ The ego needs anxiety to pinpoint the problem, then course corrects by disavowing this pesky aspect of your personality.

Ego is concerned with the self and preserving what it wants. The ego may be interested in helping others. But it isn’t inherently motivated by serving others. It is motivated by maintaining and managing your identity.

-- Shelley Provost

...more to follow on distinctions between 'ego' and 'calling'.

Memorial Day: Don't Thank Me For My Service

Memorial Day, has begun to lose its significance. It is becoming Christmas without the nativity; Thanksgiving without family and thanks. Memorial Day, previously known as Decoration Day, is a day set aside after the Civil War to honor our war dead. Unfortunately, somber reflection on the cost of our freedom and the price paid by those who never came home has been replaced by spirited discussion about holiday sales and the merits of white pants.

"So what?" you ask. It's important because Memorial Day isn't about military service, although many people will make that mistake today and thank me for my service. It's about military sacrifice. We don't talk about the latter as often because it makes us uncomfortable. We choose to shield our children from that horrific reality. The reason the distinction between service and sacrifice is important is because service doesn't provide...continue reading.

-- Jake Wood

Q&A: Caution

Q&A:

From interview with N.T. Wright:

Q: Contemporary Western Christian culture – anything we should be mindful or watchful of?

A: Beware of trivialisation, of colluding with deconstruction (breaking everything down into non-narrative fragments -- a lot of contemporary worship music does this). Beware of marginalising scripture, of assuming that we are 'biblical' by definition because we belong to some evangelical tradition, but then not really getting to grips with what the Bible actually says.

Still Good in College Football - Jack Hoffman

Not What He Is Capable of Being

Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.

-- G.K. Chesterton

Honest With Ourselves

Our lives improve only when we take chances —and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

-- Walter Anderson

Believing In Something Greater

The most powerful form of self-belief comes from believing in something greater than you. Because when you’ve got purpose, everything becomes possible.

-- Lewis Pugh

Wisdom of Uncertainty

There is wisdom in uncertainty...only from the unknown can life be renewed constantly.

-- Deepak Chopra

Engagement

JOY! JOY!

How else could one describe what occurs when your first daughter gets engaged...to a strong, humble, and God-fearing young man?  See more pics here....

Reading Spiritually

Reading often means gathering information, acquiring new insight and knowledge, and mastering a new field. It can lead us to degrees, diplomas, and certificates. Spiritual reading, however, is different. It means not simply reading about spiritual things but also reading about spiritual things in a spiritual way.

As we read spiritually about spiritual things, we open our hearts to God’s voice. Sometimes we must be willing to put down the book we are reading and just listen to what God is saying to us through its words.

-- Henri Nouwen

Prom 2014 - Makenzie

More pics here....

CT: We All Walk Between

Speaking of paying attention, there's been several posts this week worthy of our attention, including:

I had never been challenged to view suffering and hardship in my marriage as a gift from God to grow me into Christ-likeness.  As I turned the pages of my wounded soul, I realized I didn't truly want my husband to worship God. I wanted him to worship me. I wanted, needed, his love—unadulterated and unhindered.

As long as my husband was my enemy, I was forced to bear their fruit.

My sense of control shattered. I knew I couldn't control my husband. I'd never realized I wanted to control God. My heart still beat for what I wanted: a perfect, peaceful marriage, family, and complete fulfillment. I wanted God to change my husband for myself. I had to answer God's questions. Child, what about what I'm doing? Will you still trust me even if your marriage never changes? Will you repent and be transformed by the renewing of your mind?

Would I be satisfied in God? If everything fell apart, would I be satisfied knowing that God is good, even when I am not? Yes, my heart breathed with a long and ragged exhale. Then repent and be transformed.

-- Joy Sevilla

Click here to continue reading what strikes me as important reflections on sexuality, our desires, and yielding to a greater work that God is doing (often through our suffering), not only in another person, but in myself.

Pay Attention to Attention

These days, leaders are bombarded with numerous daily intrusions: urgent email, appointments every fifteen minutes, decisions ranging from hiring to overall vision. Most leaders now travel with technology that connects them to a running stream of messages and data, 24/7.

This stream of distraction draws attention away from what’s immediately at hand; those seemingly urgent rings and alerts may not be crucial. Working to maintain clear focus on a task – despite intrusions – consistently occupies the brain’s circuitry for attention.

“Cognitive effort” is the technical expression for the mental attention demanded to process our information load. In “top-down” attention we actively decide what receives our attention. “Bottom-up” attention means we function mechanically, letting our focus be dictated by whatever grabs it. This bottom-up attention causes us to be ignorant of the preferences and blind spots in our unconscious minds. There is a place for this in life, of course – just not at work.

“Cognitive control” is the technical expression for employing our capacity for top-down attention – an essential aspect of self-awareness. In leaders, cognitive control is paramount to leadership competencies like self-management – the ability to focus on a goal and the discipline to pursue it despite distractions and setbacks. Interestingly, the same neural framework that allows for intense pursuit of goals also manages unruly emotions. Strong cognitive control is therefore present in leaders who remain calm in emergencies, subdue their agitation, and can recover quickly from defeat. Continue here....

-- Daniel Goleman

Exercise and the Brain

...just 45 minutes of exercise three days a week actually increased the volume of the brain. Even for people who have been very sedentary, Kramer says, exercise "improves cognition and helps people perform better on things like planning, scheduling, multitasking and working memory."

-- Art Kramer, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois

Lies You Tell Yourself

Lies You Tell Yourself:  You only need 6 hours of sleep.  While caffeine and habit could trick you into believing that 5 or 6 hours a night is adequate, you're wrong.  University of Pennsylvania researchers found people who slept 6 hours a night for 2 weeks performed as poorly on memory and alertness tests as participants who took the same test after a night without sleep.  Mounds of additional research have linked sleeping less than 8 hours to higher rates of obesity, heart disease, and cancer, as well as a 15 percent drop in working memory function -- the type of brain activity that helps you solve problems and make decisions.

What Is A Salting Us?

Consider that America, purportedly, runs on Dunkin’. So a typical American day might begin with Dunkin’s bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich. If it does, it starts out with 460 calories, and 1200 mg of sodium. That’s 2.6mg of sodium per calorie, or well over twice as salty as you want your diet to be on average.

The copious excesses of sodium to which we are all exposed reside not just where we would expect them, but almost everywhere in the modern foodscape. The good news is that in all those same food categories there are alternative choices that are simpler, tasty, more nutritious, often no more expensive, and less salty besides. The very granular strategy of choosing foods with shorter ingredient lists allows for cutting out many superfluous grains of salt by way of improving overall nutritional quality.  Continue here....

-- David L. Katz, MD, MPH

Mothers Day

I never expected that a mother’s labor and delivery never ends — and you never stop having to remember to breathe.

I didn’t know that taking the path of most resistance often leads to the most reward.

No one told me that it would all happen at the same hallowed time: Mothering is at once the hardest and the holiest and the happiest.

Real Womanhood isn’t a function of becoming a great mother, but of being loved by your Great Father.

-- Ann Voskamp

More from Ann here....

I appreciate these words.  They capture something I knew, but didn't know quite how to say.  Saying and doing are bedfellows of a majestic nature, when alive towards each other.  A characteristic that so exemplifies holy mothering -- something I have both received from my mother and witnessed in my wife.  I am so grateful for its holy nature, born heavenly and grown on earth.  That sacrifice of this kind is still both ordinarily and extraordinarily alive is an encouraging thing, even for me as a man.  I am ennobled by it.  Even more wonderfully, my kids are strengthened and beautified by it.

Thank you to both of these women in my life, who take this path and breathing it both into themselves and out to those I love so much.

Facts & Misinformation

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. ‘Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,’ Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will win out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

-- Joe Keohane

So if facts don't re-frame for us as often as we think they do, what does?  I can't, of course, speak for everyone, but things like the fiery-peach-indistinguishably-blending-into-lavender of this morning's sunrise do so for me.

ReFraming Language

Frames are mental structures. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions. Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. . . . because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.

-- George Lakoff

Continue here....  I am pretty fascinated by the posts so far this week; how our perceptions and language shape what and how we think.

Language Shapes

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

-- Benjamin Lee Whorf

Fiction

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.

-- Jessamyn West, reVision

We Read

We read to learn that we are not alone.

-- C.S. Lewis

Jack is Back!

Praying a Psalm

St. Augustine found that the best model for developing the integrating experience of past, present, and future was the audible praying of a Psalm.  The Psalmists exercise their and our memories vigorously.  Prayer is an act of memory.  If we confine ourselves to one-generational knowledge here, or even worse, to our own conversion-experience knowledge, we are impoverished beyond reason.

-- Eugene Peterson

Memory is the scribe of the soul.

-- Aristotle

These seem like good book-ends to me.

Stuff Doesn't Happen To Me

Stuff doesn't happen to me, just for me.  I try to keep that in mind when I can't understand why something is happening.

...perhaps I am going through something for the benefit of someone else.

Further

You can't take someone much further than you've been yourself.  
In other words, if you've traveled far within yourself, you can more aptly help another do the same.

This is one of the secret jewels embedded within suffering.  We trust someone who we know has suffered, because we believe they have 'been there' and know a bit about the territory.

If you really want to help others in these ways, be willing to do so in your own life.

Trouble Prevails

Trouble prevails so that we will learn to hold Him fast...and dare not trust ourselves.  Suffering strips us of our dead hopes...

-- J.I. Packer