What You Don't Do

Focus is what you don’t do.

-- Jim Collins

Primary

Your primary weakness comes from overusing your primary strength.

-- David Baker

Presence of Strength

Great leaders are not defined by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of clear strengths.

-- John Zenger

Earn Respect

How do leaders earn respect…by admitting their mistakes.

-- John Maxwell

But...My Times Are In Your Hands

Strengthened

Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

-- Helen Keller

Suffering is powerful in at least 2 ways; it gives quick and deep opportunity to recognize our need for God and it makes us accessible to others. Outside of suffering, there is often one kind of separation or another going on between humans -- hierarchies and comparison seems ever-present.  Suffering over and over seems to level the playing field and draws our spirits together...perhaps because it reveals to us, like nothing else, how we are the same.  When we acknowledge how we are alike, we are converted to compassion.

And, compassion ennobles everyone.

Smile Because It Happened

Don't cry because it is over, smile because it happened.

-- Dr. Seuss

What You Miss When You’re Afraid Of Messing Up

It’s better to fly a kite and it get stuck in a tree, than to not fly the kite at all.  Every opportunity has an expiration date and the cost of missing out can be greater than the cost of messing up.

-- Pete Wilson

More here....

Comeback

Climb the Mountain

A number of my young friends are headed to the annual Momentum youth conference today, including my daughter.

I have a sense of anticipation and excitement for them.  I believe they will have an opportunity to see things they don't normally see.  And, that can be both exhilarating and broadening.  Exhilarating in the sense that they can feel their breath being caught by a glimpse of the magnitude of God's work.  Broadening in the sense that they can imagine new things, hear different things, see things differently.

One might describe such an experience as a mountain-top experience.  A high.  I hope that it is.  Who wouldn't want a wider view of life?  Not unlike the view from an airplane window, high places tend to provide that and often the perspective they give can inform us about our lives in low places.  If we can see more of what things really look like from above, we are more free, less weighed down by the seemingly terminal details of the daily grind.  Is this what it means, at least in part, when Jesus said that his burden is 'light'?  Perspective on reality can really shape it.

Sure, there are risks (even dangers) in climbing any mountain.  People can get hurt, in a number of ways.  But, the climb, in some ways is necessary...to expand our view, to see things beyond just the way we see them most days. 

It is noteworthy that no one lives on the mountain top; we all live in the valley somewhere.  But, the mountains inspire us to see more than what we tend to see day-to-day and to know more about where the help we need comes from. 

There are plenty of 'low' days to keep us...grounded.  So, look up...and climb!  And, be awestruck by the view!

I hope my young friends get a glimpse this week of something they haven't seen before and that they will be able to see some of why the climb is worth it.

Free Will

Why did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

-- C.S. Lewis

Milwaukee Sunday

For Sunday morning worship today, our church is visiting another church.  The leadership in both churches have begun to know each other and we felt it to be a good thing for the people in both congregations to do the same.  So we rented a bus and are driving 4 hours to church today, in Milwaukee, WI.

Why?  Why would would we do such a thing?  Here are some of my initial thoughts, answering this question:

We believe in a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.  And, we believe that a personal understanding of this relationship is significantly enhanced by our experience with His community of believers.  In other words, my relationship with Him is not in isolation from His relationship with others like me (and not like me).  It is rare to experience my relationship with God in a deep way without the involvement of others in my life, without my involvement in others lives.

So, it is important to see some of the extent of the community God has established and continues to create.  This is true because my own version of community is limited by my own experience with it.  I grow in my understanding of the nature of God's relationship to me and my relationship with Him when I encounter how and where His work is on-going outside of my set of experiences (in my community).  We want to foster this understanding of the God we follow and serve.  We want to see more of what He is up to.  And, we want to participate more broadly in His work than in the ways we normally imagine.

We need both our time-and-space and a sense of things beyond it.

Visiting our believing friends in Milwaukee helps us imagine God more profoundly, it helps us see to a greater extent the work He is doing, and it helps us participate more fully in the time-and-space we do live in most days.

We are going to Milwaukee to embolden our hope in the great Hope-Giver and to consider how locking our arms across things like state-lines can deepen our mutual love - affection, sacrifice, and worship - for those around us...in Warsaw, in Milwaukee, and around the world.

Running Out of Water

Humankind is running out of water at an alarming pace. We’re going to run out of water long before we run out of oil.

-- Peter Brabeck, chairman of Nestlé

Continue reading....

Connected, But Alone?

We use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. So a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection. For kids growing up, that skill is the bedrock of development.

And what I'm seeing is that people get so used to being short-changed out of real conversation, so used to getting by with less, that they've become almost willing to dispense with people altogether.

Technology appeals to us most where we feel the most vulnerable.

Being alone feels like a problem that needs to be solved.

You end up isolated if you don't cultivate the capacity for solitude, the ability to be separate, to gather yourself. Solitude is where you find yourself so that you can reach out to other people and form real attachments. When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people in order to feel less anxious or in order to feel alive. 

If we're not able to be alone, we're going to be more lonely. And if we don't teach our children to be alone, they're only going to know how to be lonely.

We're so busy communicating that we don't have time to think.

-- Sherry Turkle

Above are some of the comments that struck me -- worth the time to watch and reflect.

Technological Obsession

Research has connected our technological obsession to increased rates of stress, attention problems, depression, cognitive function, and anxiety, not to mention the negative impacts it can have on our relationships. It also impacts our comfort level with solitude and silence as we feel we are missing out or that something is wrong.

-- Jared Kligerman

Change is Reversible, Transformation IS NOT

How often have you changed your mind, say a change in eating style or to claim that you will go to the gym religiously, or some such change? You started out well and little by little, even imperceptibly, you were right back into the old behaviors.

Did you change? Yes. For a while, but only a while, and clearly not deeply enough. So here’s one of the elements of change versus transformation:

Change is reversible, transformation IS NOT.

Once you are transformed you are not and can never be what you once were. You have changed to the depth of your identity. It’s not a change regarding this or that about you. YOU have changed. You are a different person and the change is through and through.  Continue here....

-- Jim Sniechowski

People Don't Know What They Want

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

-- Steve Jobs

Know Your Stress Type

Stress hits each of us differently. Some of us feel it in our bodies. Others just can't stop worrying. Knowing how you experience stress can help you find the most effective methods to relax.

Finding a technique to help you relax is worth the effort. When we calm down from stress, we are shifting our nervous system from physiological arousal to the relaxation and recovery state known as parasympathetic activity. In this state, our minds are more open and clear, our heart rate slows, blood pressure lowers, and our muscles release tension.

And here's the part that particularly resonates with my personal experience:

Practice every day. Find a time in your daily routine that you can set aside just for this – whether during your drive to work or during personal quiet time first thing in the morning. If you develop a strong daily practice, you'll be able to call on it to help you calm down when you need to the most – right after those hassles that get you so tense in the first place.

The results may be subtle at first. You might find, for instance, you're no longer waking up at 4 a.m. obsessing about that rude person, or that you aren't...continue reading.

-- Daniel Goleman

Mindset

Over the last few months, I've been collecting and reflecting on the role of our mindset in who we are as people and how we live, including the things that impact our mindset.

It is interesting that even in Scripture, a key to the 'way' God wants us to be is rooted in 'the way we think' (one of Webster's definitions of mindset).

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

-- Phil 2:5

Paul stages his plea for the mind (as well as for our actions and spirit) this way:

...make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.

-- Phil 2:2

Are Just Dumb

It’s true that humans have a need to categorize their thoughts in order to make sense of the world. And yet few of us would realize our categories are largely utilitarian, based loosely in fact and largely in fantasy. Austin Cline suggests that when we fall victim to black-and-white thinking, we reduce an endless spectrum of possibilities to the two most extreme positions, saying, in short, that home is either north or south, when home may indeed be southeast or northwest, or in some cases, both, depending on the necessary route.

Black-and-white thinking is attractive because it’s reductionistic; it simplifies everything so we don’t really have to comprehend. It allows us to feel intelligent without understanding, and once we are intelligent, we feel superior. People who don’t agree with us are just dumb.

-- Donald Miller

Continue reading here....

Can't Change Anything

Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.

-- George Bernard Shaw

Your View

Research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.

-- Carol Dweck

In other words, our mindset is critical; how you see yourself affects your behavior. More here....

And, if this is correct -- how you behave affects how you think...we have a bit of a circle here.

Getting Bewildered

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne

About As Big

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry.

-- Winston Churchill

Unfortunately, this seems to be more true than it should be.

Health Care and Waiting

The last line in the article referenced below sticks out to me (at the very least, I applaud the theory):

ONE small consolation of our high-priced health care system — our $2.7 trillion collective medical bill — has been the notion that at least we get medical attention quickly.

Yet there is emerging evidence that lengthy waits to get a doctor’s appointment have become the norm in many parts of American medicine, particularly for general doctors but also for specialists. And that includes patients with private insurance as well as those with Medicaid or Medicare.  Continue reading....

-- Elisabeth Rosenthal

Here it is:

Sometimes, it would seem, a little more waiting would do us some good.

His Purpose: Too Wonderful

You saw me before I was born.
    Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
    before a single day had passed.

-- Psalm 139:16

The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me...

...Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
    too lofty for me to attain.

-- Psalm 138:8, 139:6

God still has purpose in developing me. Only the world can leave me with the impression that I have lived past this point, because its sense of time if so limited. I am not something He has moved on from or discarded. I can live and move as if I were about to discover where and how this is true.

Commencement Address Extraordinaire

...if all we have learned here are Four Ps, and Five Forces and Six Sigma, we will prove William Faulkner right, that we labor under a curse, that we live not for love but for lust, for defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, for victories without hope, and worst of all without pity or compassion, that our griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars, that we live not from the heart but from the glands.

No, my friends, we have more work to do, hard work, frightening work, uncertain work and unending work, work that may test us, work that may defeat us, work for which we may not get the credit but work for which the whole world depends. The time is short and the odds are long but I believe that we are ready nonetheless, with the love of those who raised us, with the lessons of those who taught us, with the strength of those who stand beside us as we face what lies ahead. I say let us begin.

-- Casey Gerald

Read the rest here....

Multi-tasking Is Making You Stupid

Talk about things (like sleep and sugar) that are affecting our learning:

A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of 10 points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night's sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it's really not that amusing that one of the most common "productivity tools" can make one as dumb as a stoner.

-- David Rock

Continue Reading...

Interest

I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.

-- Stanley Kubrick

Involve Me

Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.

-- Benjamin Franklin

To Discover

I write to discover what I know.

-- Flannery O'Connor