Don't Use

Instagram: bobgoff

We're not held back by what we don't have, but by what we don't use.

-- Bob Goff

LT: Preparation

We rarely ever perform to a capacity greater than our preparation. In other words, if we don't prepare, we're often not ready and, therefore, just not as capable as we could be.

We also often don't seem to prepare to a greater degree than our leaders challenge us to. Perhaps, this is due to our limitations at times in recognizing the connection between preparation and performance on our own.

Thinking About

I've noticed...I often wake up thinking about what I went to bed thinking about.

Eugene Peterson (1932–2018): Tidbits

Eugene taught me that the pastoral vocation was a call to be relentlessly personal. It meant unhurried conversations marked by listening. It meant preaching to people, not an audience. It meant loving people, not using them. It meant hours of prayer for people and with people.

-- Jamin Goggin

Anyone seeking to have a long obedience in the same direction needs a regular rhythm of stopping. Otherwise, we won’t make it. I’m grateful Eugene gave me a vision of what faithful pastoring could be.

-- Rich Villodas

...more from some of those he impacted here.


Here are some (unrelated) tidbits from Eugene Peterson:

...the goal of reading Scripture was not to know more, but to become more.


There can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an immersion in, and embrace of, community. I am not myself by myself. Community, not the highly vaunted individualism of our culture, is the setting for living the Christian life.


Sabbath:

• Uncluttered time and space to distance ourselves from the frenzy of our own activities so we can see what God has been and is doing.
• Quieting the internal noise so we hear the still small voice of the Lord.
• Uncluttered time and space to detach ourselves from the people around us so that they have a chance to deal with God without our poking around or kibitzing.

If we pray without listening, we pray out of context.  

-- Eugene Peterson

Year Of The Mountain

An amazing experience for our son, Conner.  We are thrilled  for him and how nature speaks to who he is.

His very talented friend and fellow hiker, Cam Hershberger, made this beautiful video of their most recent trip.

Visual: Carving

Visual - "Carving"

Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, New Mexico

Our Conveniences

Authentic love will not allow us to continue to ask the rest of the world to put itself at the mercy of our conveniences.

-- Richard Rohr

Focus

The achievement of challenging things requires focus, often intense focus.

Often Uncomfortable

Bad leaders may edit the truth for fear of causing discomfort. Good leaders accept that the truth is often uncomfortable.
​
-- Simon Sinek

What If: Unwillingness

What If...I thought someone’s unwillingness was really a matter of ability? What if the majority of situations are really more a function of ability, than will?  I can easily assume that things are primarily a matter of will — why?

I think it is because I believe that ability can grow — that it can be overcome with the aid of things like will.  For example, when is awareness a matter of the will?

Nonetheless, what if...?

It's Easy When

Instagram: bobgoff

It's easy to trust God when He does what we want; it's the other times when we grow.

-- Bob Goff

We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things

An article in The Atlantic titled, "We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things" noted "how online shopping and cheap prices are turning Americans into hoarders."

In 2017, Americans spent $240 billion—twice as much as they'd spent in 2002—on goods like jewelry, watches, books, luggage, telephones, and related communication equipment. Spending on personal care products also doubled over that time period. Americans spent, on average, $971.87 on clothes last year, buying nearly 66 garments, according to the American Apparel and Footwear Association. That's 20 percent more money than they spent in 2000. The average American bought 7.4 pairs of shoes last year, up from 6.6 pairs in 2000.

All told, "we are all accumulating mountains of things," said Mark A. Cohen, the director of retail studies at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. He sometimes asks his students to count the number of things they have on them in class, and once they start counting up gadgets and cords and accessories, they end up near 50. "Americans have become a society of hoarders," Cohen said.

At the same time we are amassing all this stuff, Americans are taking up more space. Last year, the average size of a single-family house in America was 2,426 square feet, a 23 percent increase in size from two decades ago. The number of self-storage units is rapidly increasing, too: There are around 52,000 such facilities nationally; two decades ago, there were half that number.

-- Alana Semuels

Things You’ve Never Seen

Poem for the week -- "Things You’ve Never Seen":

When I tell it, the first time
I saw hail, I say
it was in a desert and knocked

a man unconscious
then drove a woman into my arms
because she thought the end was near

but I assured her
this wasn’t the case.

When he tells it,
he smiles, says the first winter
after their exodus
was the coldest.

Rare snow
came down, and his mother,
who knew what the fluff was

but until then had never seen it,
woke him and said, Look outside,
what do you see?

She called his name twice.
It was dark. Snow fell
a paragraph to sum up

decades of heat. He had
no answer. She said,
this is flour from heaven.

When he tells it,
he’s an old man returning
to his mother.

-- Fady Joudah

Bad Judgment

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

-- Rita Mae Brown

Draw Us Away

So much in the culture, structure, and organization of our lives is designed to draw us away from ourselves.

If we're honest, we are so relieved at the very notion of returning to our true selves — to discovering and just being who we really are — not who we're expected to be.

See Things Differently

Leaders are curious.  They want to know more than they already know.  And this helps leaders respect others and their perspectives.  In fact, real leaders pursue those that see things differently because they believe that others have key insights and contribution that is needed for the good of the whole.

Collaboration

I've noticed...more people seem less able to collaborate.

Is this true?  Or, is it just that this is a phenomenon that particularly describes the aging?  Is it the case that the older we get, the more entrenched we become in our assumptions?  The more we believe the effort to collaborate is unproductive — I just want to do it, the way I want to do it.  Am I just more aware of this because I am aging, too?

Or, perhaps, this is a current societal-climate thing.

Either way, is the skill or mindset of collaboration in decline?

We Live In A Moment Of Grace

We live in a moment of grace. Through the hedges of our divisions we are beginning to glimpse again the beauty of life’s oneness. We are beginning to hear, in a way that humanity has never heard before, the essential harmony that lies at the heart of the universe. And we are beginning to understand, amidst the horror and suffering of our divisions, that we will be well to the extent that we move back into relationship with one another, whether as individuals and families or as nations and species. . . .

[Newell reminds us of the Holocaust and how Germany, under Hitler’s command, murdered millions of Jews in Poland.] The German nation was not alone in this. Some of our worst inhumanities as nations, including Britain and America, have been perpetrated on foreign soil and kept at a distance, as if to hide from our own soul the sacrilege of what we are doing. . . . Something in our collective psyche has pretended that the families of another land are not as sacred as the sons and daughters of our own. . . .

Think of the hubris of our lives. Think of our individual arrogance, the way we pursue our own well-being at the neglect and even expense of [others]. . . . Think of the hubris of our nationhood, pretending that we could look after the safety of our homeland by ignoring and even violating the sovereignty of other lands. Think of the hubris of our religion, raising ourselves up over other wisdom traditions and even trying to force our ways on them. Think of the hubris of the human species, pretending that we could look after our own health while exploiting and endangering the life of other species. . . .

[This] is opposite to the way of Jesus, who taught the strength of humility, of being close to the humus, close to the Ground from which we and all things come. The humblest, says Jesus, are “the greatest” (Matthew 18:4). Not that following Jesus’ path of humility is straightforward. Constantly there is tension—the tension of discerning how to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, how to honor the heart of another nation as we honor our own homeland, how to revere the truths of another wisdom tradition as we cherish our own inheritance, how to protect the life of other species as we guard the sanctity of our own life-form. Jesus knew such tension. He was tempted to use his wisdom and his power of presence to serve himself, to lift himself up over others. But to the tempter, he says, “Away with you, Satan!” (Matthew 4:10). Away with the falseness of believing that I can love myself and demean others.

-- John Philip Newell

Danger of a Single Story

Visual: Flagrant Finale

Visual - "Flagrant Finale"

Bozeman, MT

In Diversity

In diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

-- Maya Angelou

We need to read that again, slowly....

Merely Informed

Instagram: bobgoff

People grow where they're truly accepted, not where they're merely informed.

-- Bob Goff

LT: Not Their Equals

The true measure of a leader is how they treat their employees, not their equals.

-- Oleg Vishnepolsky

What If: Better or Worse?

What If...you thought you were making things better, when actually you were making them worse?

Preaching & Pastoring

Preaching and pastoring are not the same thing.  Overlap, to be sure.  But, it seems that over time, it is easy to substitute pastoring with just preaching.

Americans Aren’t Practicing Democracy Anymore

Democracy is a most unnatural act. People have no innate democratic instinct; we are not born yearning to set aside our own desires in favor of the majority’s. Democracy is, instead, an acquired habit.

Like most habits, democratic behavior develops slowly over time, through constant repetition. For two centuries, the United States was distinguished by its mania for democracy: From early childhood, Americans learned to be citizens by creating, joining, and participating in democratic organizations. But in recent decades, Americans have fallen out of practice, or even failed to acquire the habit of democracy in the first place.

American government’s most obvious problems—from its dysfunctional legislature to Donald Trump himself—are merely signs of this underlying decay. The political system’s previous strength and resilience flowed from Americans’ anomalously high rates of participation in democratically governed organizations, most of them apolitical. There is no easy fix for our current predicament; simply voting Trump out of office won’t suffice. To stop the rot afflicting American government, Americans are going to have to get back in the habit of democracy.

In the early years of the United States, Europeans made pilgrimages to the young republic to study its success. How could such a diverse and sprawling nation flourish under a system of government that originated in small, homogeneous...continue here.

-- Yoni Applebaum

Madonna del Parto

Poem for the week -- "Madonna del Parto":

And then smelling it,
feeling it before
the sound even reaches
him, he kneels at
cliff’s edge and for the
first time, turns his
head toward the now
visible falls that
gush over a quarter-
mile of uplifted sheet-
granite across the valley
and he pauses,
lowering his eyes
for a moment, unable
to withstand the
tranquility—vast, unencumbered,
terrifying, and primal. That
naked river
enthroned upon
the massif altar,
bowed cypresses
congregating on both
sides of sun-gleaming rock, a rip
in the fabric of the ongoing
forest from which rises—
as he tries to stand, tottering, half-
paralyzed—a shifting
rainbow volatilized by
ceaseless explosion.

-- Forrest Gander

Much More Exciting

The challenge of our unknown future is so much more exciting than the stories of our accomplished past.

-- Simon Sinek

Do I Trust Them?

As I traveled across country this summer, several things jumped out at me. Among those was the amount of trust people have to have. Take, for example, the services we utilize — we trust that the plane we are flying in is built well and to specifications. We trust in the pilots; that they are prepared and ready to work. We trust that the equipment air traffic controllers are using is functioning properly and that they are paying attention.

Or, what about the places where we stay, did the cleaning crews really cleans thing well or just go through the motions and say it doesn’t really matter?  Do I trust them?

When I travel, I sometimes wonder about the people I see.  How are they different; how are they the same? How does their 'place' in life work for them, like mine does for me?  Do I trust them? ...because, in fact, I do already, all the time.

LT: Themselves

Followers smell it when a leader is in it more for himself than for them.

Many followers will still follow that leader, though, if they think they too can still benefit by doing so.

Who They Are

I've noticed...it is harder to love people for who they are than for who we prefer them to be.