Awareness Is

Awareness is a process, not a destination.

I felt even more aware of this reality this week, during a conversation among friends.  It is really never about arrival.

This discovery, of course, is a bit disappointing because we are highly conditioned to expect some benefits of arrival; like reversal, making something right, relief, or peace.  But, in the end, we only really achieve these ideas when we recognize that they are already with us and that awareness of them is, perhaps, the highest good about them.  This is it.  It is all we need.  And, it is far better than we've realized.

It is not over there.  It is right here.  The current moment is all that is.  And, that's perfect because the future is the next moment and we get to do it again.

So we're free to embrace this moment, becoming aware of IT, and ask our next version of the question...about the process of what is.

Oh, and metaphorically speaking, when would we ever be more aware of this reality than at a time after a day like Good Friday and before a day like Easter?  On a Saturday that can feel lost between devastation and more hope than ever...on a day when something like transformation would seem totally imperceptible.

Good Friday: What Dostoyevsky’s Prostitute Can Teach Us About the Cross

The cross of Christ has sometimes been compared to the electric chair or other forms of execution, meaning we are wise to remember that it was an instrument of death in the ancient world. The cross is also often used to prompt us to give ourselves sacrificially for him and others. But comparisons to other forms of execution can miss the deeper biblical teaching about the cross. And the cross is much more than an object lesson in how we should live. It’s very shape, it turns out, is not incidental to its deeper biblical meaning nor to the very nature of God who hung there.

To get at the deeper meaning, we can turn to the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, especially one scene in the middle of Crime and Punishment. The lead character Rodion Raskolnikov had brutally murdered an elderly pawnbroker and moneylender, Alyona Ivanovna. When Ivanovna’s half-sister, Lizaveta, stumbled upon the scene, he murdered her as well.

Raskolnikov later meets a young woman, Sonia, who has been compelled by poverty to become a prostitute to support her family. He is immediately drawn...continue here.

-- Mark Galli

Yes, there's a free lunch

Yes, there's a free lunch

In a physical economy in which scarcity is the fundamental driver, eating lunch means someone else gets less.

But in a society where ideas lead to trust and connection and productivity, where working together is better than working apart, where exchange creates value for both sides...

Then the efficient sharing of ideas is its own free lunch. 

All of us are smarter than any of us, so the value to all goes up when you share.

-- Seth Godin

Without Accepting It

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

-- Aristotle

More Than Advice

Instagram: bobgoff

Most people need love and acceptance
a lot more than advice.

-- Bob Goff

LT: Can't Replace

​As a leader, you just can't replace the value of directly listening to what the people you serve are saying.

Arrogance

​Arrogance is worse than ignorance.

-- Oleg Vishnepolsky


 ...because we treat people accordingly.

Ecstasy

​God’s ecstasy creates the world, and the world’s ecstasy realizes God.

-- Beatrice Bruteau

An example of God's ecstasy (definition:  an overwhelming feeling of great happiness or joyful excitement)!

Welcome: Grand-baby Graham Barrett Wilkins!

 

Hide and Seek

Poem for the week -- "Hide and Seek":

Haven’t found anyone
From the old gang.
They must be still in hiding,
Holding their breaths
And trying not to laugh.

Our street is down on its luck
With windows broken
Where on summer nights
One heard couples arguing,
Or saw them dancing to the radio.

The redhead we were
All in love with,
Who sat on the fire escape,
Smoking late into the night,
Must be in hiding too.

The skinny boy
On crutches
Who always carried a book,
May not have
Gotten very far.

Darkness comes early
This time of year
Making it hard
To recognize familiar faces
In those of strangers.

-- Charles Simic

Never Underestimate

Never underestimate the immense power of your imagination.

-- Mike Krzyzewski

This truth seems like it applies well beyond basketball. Though even there, it is a bit intriguing.  I hope I never stop wondering.

You might consider following the hyper-link chain on imagination, all the way back to June 2012.

Might Miss

Instagram: bobgoff

If we only do what we're familiar with,
we might miss what we've been made for.

-- Bob Goff

LT: Inclusion Is A Skill

​Diversity is a measure. Inclusion is a skill.

Ensure you are being inclusive in tough situations and, most importantly, when things are going wrong. People can feel most abandoned at times of stress. These situations are a true torture test for any leader. The higher the risk and the stakes, the bigger the temptation to revert to the people and decisions you are most at ease with. That’s when leaders need to make sure they lead by example and demonstrate passion for inclusive leadership through their attitudes and behaviors. Show people you are there for them and wanting their input, especially when disruption is at its greatest. 

It is our role as leaders to question the status quo and encourage everyone to do the same. Staying still in today`s world is not an option. Accessing diverse points of view is vital in creating optimum strategies and plans. An inclusive leader creates an environment where disagreement is viewed positively. I have learned from experience that the more diverse the team, the more debate and disagreement we have and the better the outcome. As leaders, we should create a culture in which the team can hear and understand other people`s points of views or ideas that are different to their own.  Continue here....

-- Geraldine Huse

Change Happens When...

I've noticed...change happens in me when I enter situations personally.

Cannot Be Activated

Our inner spiritual world cannot be activated without experience of the outer world of wonder for the mind, beauty for the imagination, and intimacy for the emotions. 

-- Thomas Berry

Why Sheryl Sandberg Believes This a Necessary Skill for Women Leaders

• Reject permanence
• Tap into your community
• Find some good in the hardship

...more here.

Desperation

The human imagination is not exclusively (or primarily) defined by desperation — it is not a constant, the only state of being.

Same Level of Thinking

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were on when we created them.

-- Albert Einstein

Avoiding

Instagram: bobgoff

Most of us spend our entire lives avoiding
the people Jesus spent His whole life engaging.

-- Bob Goff

LT: Closed To Ideas

When we are closed to ideas, what we hear is criticism. When we are open to criticism, what we get is advice.

-- Simon Sinek

Irritating

I've noticed...that it appears I am just irritating to some people.

There are likely many reasons (some may not even have much to do with me — although, the majority likely do!).  Further, as much as I might try to eliminate, or even just reduce, the possibility of this reality, it appears to simply be true, simply as a function of who I am, how I'm made, etc.

So, an interesting question — should this phenomenon only increase (rather than decrease), how do I more comfortably live with it myself?

Instead Of God

Principles are what people have instead of God.

-- Frederick Buechner

Practicing Mindfulness

That we have to practice mindfulness should tell us something.

Wheeling Motel

Poem for the week -- "Wheeling Motel":

The vast waters flow past its back-yard.
You can purchase a six-pack in bars!
Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee

a block down. It’s twenty-five years ago:
you went to death, I to life, and
which was luckier God only knows.

There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours.
The river is like that,
a blind familiar.

The wind will die down when I say so;
the leaden and lessening light on
the current.

Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.

-- Franz Wright

Have you ever read something and not felt like you understood why you liked it, or appreciated it.  Like it is something, but you're not sure what -- but, you can't disgard it either.  This poem is like that for me.

"Like the word reconciliaton,"

Give It Away

​The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

-- Pablo Picasso

Not Who They Were

Instagram: bobgoff

See people for who they're becoming
not for who they were.

-- Bob Goff

LT: Diversity, Inclusion Rider?

There are many characteristics of good leaders, so ranking them may not only be difficult, but also problematic.  I would then have to hazard this notion, that among the greater characteristics is respect for diversity.

A leader must not only acknowledge the need for diversity, but also put it in place and ensure it is working — like an inclusion rider? — not just by quota, but as evidence of genuine understanding of the value of different ideas.  It is our ideas that inform how we view people and leadership — our ideas affirm or betray us, not to mention others.

I remember the disgust people around me felt about the black panther movement in the 60s and 70s.  "Why can't they just behave and not be so disrespectful?"  Watching the recent movie, Black Panther, helps me see what that attitude was suppressing, what had been suppressed (for a deeper a look at that suppression — check this out) in terms of the value of a whole people group, what they could add to the beauty of all people.

And, diversity is not just about race.  It is about the acceptance of all people, even those with differences within the same tribe.

Good leaders respect diversity, a lot.

Convince Me: No Wait, Don't Bother

It is rare to convince someone of something they don't want to see.

Because there are reasons they don't want to see it.  So, don't bother — it may not be worth the effort to convince until those are identified.

I'm not that different.  I'm often only convinced when I'm willing to be or when I am open to it.  So, what causes this kind of opening?  Usually not argument — the pain of argument, maybe.  Usually, I become open to something when I need to be; sometimes when I want to be.  Then I can be convinced.

...and another feature of being convinced that seems to be a universal — after one feels heard.

Billy Graham, the Purple State Preacher

When we come to the end of ourselves, we come to the beginning of God.

-- Billy Graham

Leaders like Billy Graham could help heal this country.

Many of the conservative Evangelicals who are now hailing Billy Graham as Pastor to the Nation might be put off by my demographic profile: a northern, secular, liberal Democrat, living in a big city in a blue state, who reads the New York Times, watches MSNBC, and has a Harvard degree. But the Baptist preacher from the mountains of North Carolina did not flinch at working with me.

Without ever inquiring about my faith or lack thereof, he personally supported my authorship of a book about the stories of people who had known him, Billy Graham & Me, affording me the cooperation of his closest colleagues and eventually writing an afterword for the book. He was not naïve about the bitterness of the red and blue divide, yet he chose to focus on the purple in all of us.

Long before the alt-right fringe made inroads into the Republican party, Graham championed diversity and inclusion. His compassion was not transactional, his faith needing no affirmation from sophisticates and celebrities to prove its worth. For Graham, everyone was his equal; only God is above us. He didn’t serve people because they were Christians; he did it because he was Christian. He had taken up the cross to preach the Good News that his God loves you even if you don’t love Him back, encouraging instead of persecuting those deemed sinful by his theology.  Continue here....

-- Steve Posner

3 Brain Tricks

​

Is the noise in my head bothering you?

Is the noise in my head bothering you?

The monologue that runs in our brain is loud. It's heavy-metal loud compared to the quiet signals we get from the rest of the world.

All day, every day, that noise keeps going. It's the only voice that has seen everything we've seen, believes everything we believe. It's the noise that not only criticizes every action of every other person who disagrees with us, but it criticizes their motives as well. And, if we question it, it criticizes us as well.

Is it any wonder that projection is more powerful than empathy?

When we meet people, we either celebrate when they agree with us or plot to change or ignore them when they don't. There's not a lot of room for, "they might have a different experience of this moment than I do."

That noise in our head is selfish, afraid and angry. That noise is self-satisfied, self-important and certain. That noise pushes intimacy away and will do anything it can to degrade those that might challenge us.

But, against all odds, empathy is possible.

It's possible to amplify those too-quiet signals that others send us and to practice imagining, even for a moment, what it might be like to have their noise instead of our noise.

If we put in the effort and devote the time to practice this skill, we can get better at it. We merely have to begin

-- Seth Godin

Do What You Do

​Do what you do...because you believe it is right or good.

Consider feedback, but don't let feedback alone be the determiner of your good — while helpful, it can also be self-serving (to the giver of it) and distracting.

So, do what you do because you believe it is good to do.

...besides, it continues to surprise what people find valuable — which makes it pretty clear that what is true strikes people in different ways and at different times. Your job is not to do something that people will like. Your job is to do what you do and let the truth of doing so do its own work.

Then Decide

Instagram: bobgoff

Most of our decisions are driven by either love or fear.
Figure out who's doing the talking, then decide what you'll do.

-- Bob Goff

LT: Accomplishing Something Together

​I want younger leaders especially to know that few things are as satisfying as the experience of accomplishing something together.

-- Gordon T. Smith

I would have to say that accomplishing something together may have been among the most instructive elements of my early experience as a developing leader.

Wherever I Can Find It

​I want to pursue truth wherever I can find it (or, wherever it finds me)

Ethical Infants

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. . . . Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

-- General Omar Bradley

I am aware personally today of how easy it is to be binary (and, so hard to be open).  I have to continue to learn the way of openness - faith (living).

Say It: "I Don't Know"

The more that you learn...the more you figure out that you don't know very much....

We always want to be calibrating and updating our beliefs.

Confirmation-bias, motivated reasoning...are going to cause us to protect our beliefs which are part of our identify.  

Embracing uncertainty invites people to be your collaborators.

-- Annie Duke

It Is Necessary

​Make yourself a priority once in a while. It is not selfish. It is necessary.

-- Oleg Vishnepolsky

32

Today, Tami and I have been married for 32 years.  Stopping to consider the significance of that — there is something kind of miraculous about it.

I'm not sure we've ever been more unified and unique.  Perhaps, this is a matter of awareness — we have come together in so many ways, sharing so much of a vision about life and so much more free to both be and to allow each other to be our unique selves.  I am so grateful for the way this works over time and that God has been so merciful to us, individually and together.

Over this last year, we have faced some challenging things; each in our own way.  And, we have done it somehow together.  Some things feel like they are being torn away from us.  At the same time, new things have formed; we wonder about how these realities work, how they may even be necessary.  Dying and rebirth = growing.  As we look ahead, we are excited about the future, about what we are discovering and will yet discover...about God, about life, and our marriage.

Tami amazes me — I'm so glad we're in this together.

Reflection

Mirror Lake, Banff National Park

I've noticed...that I am drawn to reflection — literal and metaphorical.

And, sometimes you need some distance from something in order to see.

LT: Bringing You Problems

The day people stop bringing you problems is the day you have stopped leading them.  They either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care.  Either case is a failure of leadership.

-- Colin Powell

Same Way

I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.

-- Albert Einstein

Spiritual Director, Fool

The person who has himself as a spiritual director has a fool for director.

-- St. Teresa of Avila

Snow & Light

Snow and light — speech without words.

Human Emotions

Man, I'm having a blast these days with the progression of the Saturday Mornings posts. Such a great convergence (more visible at some times than others, to be sure) of ideas.

Like this:
​
I'm exploring the emotion of my anger these days; how about you, what are you wondering about in your life?

Wisdom Begins In...

Wonder — when I saw this, I had to get it, as it expresses how fond I am of this perspective of wisdom.

Like a profound and reverberating truth, it is full of so many graces — descriptive, instructive, aspirational, unencumbered, and wide-open — for how it works for me and my view of others through it.

Prefers to Life Itself

It is merely that when a man has found something which he prefers to life itself, he then for the first time begins to live.

-- G. K. Chesterton

Not Like Magic

Self-discipline is not like magic — you don't just try something and then, "poof", you automatically grow by 1.5%. Self-discipline is something that can create a context for growth to occur. That context, when reinforced over and over, can produce substantial growth, especially over time.

Stories You Tell Yourself

​Since you always believe the stories you tell yourself, embracing who we are is the first step to becoming who we want to be.

-- Mareo McCracken

Want To Be

​Unsuccessful people make decisions based on current situations. Successful people make decisions based on where they want to be.

-- Benjamin Hardy

Alive and Active

Obviously, then, the 'Word of God' is bigger than the Bible itself — in other words, it is bigger than a book.  The Word of God is present in the Bible, as it is everywhere else.  In that way, it is living, not just 'there'.  And, it is moving — circling, penetrating, revealing, leading; it is active, not passive.

So, what activates the efficacy of this truth in me?  It has something to do with me, my disposition to it, my working assumptions about it — how awake I am to it.

It is almost as if this — Word of God — is life itself.  If I want to be alive and active, I must recognize it (wherever it is), because it informs and impacts my sense of reality.

What Everyone Gets Wrong About The Economy

Something You Attract

​Your level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development, because success is something you attract by the person you become.

-- Ryan Holiday

BS

​People believe their own bullshit.

-- Dom Price

“In the digital world, we’re privy to an abundance of knowledge,” he says. “We believe getting smart means knowing more, but in fact, it is not. We’re not practicing what we know. The acquisition of knowledge is dangerous when you don’t practice it.”

In order to succeed, Price argues that you need to understand the importance of unlearning—identifying the things you know that you don’t have time to nurture, and then letting some of them go. Continue here....

— Stephanie Vozza

Work We Have To Do

I've noticed...​that at least on the human level, the work I have to do to develop and grow is primarily mine — no one else can do it for me.

LT: Don't Listen

​Leaders who don't listen will eventually be surrounded by people who have nothing to say.

-- Andy Stanley

Monday Morning, Pastor Press Conference

Isn't Slow

​
The beauty of Scripture is that it reminds us of the reality (observable in many places) that God has been entering our human contexts from the very beginning, with great purpose...inviting us to reconsider all of our conclusions about life and Him.

We Each Must Enter

What a remarkable perspective, from someone hurt so badly by Larry Nassar:

In our early hearings. you brought your Bible into the courtroom and you have spoken of praying for forgiveness. And so it is on that basis that I appeal to you. If you have read the Bible you carry, you know the definition of sacrificial love portrayed is of God himself loving so sacrificially that he gave up everything to pay a penalty for the sin he did not commit. By his grace, I, too, choose to love this way.

You spoke of praying for forgiveness. But Larry, if you have read the Bible you carry, you know forgiveness does not come from doing good things, as if good deeds can erase what you have done. It comes from repentance which requires facing and acknowledging the truth about what you have done in all of its utter depravity and horror without mitigation, without excuse, without acting as if good deeds can erase what you have seen this courtroom today.

If the Bible you carry says it is better for a stone to be thrown around your neck and you throw into a lake than for you to make even one child stumble. And you have damaged hundreds.

The Bible you speak carries a final judgment where all of God's wrath and eternal terror is poured out on men like you. Should you ever reach the point of truly facing what you have done, the guilt will be crushing. And that is what makes the gospel of Christ so sweet. Because it extends grace and hope and mercy where none should be found. And it will be there for you.

I pray you experience the soul crushing weight of guilt so you may someday experience true repentance and true forgiveness from God, which you need far more than forgiveness from me -- though I extend that to you as well.

-- Rachael Denhollander

As painful as they may be, we must continue to acknowledge such things — talk about them, enter them...not avoid them.  We have such a model of entering in, in the Bible.  I suspect that this may be among the greater themes of the Christian Scriptures — God entering such contexts of our world throughout time.

And, each of us can do so; in fact, we are called to do this.  To enter, where others can't or won’t go (more on this part of the issue related to the church here).  We aren’t called to all do it for the same thing or in the same way.  So, we can have great appreciation and encouragement for others and the way they are entering the many contexts of life.

Here’s an example: http://wvpe.org/post/listening-new-year

Approval

Instagram: bobgoff

We can't give away love freely
if what we're really looking for is approval.

-- Bob Goff

Companioned

​The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is.

-- Parker Palmer

What You Are...For

I've noticed...that a key to emotional health is to determine what you are for, rather than just what you are against.

LT: Confidence to Trust

​Confidence in leadership is the confidence to trust others.

-- Simon Sinek

Reflection of Ourselves

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

-- Thomas Merton

The Unlikely Crackup of Evangelicalism

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has written recently about what he sees as a possible “crackup” that may be coming in the evangelical community. He sees a quiet version of that split already happening among the younger generation, many of whom seem to be moving in other directions: mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy.

The more dramatic gap, as Douthat sees it, is between, on the one hand, the elites—“evangelical intellectuals and writers, and their friends in other Christian traditions,”—and those millions of folks, on the other hand, who worship in evangelical churches. It may be, he says, that these elites “have overestimated how much a serious theology has ever mattered to evangelicalism’s sociological success.” It could be that the views and attitudes on display in the recent support for rightist causes have really been there all along, without much of an interest in the kinds of intellectual-theological matters that have preoccupied the elites. If so, then the elites will eventually go off on their own, leaving behind an evangelicalism that is “less intellectual, more partisan, more racially segregated”—a movement that is in reality “not all that greatly changed” from what it has actually been in the past.

Douthat hopes he is wrong about this, and I think that he is. But his scenario has some support by increasing voices in the evangelical academy who are saying that they can no longer identify with a grassroots evangelicalism that has become regrettably “politicized” these days.

One problem with the Douthat scenario is that it suggests that there is a significant gap between the vast majority of “ordinary” evangelicals and a much smaller band of “evangelical intellectuals.” To see whether that picture is really accurate, we have to fill in some specific detail.  Continue here....

-- Richard Mouw

Net Neutrality - Explained With A Burger King Whopper

Gitanjali 35

Poem for the week -- "Gitanjali 35":

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
     Where knowledge is free;
     Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow 
          domestic walls;
     Where words come out from the depth of truth;
     Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
     Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the                          
          dreary desert sand of dead habit;
     Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening                                
          thought and action—
     Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

-- Rabindranath Tagore

The Buddha wasn’t A Buddhist

The Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist. A religion grew around his community. His realizations were universal realizations about suffering, the nature of suffering and the nature of the human mind.

-- Jon Kabat-Zinn

Too Long

I've noticed...​that trying to hold on to anything for too long, at some point is counter-productive, if not destructive.

LT: Power

​Many common concepts about leadership are entrenched in issues of power. Power to consume things, protect interests, and control others.

The irony is that leadership IS, in fact, about power. But, the purpose of leadership power is to liberate, not consume and control. This is why the power of service is so important in leadership.

It's not about the needs of the leader, it's about the needs of the followers.

Controversy

​In a culture that is prepared to sell (literally) anything, selling controversy is easy. What may be more disturbing is that, unlike our misgivings about the selling of some things, we all are buying controversy. Not substance, controversy. What would happen if we just stopped? What would happen to TV, to the Internet? To us?

Mountains

You don’t have to climb mountains named I Will Perform.

You don’t have to climb mountains named I Will Produce.

Jesus flattens that mountain before you with His Grace: The Lord will Provide. With enough strength. With enough wisdom. With More Than Enough of Himself.

More important than you trying to muster up sufficient grit and determination for the new year — is that you simply accept His sufficient grace and liberation every day.  Continue here....

-- Ann Voskamp

How will you transform in 2018?

From a rather beautiful essay here....

...the work of transformation – it’s not matching ourselves to roles that reflect exactly what we did before. It’s metamorphosing into a future state. 

I imagine your mind – like mine - is alight with the apt metaphors of this metamorphosis. So was the Radiolab journalist Molly Webster when she reported this story. She said it provoked in her the following thoughts: “It’s not just what we carry forward from our past into the future. It’s the idea, what of my future self is in me right now?”

To truly transform, we don’t have to fully fall apart – though part of it requires descent into a state that looks and feels like goo. What really happens is that there are parts we keep, parts we create or grow, and parts that we must leave behind. There are some hard parts we remember. And all the while, we have the biological means to breathe through it all. 

What we let go is as important as what we take on.

That line really strikes me, as does this thought here:

To me, the most amazing part of the story of metamorphosis is that the caterpillar comes with everything it needs to become something else. It is equipped to let the past dissolve and prepared to engineer its own future parts.  I like to think, so are we.  

-- Katya Andresen

Time to be the fine line of light

Poem for the week -- "Time to be the fine line of light":

between the blind and the sill, nothing
really. There are so many things

that destroy. To think solely of them
is as foolish and expedient as not

thinking of them at all. All I want
is to be the river though I return

again and again to the clouds.
All I want is to stop beginning sentences

with All I want. No—no really all
I want is this morning: my daughter

and my son saying “Da!” back and forth
over breakfast, cracking each other up

while eating peanut butter toast
and raspberries, making a place for

the two of them I will, eventually,
no longer be allowed to enter. Time to be

the fine line. Time to practice being
the line. And then maybe the darkness.

-- Carrie Fountain

The lesson I learned in my 30s that changed how I live my life

As children, we were told by our parents when we were good and when we had done something wrong. At school, our teachers and their dreaded red biros told us if we got it right or wrong. At first, we’d get gold stars and then we’d start getting alphabetical grades and exact percentage scores to tell us how right (or wrong) we were. When we did science experiments, we always knew the correct results ahead of time – and when the dots didn’t line up along that diagonal line, we adjusted the data to make it fit. There was always a right answer, and our job was to find it.

The problems start when we go out into the real world...continue here....

--  Anna Lundberghttps

Menial Tasks

I've noticed...that there is nothing quite like menial tasks to allow for opportunities to consider truths about things in my life.

Truths like this one:
​
People with a high need to control others are generally doing it as a way of dealing with the lack of control they’re experiencing within themselves.

-- Rob Bell

LT: Stop Talking, Start Listening

​Leaders who take organizational conversation seriously know when to stop talking and start listening. Few behaviors enhance conversational intimacy as much as attending to what people say. True attentiveness signals respect for people of all ranks and roles, a sense of curiosity, and even a degree of humility.

-- Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind, Leadership Is A Conversation

MLK Day: Peace On Earth

​If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not God Himself

​Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the idea of God, not God himself.

-- Miguel D'Unamuno

Follow These 8 Steps to Stay Focused and Reach Your Goals

Accomplishing a goal can be hard work. 

Check out these eight steps to help you prioritize and clear your mind.

1. Stop multitasking
2. Block out your days
3. Get your blood pumping
4. Help your technology help you
5. Meditate
6. Change up what’s in your headphones
7. Streamline your communication
8. Find an environment with the right kind of noise.

More detail here....

-- Nina Zipkin

Evergreen

In light of this 'Poem for the Week -- "Evergreen"', the image above (from our recent trip to Glacier National Park) seemed fitting.

What still grows in winter?
Fingernails of witches and femmes,
green moss on river rocks,
lit with secrets... I let myself
go near the river but not
the railroad: this is my bargain.
Water boils in a kettle in the woods
and I can hear the train grow louder
but I also can’t, you know?
Then I’m shaving in front of an
unbreakable mirror while a nurse
watches over my shoulder.
Damn. What still grows in winter?
Lynda brought me basil I crushed
with my finger and thumb just to
smell the inside of a thing. So
I go to the river but not the rail-
road, think I’ll live another year.
The river rock dig into my shoulders
like a lover who knows I don’t want
power. I release every muscle against
the rock and I give it all my warmth.
                                    Snow shakes
onto my chest quick as table salt.
Branches above me full of pine needle
whips: when the river rock is done
with me, I could belong to the evergreen.
Safety is a rock I throw into the river.
My body, ready. Don’t even think
a train run through this town anymore.

-- Oliver Baez Bendorf

Corruption

​I suspect that corruption hasn't really changed all that much, given the nature of it. What has changed is the ability to expose it, via things like the capacity to store information, the Internet, etc.

Rarely

I've noticed...​we are rarely rejected personally as much as we feel we are -- people tend to be too absorbed with themselves to be that intentional.

LT: Capable

Being capable is one thing, but that is primarily for your benefit.  Inviting incapable people into things with you is the real value of your capability, because that is for them.

Weapons

To know what they can do, you have to get comfortable using weapons - literal or emotional ones - in order to limit careless damage, to be effective with their purpose.

Settle

Instagram: bobgoff

We won't figure out what's sacred in our lives
if we settle for what's safe.

-- Bob Goff

Whitefish, MT: Something Unbelievable

There is something unbelievable about the combination of snow, pine, and silence.  You think and feel and see things you otherwise wouldn’t:

We so enjoyed our time at The Treehouse in Whitefish, MT this week:


...more pics here.

Barter

Poem for the week -- "Barter":

Life has loveliness to sell,
   All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
   Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up
Holding wonder in a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,
   Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
   Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit's still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,
   Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
   Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstacy
Give all you have been, or could be.

-- Sara Teasdale

Un-becoming

Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.

-- Paulo Coelho

Pay Closest Attention

I've noticed...​it does me well to pay closest attention to what people are inviting me toward, especially when they're persistent.

LT: Action

​Words may inspire, but only action creates change.

-- Simon Sinek

New (Year)

Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that.
You cannot hold onto the old, all the while declaring that you want something new.
The old will defy the new;
The old will deny the new;
The old will decry the new.
There is only one way to bring in the new. You must make room for it.

-- Neale Donald Walsch

Perhaps this is why we have times of renewal, that are seemingly built-in -- like New Years Day, the seasons, or that restlessness we all have somewhere within us to begin again.  Everything moves and changes, whether we like it or not, because it is how growth happens.

As I leave 2017 and enter a new year, I recognize that this is happening in me.  It is, in fact, making room in me for something new.  And, I don't want to resist it, because it is the necessity of regeneration in me, as in all of us.

Born Again

Everything is moving, everything is changing; everything must die, and be reborn.  This seems fitting as we face the prospects of a new year:

Strange as it may seem in this time of cultural anxiety, economic near collapse, terrorist fear, political violence, environmental crisis, and partisan anger, I believe that the United States (and not only the United States) is caught up in the throes of a spiritual awakening, a period of sustained religious and political transformation during which our ways of seeing the world, understanding ourselves, and expressing faith are being, to borrow a phrase, “born again.” Indeed, the shifts around religion contribute to the anxiety, even as anxiety gives rise to new sorts of understandings of God and the spiritual life. Fear and confusion signal change. This transformation is what some hope will be a “Great Turning” toward a global community based on shared human connection, dedicated to the care of our planet, committed to justice and equality, that seeks to raise hundreds of millions from poverty, violence, and oppression.

Exponential change creates exponential fear along with exponential hope. Massive transformation creates the double-edged cultural sword of decline and renewal. Exponential change ends those things that people once assumed and trusted to be true. At the same time, upheaval opens new pathways to the future. Change is about endings and beginnings and the necessary interrelationship between the two.

In his Letter to the Romans, Paul has a marvelous line: “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). In so many places, there are signs of the Holy Spirit working at all levels of society. The church might well have done its work as leaven, because much of this reform, enlightenment, compassion, and healing is outside the bounds of organized religion. Only God is going to get the credit.

The toothpaste is out of the tube. There are enough people who know the big picture of Jesus’ thrilling and alluring vision of the reign of God that this Great Turning cannot be stopped. There are enough people going on solid inner journeys that it is not merely ideological or theoretical. This reformation is happening in a positive, nonviolent way. The changes are not just from the top down, but much more from the bottom up. Not from the outside in, but from the inside out. Not from clergy to laity, but from a unified field where class is of minor importance. The big questions are being answered at a peaceful and foundational level, with no need to oppose, deny, or reject. I sense the urgency of the Holy Spirit, with over seven billion humans now on the planet. There is so much to love and embrace.

I am convinced that the only future of the church, the one Body of Christ, is ecumenical and shared. Each of our traditions have preserved and fostered one or another jewel in the huge crown that is the Cosmic Christ; only together can we make up the unity of the Spirit, as we learn to defer to one another out of love.

-- Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion

Permanent Process

Conversion is a permanent process, in which very often the obstacles we meet make us lose all we had gained and start anew.

-- Gustavo Gutierrez

Spoken For

Poem for the week -- "Spoken For":

I didn’t know I was blue,
until I heard her sing.

I was never aware so much
had been lost
even before I was born.
There was so much to lose
even before I knew
what it meant to choose.

Born blue,
living blue unconfessed, blue
in concealment, I’ve lived all my life
at the plinth
of greater things than me.

Morning is greater
with its firstborn light and birdsong.
Noon is taller, though a moment’s realm.
Evening is ancient and immense, and
night’s storied house more huge.

But I had no idea.
And would have died without a clue,
except she began to sing. And I understood

my soul is a bride enthralled by an unmet groom,
or else the groom wholly spoken for, blue
in ardor, happy in eternal waiting.

I heard her sing and knew
I would never hear the true

name of each thing
until I realized the abysmal
ground of all things. Her singing
touched that ground in me.

Now, dying of my life, everything is made new.
Now, my life is not my life. I have no life
apart from all of life.

And my death is not my death,
but a pillow beneath my head, a rock
propping the window open
to admit the jasmine.

I heard her sing,
and I’m no longer afraid.
Now that I know what she knows, I hope
never to forget
how giant the gone
and immaculate the going.
How much I’ve already lost.
How much I go on losing.
How much I’ve lived
all one blue. O, how much
I go on living.

-- Li-Young Lee