Archive for the ‘Growth’ Category

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Only God Can Label You

May 13, 2015

He was a quiet kid. Kept to himself. Freshman trumpet player in the university marching band. Away at band camp before school even started. Probably his first college experience.

We were in the same cabin. I was also a freshman, first experience away like that, percussionist. We shared the cabin with the drum major. Head guy.

He sensed a weakness, I guess. I only thanked God that it was the trumpeter he picked on. Labeled him a nerd. I guess that’s worse than geek. He was merciless the entire week. 

The trumpeter? He kept his head down and never said a word.

Labels that others give us can really hurt. They can also misdirect our lives.

Label someone as fat early in their life, and even though they may get fit as an adult, chances are they’ll always feel fat. It’s really hard to outgrow the hurts of adolescence.

I think it was third grade when they gave us some kind of intelligence test. I was clueless. All I know is that my parents got called to visit the teacher. When they came back, I had a label–smart. I’m still clueless. I’ve been trying to disprove that my entire life. <smiles> But that resulted in lectures every time I didn’t get straight As until dad gave up on me while I was in college. I never played the game to get a grade. I’d learn enough from the class and then go off and  study what I wanted to study. (And, yes, I did get a degree. The department shut down the graduate program before I finished my master’s work, and I never finished that. No need to have a paper.)

Yesterday I listened to Andy Stanley talk to a group of 8th graders about labels. He warned them about letting other people label you. What great advice!

We are children of God. That is the label God puts on us. We don’t need another. It’s hard to overcome a label that someone in authority puts on you–even if it’s just the drum major. 

By the way, I recommend listening to Stanley every week. I listen to Bill Hybels, John Ortberg, Gene Appel (when they load his talks into iTunes), Stanley every week. I also listen to technology news and other podcasts that broaden my experience. I recommend finding your favorites and listen to something daily for your growth.

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What Is God Like?

April 21, 2015

“He is an old man with a long, white beard.”

“He is angry, vengeful, and if we don’t do the right things to satisfy him, we’ll go to Hell.”

“He is so full of love that he blesses everything and everybody.”

“She is the creator giving birth to the universe.”

“He constructed the universe and developed all the physical laws that run it.”

None of these, of course, can be found in the Bible without the use of much imagination. Jesus said Father. John said spirit and love.

The old man and many other myths come from the Middle Ages and its particular blend of fears and incorporation of pagan ideas into Christianity.

We must be mindful of how we come to God.

If our emotions rule us, they will construct a God in the image of whatever prevalent emotion we may have: fear, sympathy, love, disinterest.

If our intellect rules us, it will construct a God of distance, impersonal, giver of physical and other laws.

We work out our relationship with God bringing our whole self before the Father pleading for wholeness in our mind, body, soul. We move, as Paul put it, away from childish ideas about God. 

As in all relationships, this relationship grows over time. We discover more and more about each other. We grow closer, then more distant. We correct each other (well, maybe we don’t correct God, but we certainly try, don’t we).

Take care what rules us. Every morning ask for God to rule our emotions, thoughts, and actions during the coming day.

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Doing The Difficult Thing Adds Value

March 25, 2015

There are two types of organizations. Two types of churches. One assumes customers or members. Its leaders see their role as stewards of what is. Others believe passionately about their mission. Their products will change the way people live for the better. Their gift of spirit will lead people to better lives.

The first is easy. The second one often challenging. The first leads to the path of decay and organizational death. The second leads to energy, growth, kindling that passion in others…and others.

Seth Godin made his mark as a marketing guru in high technology. He wrote recently:

Of course it’s difficult…
Students choose to attend expensive colleges but don’t major in engineering because the courses are killer.

Doing more than the customary amount of customer service is expensive, time-consuming and hard to sustain.

Raising money for short-term urgent projects is easier than finding support for the long, difficult work of changing the culture and the infrastructure.

Finding a new path up the mountain is far more difficult than hiring a sherpa and following the tried and true path. Of course it is. That’s precisely why it’s scarce and valuable. 

The word economy comes from the Greek and the French, and is based on the concept of scarcity. The only things that are scarce in the world of connection and services and the net are the things that are difficult, and the only things that are valuable are the things that are scarce. When we intentionally seek out the difficult tasks, we’re much more likely to actually create value.

Think of his comment about raising money relative to your church or non-profit. I am. It is condemning of the approach I took over in my ministry. Buffeting from project to project. No real stability or plan for growth. No real involvement from the larger group. No commitment to the hard work of a sustaining ministry.

What is scarce these days is attention. I wrote yesterday about distraction. We have so much information–24-hour news channels, 24-hour sports, the Internet, apps, check Facebook every couple of minutes–when do we have time to put our attention, our focus, on what’s important?

What sort of leader are you? Do you need a kick start? Take time to focus our attention completely, if only for 30 minute time slots, on thinking about the long, difficult work? Or just slide along becoming ever more comfortable in a state of distracted disinterestedness?

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Getting Fit For God’s Work

November 13, 2014

This spring began a season of stress and frustration. A business deal with which I was uncomfortable from the beginning went rapidly downhill over the winter. By spring, I was looking for a way out.

Travel is not always that bad. But when you combine personal travel on top of business travel, it means there is no time for pause. For rest and reflection.

On top of that, my soccer responsibilities grew and became frustrating in some regards and just plain hard work in others. And I had taken on responsibilities at church during a lull period in my life. Well, that lull went away 😉

As a result, my ability to work out decreased. My ability to sit still and focus during meditation withered. Still, I accomplished much.

The climax was three plus weeks of being home only three days — getting home from a business trip only to take a family trip. Most of the time I could not exercise. At my age, you deteriorate rapidly.

I noticed the first week back. Attempting to run daily. Back into my Yoga routine. My muscles ached. Constantly.

But the next week was much better. By the third week back into routine, I was running better, practicing Yoga better, feeling tight and fit.

It is no wonder that Paul often invoked the images of physical activities, of athletes, in his spiritual development messages. You have to work at it. And if you take some time off, your spiritual muscles will ache and protest until you get back into the habit and start feeling fit spiritually.

Read the letter to the Romans. Don’t stop and analyze each verse. Just grasp the broad strokes of what Paul is laying out. He is teaching us about spiritual development. First we were away from God living in our lives as we saw fit (sinners). Then something happened, some consequence of our actions impacted us. Then we saw that through Jesus God’s grace was available to us. We accepted, Gods grace was poured out on us, and we began to live the with-God life basking in the Spirit.

Just as we work at getting back into physical shape, we can also fall out of Spiritual shape. We work at it through study and prayer and practice and find that we have renewed our strength in God.

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Perception and Reality

October 13, 2014

“I liked it better out there. The skies are always blue. Here, the skies are always gray.”

Talking with an acquaintance the other day.

Of course, she returns to Ohio in the changing seasons. We get a lot of cloud cover from fronts and changeableness. Some geographies have pretty much the same weather year around.

But is her observation the reality? Is your observation reality? Or maybe your perception creates your reality?

Supposedly this story came from Carl Sandberg, but I heard it through Earl Nightingale.

Seems a farmer was standing by his field leaning on a fence post contemplating the crops and the weather when a stranger drove by and stopped. “What sort of people live around here?” the stranger asked.

“what sort of people lived where you are from?”

“Well, they are lying, cheating, miserable people.” “I expect you’ll find the people around here the same way.”

Second stranger comes by. “What sort of people live around here?” “What sort of people were there where you’re from?” “Well, they are honest, hard-working people.” “I expect you’ll find the people around here to be the same.”

The point, of course, is that our perceptions often cloud our view of reality. Just look at politics. If you are hard-core whatever, you’ll interpret all events through that filter.

When you can throw that filter away and see reality, then you can start to grow.

That’s one goal of meditation. To calm the mind and begin to focus just on the moment. Only as things are.

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Traits for Success in Life

September 23, 2014

Part of my daily morning routine is scanning some news and a variety of blogs using Feedly on my iPad. One blog I’ve followed for several years is Lifehacker.

Recently it ran a post based on a TED Talk that I had not yet heard about results of research into traits of successful people. From Lifehacker:

Lecturer Richard St. John traveled around the world for ten years to conduct face-to-face interviews with successful people like Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s, Bill Gates, Arianna Huffington, James Cameron, Matt Groening, and even Dan Ackroyd. The list of successful, influential people he interviewed goes on and on. After analyzing everything he’d learned, he come up with these eight traits:

Passion: Love what you do.
Work: Really hard.
Focus: On one thing, not everything.
Push: And keep on pushing yourself.
Ideas: Come up with some good ones.
Improve: Keep improving yourself and what you do.
Serve: Serve others something of value.
Persist: Because there is no overnight success.

Somehow I think that most of us could have compiled this list with a little reflection. Contemplate on these virtues. No matter where you find yourself, isn’t it great to meet people with passion for what they do? Those whose orientation is to serve others?

But think of the trait of constantly improving yourself. This is a lifelong journey. Never stop growing. Never stop improving.

Like this list? Have others? Let me know. This is a great list to put in a journal or on a card by the computer to refer to occasionally just a a check up on how we are progressing on our journeys.

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When Confronted With Reality

August 25, 2014

Colin Dexter wrote a series of detective novels based on the character “Inspector Morse.” They were adapted by BBC (and shown on PBS as part of the Sunday Masterpiece Mystery summer series) and then used as the source for the latest series “Endeavor” showing Morse as a young man.

Morse puts the pieces together, comes to a logical conclusion, then discovers he’s wrong. Unlike Sherlock Holmes who was always right, Morse is seldom right–until the end.

He figures it out, discovers he’s wrong, puts the pieces together again with the new piece of information, and then he’s wrong again. This continues until the final few pages.

I just spent a half-hour this morning fruitlessly searching for the source of the observation:

There are two types of people when faced with reality: those who bend the facts to fit with their preconceived view and those who adapt themselves to the new facts.

Which are you? Do you even recognize that in yourself? Can you change if you need to?

I am instinctively like Morse. I will adapt to a new reality. It may take me some time. I may have to digest the facts. Sometimes it’s a shock to discover that you’re wrong. Or that you’re not the center of the universe.

Some people seem incapable of adapting. They tell themselves a story of how things were. Convince themselves of that version of reality (which wasn’t real). And continue on.

Is there any way to deal with such people when they remain obstinately convinced of reality the way it exists in their imagination?

Probably not.

But if that person is us, then we eventually need to come to the realization that we’ve interpreted the facts wrongly and that it is us–not the facts–that need to change.

It says in Proverbs “A fool returns to his folly.” The book was written to be like a mirror held up to our lives where we see that we are the fool, and that we need to change. I’m not sure we can change someone else, but you might ponder these questions. Where is it in our lives that we hold on to a view of reality that is wrong? What can we do to open our eyes and see?

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Just Stubborn or Unwilling to Grow

May 22, 2014

A trait in successful leaders is the willingness to continue growing as a person. It’s something we should all work at our entire lives.

I think about all the people who came to Jesus for advice and went away sad because they could not do what he advised. Just think, the person best fitted to help people grow, the person filled with the Spirit of God, gave personal advice and often the other would walk away sad.

I’ve come across people–leaders–who seem to have no capacity for growth. Some don’t even seem to acknowledge that there is even any room in them for more growth.

Just had dinner with a man from Scotland. He said he was from up north, not the south like Robert Burns. His comment reminded me of the famous line in a poem, which I will not give in the vernacular, that went Oh what a gift he gives us, to see ourselves as others see us.

Do you ever, like me, walk away from a situation thinking, God, what a jerk I was? I’ll reflect and swear I’ll change. Which I don’t enough. I’m just a work in progress.

So, I wonder. Are some people just stubborn? They refuse to listen to others or acknowledge the need to change? Or, when the Clue Train stopped, did they just fail to accept a delivery?

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Share The Wealth With A New Generation

May 21, 2014

Yes, I am traveling again. This week two conferences in two cities. Actually, I found two additional conferences at the Houston Hilton Americas and the George R. Brown Convention Center. So three so far. Today driving to San Antonio for another conference. Then home for a little while (most of a week).

Last weekend I recruited and organized referees for a youth soccer tournament. For the first time in my career I heard the vast majority of coaches actually giving instructions to their players. Usually they just scream at them from across the field to do things that I bet they had not practiced.

As far as referees, I had a mixture of experienced adults and beginning youth. I had an opportunity to work with a young lady who had a grand total of one game of experience. She was great. There were opportunities for me to chat with her and give her encouragement. Then I could write to the referee leaders in her area to suggest they work with her to bring her along.

I heard several of the young referees talk about how much they learned during the two days.

That’s why I’m involved. I love the sport, of course. But I love to see people develop. I teach the skills of soccer refereeing, but I also teach life skills about decision making, being strong, getting into physical shape, working with a team.

Andy Stanley (on this podcast) talks about “Sharing the Wealth.” What are we doing to help the next generation take our place–and do it better? Teaching, mentoring, encouraging, providing experiences are some things we can do.

We are not here to live only for ourselves like so many unfortunately believe and preach. We are here to help other humans develop and grow. What are you doing?

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Are You Emotional or Rational or Both

May 6, 2014

Just watching people in a group setting recently, I noticed a large emotional response to a situation about which no one has facts. That started me thinking about three kinds of people–or rather three types of ways of relating to the world and to others.

As humans develop and grow, they begin as emotional beings. Responses to situations are driven by emotions. When our growth and development proceeds normally, we gradually develop the ability to reflect, think and apply reason.

Have you noticed that some people even as adults react with emotional responses untempered by using the thinking part of themselves? Many times these people quickly regret their response (eventually some sort of thinking/reflection sets in) and then they must apologize.

I’ve noticed that these people quite often exhibit a sort of narcissism–in their hearts, it’s all about them.

I work with engineers–a lot. Engineers are trained thinkers. Got me thinking of the opposite trait in people. They develop the thinking part while burying the emotional part (Jung, among others, had much to say about the effects of this). These people can be maddening to the emotional type of people. They can appear cold and aloof. They can also exhibit a sort of narcissism–it’s all about me and my thoughts.

What we really need to do to develop fully as humans is to recognize the emotional part of us, apply some controls over those to keep us stable through our thinking capability, and then seek to be filled by the Holy Spirit which will move us beyond both and let us experience others.

It’s important that we not just get carried away with a solely emotional response. That leads to instability, conflict, alienation from others. We need to be united with God and with others in order for us to be healthy and for our local organizations and societies to be healthy.

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