Ponder this...

Transition & Identity

I ran across this at Len's excellent blog.  Clearly he has spent some time in this classic book. 

"Every time we go through a personal transition, we are shaken loose from the identity associated with the particular activity and role. For some reason this is particularly hard for leaders; perhaps because people often become dependent on us. We, in turn, become dependent on the position and status and our place in the network of relationships.

Every loss is an opportunity to grow deeper. Loss of identity that is rooted in activity is a particular kind of invitation to grow deeper.. deeper in an identity that is immovable because it is founded in God’s creational activity. Finally, we are loved for who we are - not for what we can do or achieve.

The temptation for leaders who are in transition is to look immediately for ways to express their gifting again. We justify this as stewardship. “My gifts are too important to be retired for this year.” In reality, our gifts are too important to be continue to expressed apart from growth in grace. God invites us to abide more deeply."

Upside down taxes

I just finished off my taxes yesterday and came across these words by Gary Thomas today...

Thinking about eternity helps us retrieve perspective. I'm reminded of this every year when I figure my taxes. During the year, I rejoice at the paychecks and extra income, and sometimes I flinch when I write out the tithe and offering. I do my best to be a joyful giver, but I confess it is not always easy, especially when there are other perceived needs and wants. At the end of the year, however, all of that changes. As I'm figuring my tax liability, I wince at every source of income and rejoice with every tithe and offering check--more income means more tax, but every offering and tithe means less tax. Everything is turned upside down, or perhaps, more appropriately, right side up. I suspect Judgment Day will be like that.

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Limiting beliefs

Patricia Soldati in this article articulates some stuff that makes sense to me in a lot more spheres of life than just our careers.  She  goes in the article to suggest some ways in which we can change our beliefs.

When it comes to our careers, here are the most common limiting beliefs.

   1. I am not skilled enough.
   2. Hard work is noble.
   3. Fulfilling work is for others, not me.
   4. Fulfillment comes from my personal life, not my work life.
   5. I'm too old to make a major life change.
   6. My family and friends will think I'm crazy.
   7. I'm a fraud – my success is a result of the corporate structure, or my tenure.
   8. The unknown isn't safe.
   9. I'm not sure that I can trust my decisions or choices.
  10. I'm afraid of failing in a new role.

Beliefs stay with us for three primary reasons:

First, we label them. ("I'm no good at math. My Mom (or Dad) wasn't either.") Labeling beliefs and focusing on where they come from helps us rationalize and make them okay.

Then we engage in selective data gathering. We seek out evidence to support our beliefs and ignore evidence that would support the opposite belief.

Finally, we disguise them – sugar-coat them – to make them more palatable. They become an ego advantage. For example, "I'm not as smart as…" can become "I work harder" – an empowering belief which could aid your career. (Just think of what could happen when you let go of the limiting belief – it makes positive even stronger: you are smart AND you work hard!).

Learning from a broken man

“The public person I was wasn’t a lie; it was just incomplete. When I stopped communicating about my problems, the darkness increased and finally dominated me. As a result, I did things that were contrary to everything I believe.” 

- Ted Haggard (Here's the rest of his letter to his congregation.)

 

Brian Jones tells God to take a break...

Brian asks some good questions in this post, it should get you thinking!

"This past Sunday as I walked to the podium to preach for our fourth service I prayed a prayer I’ve never prayed before, “I’ll take it from here God. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like for you not to be involved in this one. I’d like to see what happens when I do this by myself.”

I stood up. I preached. People were visibly moved by my words. People laughed. Afterwards those in attendance shared how much my words meant to them. People made decisions to become followers of Jesus.

The only problem was God wasn’t involved. And it appeared it really didn't make that much difference..."

read the rest here...

Why go to a church service?

The following points are from a talk giving by Brian Mclaren a while back called "Public Worship as Spiritual Formation."  I think it's a great talk and it changed the way I view the whole Sunday morning experience.  Here's some of the main points, if you know of an .mp3 of that talk floating around the net let me know.

Spiritual formation involves intentional spiritual practices: actions within our power which we do to train ourselves to do things currently beyond our power, and to become people we are currently incapable of being.

10 Spiritual Practices for Public Worship

* Ritual: Doing things I may or may not feel like doing to bond to the meaning they represent. Everything we do in our service, if rightly understood, can be understood as a ritual which brings about meaning.

* Inconvenience: Going to a place I didn’t choose, at a time I didn’t choose for a purpose I do choose.

* Association: Associating with some people I like, and others I don’t like, for a purpose I believe in.

* Speed: Altering my pace to see what I’ve missed and to feel a different rhythm. Weekly, seasonal, annual and lifespan.

* Hospitality: Using my presence and our space to help “the other” feel welcome in my presence, and in the presence of our community.

* Attentiveness: Waiting for what I may receive only by waiting receptively. This trains us to become the type of people who will be able to hear the Spirit’s voice and make us vulnerable enough to feel the wooings of the Spirit.

* Generosity: Taking greater pleasure in being productive (fruitful) than consumptive.

* Modeling: Exposing apprentices to masters. In prayer, teaching, artistry, faithfulness, service, hospitality, etc. Contemplative and charismatic models…

* Justice and Mercy: Preaching, singing, praying, signifying announcing justice...

* Catholicity: Quoting others, affirming others, praying for others, inviting others…

Brian Jones writing sample

I picked up a copy of Brian Jones book Second Guessing God: Hanging On When You Can't See His Plan after chatting with him briefly at a conference.  He told me about the two guys in his church that he describes in the article below.  Brian is an authentic and encouraging guy.  His book is a good read and I'l likely pass along copies of it to few people I know. Here's a sample...

MINISTRIES OF MISERY by Brian Jones

In the spring of 1997 I quit being a pastor. I didn't make a formal announcement to my congregation, but I might as well have. I was out of there. In my mind I had two good reasons for taking my hand off the plow: Jim and Franklin.

Jim was a guy who felt called by God to be my accountability partner-without asking me. He offered to take me out to eat one day, so I accepted. Little was I prepared for what was about to happen. Setting down his sandwich he said, "Brian, there are a number of things you are doing wrong at our church, but for the sake of time I've shortened my list to 10." I made the mistake of saying, "Start with number one." Two and a half hours later I left with two things-50% less self-esteem and a really good case for why first cousins should never marry. After that meeting Jim felt that it was his special calling from God to point out my mistakes on a weekly basis-through letters, phone calls, notes in the offerings bowls, frowns during the sermons, and disappointing stares in the church hallway. Jim was the first person I ever met with the spiritual gift of complaining.

Franklin, on the other hand, felt equally called to correct my flaws; he just had a different strategy. Instead of coming directly to me, he would secretly approach people one on one and ask questions like, "What do you think of Brian's sermons? I've talked to just about everyone except you. People are really disappointed. I just wanted to know what you thought." Occasionally someone would approach me and warn, "You really need to talk to Franklin." Every time I directly approached him, however, he'd laugh, "You're paranoid Brian. Things are fine." Franklin had a special CIA-covert-black-ops-stealth-ministry-of-subversion thing going on in our church. I'm sure the Bible talked about why those kinds of ministries were important in the local church, but I must have skipped that chapter.

Jim and Franklin's ministry of misery went on for eight months. I was young and inexperienced. I was leading a new church with new Christians so they were just as confused as I was. My leadership team didn't really know how to handle the situation. So Jim and Franklin got exactly what they wanted: I was out of there. My soul was too heavy to carry on. I didn't want to quit but I knew that every time I walked into that church a little part of me died inside. If I kept it up nothing would be left.

One day, out of complete desperation, I drove across town to the church of a Pastor I had recently met. I didn't have an appointment, I just showed up. As I walked into his office he could tell by the look in my eyes that I was desperate, so he graciously stopped what he was doing and asked me to sit down. My lips quivered. My eyes watered. My chest expanded and compressed with great force. When I finally talked I could only mouth small, measured sentences. It reminded me of those lines in Hamlet:

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story. (Hamlet, Act V, Scene ii)

I told him about the two men at our church. I told him about the way I felt on Sunday when I saw them corner people in the hallway. I told him about the notes, the emails, the phone calls, the stares. I told him that I knew it wasn't Christ-like but I wanted to get back at them so way-hire hit men or scrap my keys on their car doors or make fun of their bad haircuts or something. I told him I was quitting.

Then he shared something with me that changed me.

He pulled his chair closer to me, grabbed my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, "Brian, God wants to change the city. But in order to do that he has to change our hearts first. What you're experiencing is God's way of softening your heart. Ask God to take the pain you're experiencing and use it to give you his heart for people in pain."

Honestly, I wasn't real encouraged by what he said. But he was older and wiser and thinner than me so I thought I should at least give what he said a try before I threw in the towel.

That night before I went to bed I threw up a half-hearted prayer, "Jesus, give me your heart for people," and went to sleep.

Then I did it the next night, then again, then again, and again.

For almost ten years now that has been a spiritual discipline of mine. In fact, for ten years now that one simple prayer has worked more good in the lives of people I serve than just about anything else I've done - all thanks to Jim, and Franklin, and a pastor named Doug Roe.

Fruit of love

As I begin preparing to teach through the fruit of the spirit I came across a piece that Mike Harden of the Columbus Dispatch wrote years ago.  It resonates with me.  The fruit of the spirit is love...

"When Frank Steger pushed himself into an upright position in the hospital bed, the heart monitor's fluid cursive line disintegrated into an erratic scribble. 'I told the doctor,' he said, peeking at the edge of the curtain to make sure that his wife, Mary, was not within earshot, 'I told him that I felt like I was drowning. He said this is what happens when you have congestive heart disease. I told him I'd rather he throw me off the roof instead.'

Mary returned to the room, drawing a chair to his bedside. 'Thirsty,' he complained. She lifted the straw to his lips as he pulled the oxygen mask aside. The medicine made him sick then. She fetched the basin, wrapped a firm arm around his spasm-racked shoulders, mopped the sweat from his forehead. In sickness and in health. They were supposed to be preparing for a Florida vacation, not holding on to each other in a cardiac care unit. 'Help me sit up,' he whispered hoarsely.

In the end, love comes down to this; not Clark Gable's devilish first appraisal of Vivien Leigh, not Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in the surf, but, 'Help me sit up.' A sharp-toothed rain spattered against the windowpane. In the room, a procession of medical courtiers came and went, trading pills for blood and tinkering, ever tinkering, with the buttons and dials controlling the tubes and wires to which their patient was trussed, like some latter-day Gulliver.

One evening Frank was sitting asleep in the chair next to the bed. Mary paused in the waiting room to remove her street shoes and put on her slippers. She did not want to wake him now that sleep was such a rationed luxury. Soundlessly, she slipped into the chair next to his. In the end, love is not the smoldering glance across the dance floor, the clink of crystal, a leisurely picnic spread upon summer's clover. It is the squeeze of a hand. I'm here. I'll be here, no matter how long the fight, even when you want most to close your eyes and be done with it all. Water? You need water? Here. Drink. Let me straighten your pillow.

'Help me into bed,' he said, he who had once been warrior triumphant in the business world. He was tough, demanding, but never as much on others as himself. If you gave him your best, no one could hurt you. If you gave him less, no one could hide you. She had been with him and beside him when the future was golden, beside him when health sent his career into eclipse. 'I'm thirsty,' he said. 'Here,' she said, 'let me get you something.'

Along the road they once traveled so often to visit family, the hearse wound its way past stubbled fields, shuttered roadside markets. The minister, clutching his Bible against his chest as though it was sufficient cloak against the winds whipping across the rural countryside, passed final benediction: 'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' He stooped to pick up his hat as the funeral director placed the folded flag in Mary's lap.

So when all is said and done, love is not rapture and fire. It’s a hand steadier than one's own, squeezing harder than a heartbeat. Wine changes back to water. Endearment is exhibited by what once might have been considered insignificant kindnesses, but which, in the end, become the tenderest of ministrations. On the day after the funeral, trying to busy herself with chores that could easily wait, she plopped the laundry basket down in front of her granddaughter. The child tugged out the end of the sheet her Frank had always held when they did the wash. When the child brought the folded end to meet the corners her grandmother held, she kissed her playfully, just as he had once done. 'I'm thirsty, Grandma.' "

"Here, let me get you something."

Wright on the Code

Well, I'm doing what most Christian bloggers do at some point - I'm quoting N.T. Wright.  This comes from his reflections on The Da Vinci Code which you can find here.

_____________________________________________________________

The Da Vinci Code is a symptom of something much bigger, a lightning rod which has throbbed with the electricity of the postmodern western world.

One of the basic fault lines in the contemporary Western world is the line between neo-Gnosticism on the one hand and the challenge of Jesus on the other. Please note that, despite strenuous attempts to make this line coincide with the current sharp left-right polarization of American culture and politics, it simply doesn’t. Nor, for that matter, does it coincide with the polarizations of British or European culture either. So what is this real, deep polarization which runs through our world?

Neo-Gnosticism is the philosophy that invites you to search deep inside yourself and discover some exciting things by which you must then live. It is the philosophy which declares that the only real moral imperative is that you should then be true to what you find when you engage in that deep inward search. But this is not a religion of redemption. It is not at all a Jewish vision of the covenant God who sets free the helpless slaves. It appeals, on the contrary, to the pride that says “I’m really quite an exciting person, deep down, whatever I may look like outwardly” — the theme of half the cheap movies and novels in today’s world. It appeals to the stimulus of that ever-deeper navel-gazing (“finding out who I really am”) which is the subject of a million self-help books, and the home-made validation of a thousand ethical confusions. It corresponds, in other words, to what a great many people in our world want to believe and want to do, rather than to the hard and bracing challenge of the very Jewish gospel of Jesus. It appears to legitimate precisely that sort of religion which a large swathe of America and a fair chunk of Europe yearns for: a free-for-all, do-it-yourself spirituality, with a strong though ineffective agenda of social protest against the powers that be, and an I'm-OK-you're-OK attitude on all matters religious and ethical. At least, with one exception: You can have any sort of spirituality you like (Zen, labyrinths, Tai Chi) as long as it isn’t orthodox Christianity.

By contrast, the challenge of Jesus, in the 21st century as in the first, is that we should look away from ourselves and get on board with the project the one true God launched at creation and re-launched with Jesus himself. The authentic Christian gospel, which is good news about something that has happened as a result of which the world is a different place — this gospel demands that we submit to Jesus as Lord and allow all other allegiances, loves and self-discoveries to be realigned in that light. God’s project, and God’s gospel, are rooted in solid history as opposed to Gnostic fantasy and its modern equivalents. Genuine Christianity is to be expressed in self-giving love and radical holiness, not self-cosseting self-discovery. And it lives by, and looks for the completion of, the new world in which God will put all things to rights and wipe away all tears from all eyes; in which all knees will bow at the name of Jesus, not because he had a secret love-child, not because he was a teacher of recondite wisdom, not because he showed us how we could get in touch with the hidden feminine, but because he died as the fulfillment of the Scriptural story of God’s people and rose as the fulfillment of the world-redeeming purposes of the same creator God; and because, in that death and resurrection, we discover him to be the one at whose name every knee shall indeed bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, confessing Jesus Christ as Lord to the glory of God the Father.

Keep Company

"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me--watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."

Matthew 11:28-30 (The Message)