stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls
Thanks to Tim Hawkins for passing this along:
“The university thought of itself as a place of freedom for thought and study and experimentation, and maybe it was, in a way. But it was an island too, a floating or a flying island. It was preparing people from the world of the past for the world of the future, and what was missing was the world of the present, where every body was living its small, short, surprising, miserable, wonderful, blessed, damaged, only life.” – From Jaber Crow
From Robert Randolph, Chaplain to the Institute at MIT:
“Has Mark Zuckerberg had more influence on your vocation than Jesus?”
Brian is a weird dude. But he says some interesting things. Here are a few examples:
“Luck is being ready.”
“For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.”
“It’s not the destination that matters. It’s the change of scene.”
From Chris Martin (Coldplay):
“We can’t dance like Usher, we can’t sing like Beyonce, we can’t write songs like Elton John; but we do what we can and we just go for it.”
I’ve been reading Life by Keith Richards and it’s fascinating for all the reasons one might suspect: the inside rock’n’roll story, the gossip about Mick, and the revelations about where the songs came from (Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a good one).
All that aside, what interests me about this book is not juicy stories of debauchery and came-from-nothing-to-make-it-big exuberance, but the insight it provides about longevity.
The Rolling Stones turn 50 this year. 50 years as a band. That’s a great marriage. No one stays in the game (let alone on top of the game) for 50 years in the music industry.
I don’t know the secret to that yet. I’ll let you know if I find out. But along the way Keith has some great insights to a whole bunch of things…creativity, cultural change, doing what you love to do.
Here’s a bit about the creative process (he’s talking about songwriting but I think you can insert writing, preaching, anything creative):
“Because you are playing, working, every day…ideas are flowing. One thing feeds the other. You may be having a swim or whatever, but somewhere in the back of the mind, you’re thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. You might be getting shot at, and you’ll still be ‘Oh! That’s the bridge!’ And there’s nothing you can do; you don’t realize its happening. It’s totally subconscious, unconscious or whatever.
The radar is on whether you know it or not. You cannot switch it off.
You’re constantly on the alert…You start looking around, and everything’s a subject for a song. The banal phrase, which is the one that makes it. And you say, I can’t believe nobody hooked up on that one before!”
From Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost (The Faith of Leap)
“To love is to suffer…and that’s probably why we generally don’t do it well. Unwillingness to venture, plus a desire to be safe, holds us back from love. To be sure, most of us do have a vision of what makes a good life, and as believers we know that it involves growing in the love of God. What we seem to lack, however, is the will to attain to this good life of love. Most of us prefer to skip over the pain and the discipline, to find some easy, off-the-shelf ways to sainthood. Christian self-help spiritualities are a classic dodge of the real issues and manifestly do not produce maturity. We do well to be reminded of the cost of shortcuts in Carl Jung’s penetrating statement, ‘Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.'”
Continuing the theme from yesterday:
“Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love.”– Earl Grollman Living When a Love One Has Died
I’ve been thinking a lot about this article this past week. Twitter is such a great source of information, but when we start to think of our life as a series of tweets the question really becomes: does twitter help me tell a good story? Ed Cyzewski says no!
“Twitter is great for quickly spreading a good idea. I use it every day. It’s the Big Bird of networking tools. However, Twitter is a lousy living tool. In fact, Twitter can become a distracting obstacle to deep thought, art, or relationships…
It would seem to me that the first step in living a good story is to stop telling everyone about the mundane details of life and to focus on real life.”
Continuing the Acts theme this week:
“There are no locked doors in the kingdom of God.”
From NT Wright’s commentary on Acts 5:17-26
Here are a couple of intertwining thoughts from two different books I’ve been reading. In Safe People (by Cloud and Townsend) the authors write: “An important question to ask (when discerning if a person is safe or unsafe) is: what does this person do with my no?”
Saying yes and no (being truthful), and how people respond to that, is a theme that keeps showing up in a number of places.
In The Bottom of the 33rd, Joe Morgan (no not that Joe Morgan) is the manager of the AAA Pawtucket Red Sox. As a AAA (closest minor league level to the major leagues) manager Morgan saw a lot of guys who went on to play in bigs, but he also saw a lot of guys who were good but not quite good enough.
These not quite good enough players would hang around and hang around hoping against hope for their break. At some point they would come to Joe and ask: “What do you think, skip? Am I going to make it?”
And Joe Morgan was honest with them. He told them the truth. Sometimes that was a really hard, even brutal, assignment. But, and here’s our quote of the week:
“Morgan never wanted to be complicit in another man’s delusions. He felt morally required to provide either encouragement or release. To say yes or no.”
He wasn’t a jerk about it. He didn’t take delight in crushing a man’s dreams. But he didn’t lie to them either. This is a hard lesson of leadership, but, as I am learning, it is important to tell the truth.
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