Tag: Books

Vacation, 3rd Tri, Perfection, etc…

What a week this has been! Vacation is wonderful. Sometimes you don’t realize how much you need it until you are in it. One of my favorite books is The Old Man and The Sea by Hemingway. At the end of the book, the old man questions himself: “What beat you?” And he answers this way: “Nothing, I went out too far.” And that is how I feel about this last year. This week has been good for my soul, a pulling back in and putting back together.

Amy and I spent last weekend in the Berkshires eating wonderful food, resting, celebrating, and having great conversations with our good friends.

Then I jumped on a plane to southern california and spent two days with Rob Bell and 47 other people who love Jesus and lead and create and also needed to be put back together. More on this next week.

Then 12 hours of reconnecting with some more great friends, and then back on the plane.

Upon returning home my body, unsure of the time zone, could not sleep so I watched the Giants game that night…just so happened that Matt Cain throws a perfect game!

And then, we went to the doctor yesterday and everything continues to check out well as we enter the 3rd trimester…3 months until we get to meet our new family member!

More updates and thoughts to come…it’s been a good week!

Don’t Be Complicit

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.

We Don’t Do That Here

On a friend’s suggestion I picked up Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game and I have not been able to put it down. The book tells the story (and the back story) of the longest game in professional baseball history. The game took place in 1981 between the AAA level minor league teams for the Red Sox and the Orioles in Pawtucket, RI (about 40 min south of Boston).

The book is full of a number of incredible anecdotes, and anyone who loves baseball or who has lived in New England should read it!

One of the best scenes centers around, arguably, the most famous player to participate in the game: Cal Ripken Jr. Ripken was a bit of a hot head in his younger days, a star in the making who needed to be put in his place. Here’s how it went down:

“Ripken’s white-hot desire to win, always, leaves little allowance for the inevitability of failure. He is quick to lose his temper–usually, but not always, with himself. A couple of years from now, after Ripken will have emerged as an up-and-coming major-league star, a veteran teammate, Ken Singleton, will show him a videotape of yet another Ripken fit; something thrown, something slammed. Embarrassed, Ripken will work hard from then on to contain his temper, to be a model of retrained passion, the message imparted by Singleton finding hold somewhere deep in his temporal lobe: ‘We don’t do that here.’“

Start with Why (Quote of the Week)

Great story from a book that has captured my attention: Start With Why

The story of two Stonemasons:

A stonemason is asked, “Do you like your job?” He responds: “I’ve been building this wall for as long as I can remember. The work is monotonous. I’m out in the scorching hot sun all day. The stones are heavy and lifting them day after day is backbreaking. I’m not even sure if this project will be completed in my lifetime. But it’s a job. It pays the bills.”

A second stonemason, working on the same wall, is asked, “Do you like your job?” He responds: “I’ve working on this wall for as long as I can remember. The work can be monotonous. Yes, it can be really hot out here and lifting these stones, day after day, is back-breaking. I’m not even sure if this project will be completed in my lifetime. But I love my job…I’m building a cathedral.”

Build cathedrals, not walls!

Leadership Quote(s) of the Week

I have spent some time over the last week skimming back through one of the most formative books I’ve ever read: The Making of a Leader. Here’s some good stuff from the intro, “A Letter to Dan, the Intern”:

“Superficially it may appear that ministry training is the focus of development…but closer analysis shows that the major thrust of God’s development is inward. The real training program is in the heart of the person.

The amazing thing is that during [the primary phases of leadership development] God is primarily working in the leader, not through him or her. Though there may be fruitfulness in ministry, the major work is that which God is doing to and in the leader. Most emerging leaders don’t recognize this. They evaluate productivity, activities, fruitfulness, etc. But God is quietly, often in unusual ways, trying to get the leader to see that one ministers out of what one is. God is concerned with what we are.

We want to learn a thousand things because there is so much to learn and do. But he will teach us one thing, perhaps in a thousand ways: ‘I am forming Christ in you.’

Perhaps the key issue in all of this is submission. Are you willing to submit to God’s purposes right now for you? Anyone can submit to something he or she wants. Submission is tested only when the thing is not desired. God is not in as big a hurry as you and I are.”

Reads and Links (Technology Themed)

  1. Brett McCracken on the beauty of being “out of the loop”
  2. Is texting good for relationships?
  3. Nadia Weber on the spiritual practice of saying “No”
  4. Scot McKnight has been doing an excellent review of a book by John Knapp called “How the Church Fails Business People“. Here’s a link to pt 5 and the rest of the series.
  5. Amy’s college pastor, Rhett Smith, published a book recently called “The Anxious Christian.” I’m about 3/4 of the way through it and it is fantastic. Pick up a copy!

Prayer, Boundaries, and The Center

This is a long one today, but this stuff from Richard Rohr’s book Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer is really, really good.

Those who rush to artificially manufacture their own identity often end up with hardened and overly defended edges. They are easily offended and are always ready to create a new identity when the current one lets them down…living only in reaction to someone or something else.

Many give up their boundaries before they have them, always seeking their identity in another group, experience, possession, or person. Beliefs like, “she will make me happy,” or “he will take away my loneliness,” or “this group will make feel like I belong” become a substitute for doing the hard work of growing up. It is much easier to belong to a group than it is to know that you belong to God.

The gift that true contemplatives offer to themselves and society is that they know themselves as a part of a much larger story. Their security and identity are founded in God, not in being right, being paid by a church, or affirmed in the eyes of others. People who have learned to live from their center in God know which boundaries are worth maintaining and which can be surrendered…which, ironically, requires an “obedience,” to listen to a Voice beyond their own.

By contrast non-centered people have boundaries that must be defended, negotiated, or worshipped: their reputation, their needs, their nation, their security, their religion, even their ball team. You can tell if you have placed a lot of your eggs in these flimsy baskets if you are hurt or offended a lot. They are a hurt waiting to happen…in fact, they will create tragedies to make themselves feel alive.

I believe that we have no real access to who we really are except in God. Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are. Only when we live and see through God can “everything belong.”

Community and the Extrovert Ideal

I started reading a fascinating book this week called, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Without further ado, here is the quote (or quotes) of the week:

Today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable…[as a result] many people pretend to be extroverts. It makes sense that so many introverts hide from themselves. We live with a value system I call the Extrovert Ideal–the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight.

And then, here’s the kicker:

Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extraversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

I have several reactions to this, but initially my thoughts turn towards community. I’ve had a number of conversations recently around the idea of community and when I pull them all together the picture (or working definition) of community that I get is of a large number of people who are together all the time and who do tons of fun things.

Is that true community though? Consider Jesus. He certainly interacted with a lot of people and at times had huge crowds around him.

That was not his community.

His community was 12 guys. These guys were a true community because:

  1. They were a manageable size.
  2. They had a mission (and a risky one at that).
  3. They spent a lot of “deep” time together.

Jesus also talked about the Kingdom of God as a party. He went to festivals and feasts. Again, he wasn’t afraid of the crowds.

But I wonder if the Extrovert Ideal hasn’t warped our idea of what authentic community really is. And that is pretty interesting to me.

More to come from this book, I am sure!

On the Entrepreneurial Spirit

I’m reading a fascinating book called My Korean Deli. It’s the story of a convenience store in Brooklyn (and it is quite the story). Anyone who has lived in the city has seen, and been in, one of these ubiquitous establishments at some point (if not every day).

It’s a fascinating read for a number of reasons: race and immigrant issues, inter-racial marriage dynamics, neighborhoods in transition…it’s got a little bit of everything.

In ministry, especially start-up campus ministry and church planting you have to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit at some level or else you are in trouble. Ben Howe, the author, perfectly captures the difficulty of the entrepreneur:

“The thing about business is that, like anything else, it takes a while to figure out how you’re really doing. You’re like a pilot whose dashboard instruments don’t function until the plane has reached cruising altitude–you don’t know how fast you’re going, how high you are, or how close you are to stalling and dropping out of the sky. There just isn’t enough information, and what there is you don’t know how to interpret…beginner’s errors distort the picture…ballpark guesses often turn out to be rosy-picture guesses.”

And then this:

“No matter how mixed the evidence, to a fledgling entrepreneur the future always looks shiny and bright, doesn’t it? You’re in business, you have a store, and it has customers, which might seem like modest accomplishments, but it’s the beginning and it’s hard not to succumb to the delusion that things can only get better.”

That is good stuff, especially in ministry when defining the “bottom line” can get tricky. Doing something, does not always equate with quality. A good reminder, for me, that clarity in big goals brings clarity in smaller things.