St. Petertide

In honor of yesterday; 'poem selection' for the week -- "St. Petertide":

Impulsive master of misunderstanding
You comfort me with all your big mistakes;
Jumping the ship before you make the landing,
Placing the bet before you know the stakes.
I love the way you step out without knowing,
The way you sometimes speak before you think,
The way your broken faith is always growing,
The way he holds you even when you sink.
Born to a world that always tried to shame you,
Your shaky ego vulnerable to shame,
I love the way that Jesus chose to name you,
Before you knew how to deserve that name.
And in the end your Saviour let you prove
That each denial is undone by love.

-- Malcolm Guite

From the author:

"The 29th of June is St. Peter’s day, when we remember the disciple who, for all his many mistakes, knew how to recover and hold on, who, for all his waverings, was called by Jesus “the rock,” and who learned the threefold lesson that every betrayal can ultimately be restored by love. It is fitting therefore that it is at Petertide that new priests and deacons are ordained, on the day they remember a man whose recovery from mistakes and openness to love can give them courage. So I post this poem not only for St. Peter but for all those being ordained this weekend and in memory of my own ordination as a priest on this day 26 years ago."

This poem comes from my collection Sounding the Seasons published by Canterbury Press.

Thank you, Jim, for forwarding this one.

Trees

Nature:  

Trees give peace to the souls of men.

-- Nora Wain

Used To

I've noticed...that I have to get used to things, before I become familiar with them.

What Is A Leader?

As part of my on-going Tuesday posts on leadership (follow the 'leader'-related links in each), I find myself asking what being a leader is.

A thought recently was crowding my mind -- "I'm not a good leader".  So, I couldn't avoid asking what is a good leader?  Who decided what leadership even is, not to mention what makes one a good or bad leader?  Recognizing that such things are heavily influenced by the culture that informs our thinking about them, who does it say leaders are?  And, perhaps more importantly, why does it select who it does?

Is God a leader?  Somehow that doesn't feel quite right, as a description of God (at the very least in the 'CEO' sense of leadership things).  Yet, most would say God does lead them.  So, how does God lead us?  Should that be what we look to, in response to such questions as above?  Should I assess my 'leadership' more through that grid, than the one imposed by the systems of our world?  I'm leading the witness now, so back to my question....

Most Difficult Thing

​The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

-- Amelia Earhart

Even In Our Disobedience

​God honors us, even in our disobedience, by letting us experience the natural consequences of going our own way, letting us walk away from Him...though He is always offering a way back.


He that prays and does not faint will come to recognize that to talk with God is more than to have all prayers granted -- that it is the end of all prayer.

-- George MacDonald

Power Causes Brain Damage

A scientific take on the fairly observable problem of power:

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake. 

What was going through Stumpf’s head? New research suggests that the better question may be: What wasn’t going through it? 

The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” But that’s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view. Continue here....

-- Jerry Useem

Hope

'Poem selection' for the week -- "Hope":

always the hopeless asked to give others hope
the ones pushed up against wall after wall

when you’re done unpinning yourself
from the wall, please give hope

those who work twice as hard to seem half as good
being asked to do one more thing

we need to be seen
because things are not going well
and the crows are up to no good

--  Ali Liebegott

From the author:

“I often think of the expression, ‘You have to work twice as hard to be viewed half as good,’ used for women and people of color. Marginalized people are often asked to be the patient educators to non-marginalized people. I think this poem wrestles with the intrinsic unfairness of that.”

Worth Being Afraid Of

We're pretty good at finding demons to be afraid of.

• The other
• The one in the shadows
• Change
• The family member we can't possibly please
• Competition
• Critics
• The invisible network of foes conspiring against us and what we stand for

It turns out, though, that the one who usually lets us down is us. Our unwillingness to leap, to commit, to trust our own abilities. It's the internal narrative that seeks disaster just as much as it craves reassurance. That's the one we ought to be vilifying, fortifying ourselves against and frightened of.

It gets less powerful once we are brave enough to look it in the eye.

-- Seth Godin

Willing To Work At

​I've noticed...we can come to love what we are willing to work at. In the end, we work at what we love.


Oh, and, welcome to summer -- we were treated to quite the show last night:

...not to mention the double-rainbow!  More here....

Not Leading

We are not leading when we are in charge. We lead when we are willing to let others take charge.

-- Simon Sinek

Approval Through Disapproval

​One way or another, we seem to have all come from one kind of model of disapproval or another -- generational, social, cultural, ethnic, even spiritual.  We have been so immersed in them that we can hardly stop our own selves from perpetuating them, because it is not only the lens through which we have been conditioned to see others, but also the one through which we see ourselves.

Perhaps, we are emerging from this mentality of control. Compensating for it, we can feel the collective swing around us to a model of hyper-approval.

What is it that we are really looking for...in either model?

The Delay Would Give Me Wisdom

When people came and told me, when I was going through my [hard] times, ‘You are being blessed’—I knew that they were right. but I was resentful. It sounded like a cliché. I knew I was being blessed, but I wanted to see it right now. I didn’t realize that the delay would give me wisdom.

There’s wisdom that you gain with age. When I was twenty, I knew God was faithful, but I didn’t have my own history of God’s faithfulness. Now, I can look back on my own book. I don’t have to look anywhere else, because I know he’s been faithful.

-- Carl Ellis


Prayer is the spirit speaking truth to Truth.

-- Philip James Bailey

The Ways Your Brain Manages Overload, and How to Improve Them

Information overload is everywhere, from non-stop news to rat-a-tat email inboxes. At the receiving end of this deluge of verbiage is the human brain—your brain— metaphorically endowed with a vacuum cleaner that sucks up information; a container for short-term memory; a blender for integrating information; a memory bank for storing long-term information; a garbage disposal for getting rid of information; and a recycling machine extraordinaire. Using each of these functions effectively is critical if one wants to manage information overload ̶ simply using your brain for crossing items off your to-do list is poor use of a very sophisticated machine. Yet few people build the habits and lifestyles that allow for their brains to function at their best.

At the core of managing information overload is the ability to know which function to use, and how and when to use it. The six principles below can serve as a guide to the proper brain hygiene for managing information overload on a busy work day.  Continue here....

--Srini Pillay

...time for some brain management -- a long run!

Beauty and Beauty

'Poem selection' for the week -- "Beauty and Beauty":

When Beauty and Beauty meet
   All naked, fair to fair,
The earth is crying-sweet,
   And scattering-bright the air,
Eddying, dizzying, closing round,
   With soft and drunken laughter;
Veiling all that may befall
   After—after—

Where Beauty and Beauty met,
   Earth’s still a-tremble there,
And winds are scented yet,
   And memory-soft the air,
Bosoming, folding glints of light,
   And shreds of shadowy laughter;
Not the tears that fill the years
   After—after—

-- Rupert Brooke

Hard Things

Are hard things in life the things that keep us humble? It is not too difficult to spot even the slow creeping nature of arrogance that grows within us. Just look at the things we despise - what do they tell us? What if things that are hard are actually invitations to remind us of important things, like what we are not capable of? Of the ways that we are dependent, not independent? Of how we are not better than other people after all?

Easy things have an odd way of making us feel something about ourselves that often makes other people feel like something less (than us). Hard things remind us that this is not true.

Uncomfortable

​I've noticed...we all seem to have a line, past which we are mostly uncomfortable. Much of the time that line, overt or not, is conditioned by what we have or have not experienced.

Is there a domain (physical, emotional, spiritual, etc.) where this does not seem true?

Really Means

The 3 in front are old and sick, they walk in front to set the pace of the running group lest they get left behind. The next 5 are the strongest and best, they are tasked to protect the front side if there is an attack. The pack in the middle are always protected from any attack. The 5 behind them are also among the strongest and best; they are tasked to protect the back side if there is an attack. The last one is the LEADER. He ensures that no one is left behind. He keeps the pack unified and on the same path. He is always ready to run in any direction to protect and serves as the 'bodyguard' to the entire group. Just in case y'all wanted to know what it really means to be a leader.

-- Clare Watkins

Failure To Change

​Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be.

-- John Wooden

Wrigley!

Another great day at Wrigley!  More pics here....

Love & Fear

IF Jesus died for the whole world (Jn 3:16, et al), this passage has some pretty broad implications for how we see and treat anyone, not just believers; everyone is our brother and sister:

​And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

-- 1 John 4:16-21


The path of prayer is taken by those rare people who consciously and slowly let go of their ego boundaries, their righteousness, their specialness, their sense of being important.

-- Richard Rohr

As Far As Possible

And as a project for conservatives, it must ultimately be understood as a civic labor of love, not a political fight to the death. It should aim, as far as possible, to uproot the disposition toward alienation and despair in American life and to plant in its place the essential conservative tendency: to love the good more than we hate the bad. That means looking to improve more than to scorn, to build on what works more than to tear down, and to understand our inadequacies by looking at them in light of what they keep us from being more than what they make us into.

-- Yuval Levin

The Owner of the Night

'Poem selection' for the week -- "The Owner of the Night":

interrogates whoever walks
this shadow-lane, this hour
not reserved for you: who

are you to enter it?
Orion’s head over heels
above the road, jewel-belt

flinting starlight
to fuel two eyes looking
down from the air:

beacons in reverse,
since light pours in
toward her appetite

until she wings her noiseless outline
between our rooftop and the stars,
over this door and all the doors

hidden in the grass:
dreaming voles,

firefly province,

wasps in the palace
they’ve hollowed under the hill.

Mole resting his face against his splayed hands.

Perch, blink. Pose
the evening’s question
to the sleepless

while the moon if there is one
scatters islands
on a field of ink. Who

maps this? The owner
of the night looks down
to mirror and admit the hours

before the upper vaults
begin to lighten and recede.
Did you hear what I said,

a face looks down from the night?
Did who hear me? Who
reads this page, who writes it?

-- Mark Doty

From the author:

“I spend about half my time in the city, in a built landscape where one knows the name of just about everything; in this way it’s a city of language, a world mediated by words. The rest of the time I live in a place where sky and weather, plants and animals are as present as sidewalks and vehicles are in town. My inner process of narrating experience in words slows down there, even vanishes for moments at a time; then I’m just raking, or weeding, or looking at the sky not supplying words for what I see. Thus it’s startling, at twilight, or deep in the night, when the dark itself seems to say a word: who. It seems the right question, the one the owl asks; as Stevens said of the harbor lights in Key West, that sound arranges, deepens, and enchants the night.”

Not Getting What You Want

​Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.

-- Dalai Lama

Luck...or something else.  Either way, a gift.  It's happened to me, more than once.

History

​We must hold on to history.  But we must also let it go.

This is often a tearing tension for us, as history so informs how we understand and go about our present realities.  But, if I hold it too tightly, over time I am crushed under the weight of what all I know and feel. I must learn to be honest, but also open and trusting to something bigger than my history-laden present.

Worth It

​I'm not telling you it's going to be easy - I'm telling you it's going to be worth it.

-- Art Williams

This is what a leader does.

U2 - Joshua Tree 30th Anniversary Tour, Soldier Field 2017

The U2 concert was incredible -- a 'beautiful day' and evening.  Amazing music, show, and truth...relevant 30 years ago and today.  ...not to mention how much joy there was for me in sharing the experience, at his initiative, with my son.  I am blessed in so many ways.

That many people singing at the top of their lungs about something they still haven't found is quite a collectively moving experience.  ...more here.

God Isn't An Editor

The Holy Spirit is God's very own life shared with us and residing within us (see John 20:22). When we pray, we are steadfastly refusing to abandon this Presence, this True Self, this place that already knows we are beloved and one with God.

-- Richard Rohr

Instagram: bobgoff

God isn't an editor, He's a creator.
He's not looking for the typos in our lives;
He sees the beauty in them.

-- Bob Goff

Q&A: Disapproval

​Q&A:  

Q:  We seem to have come from such a model of disapproval -- generational, social, cultural, ethnic, etc. Perhaps, we are emerging from that mentality of control. We can feel the swing to a hyper-approval way, compensating for the prior way. So here's a question -- what is it that we are looking for...in either model?  Are we looking for the very thing we think we're gaining by doing its opposite to each other?

A:  We disapprove of some, in order to gain approval of others...as we desperately search for acceptance.

Sonnet VI

'Poem selection' for the week -- "Sonnet VI":

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore—
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

It is amazing to me how sometimes something can be so unclear and evocative, at the very same time.

Never Change

So it's searchable:

You'll never change your life until you change something you do daily.  The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.

-- John C. Maxwell