LT: You Can't Lead

​The personal mission statement was important for me because I believe that you can’t lead others unless you have a strong sense of who you are and what you stand for.

--  Denise Morrison, CEO of Campbell Soup

Belonging Starts

​The truth is: Belonging starts with self-acceptance. Your level of belonging, in fact, can never be greater than your level of self-acceptance, because believing that you're enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable and imperfect. 

-- Brene Brown

The Godness of God

More interesting to me is that the book contains themes that I believe are particularly relevant to evangelicalism today, one of which we’ll consider here: Karl Barth saw in Romans a complete refutation of the human-centered religion of his day. Describing “the characteristic features of our relation to God,” he wrote:

Our relation to God is ungodly. We suppose that we know what we are saying when we say “God.” We assign to him the highest place in our world: and in so doing we place him fundamentally on one line with ourselves and with things. . . . We press ourselves into proximity with him: and so, all unthinking, we make him nigh unto ourselves. We allow ourselves an ordinary communication with him, we permit ourselves to reckon with him as though this were not extraordinary behavior on our part. We dare to deck ourselves out as his companions, patrons, advisers, and commissioners. ...

Secretly we are the masters in this relationship. We are not concerned with God, but with our own requirements, to which God must adjust himself. . . . Our well-regulated, pleasurable life longs for some hours of devotion, some prolongation into infinity. And so, when we set God upon the throne of the world, we mean by God ourselves. In “believing” on him, we justify, enjoy, and adore ourselves.

Instead, Barth discovered in Romans “that the theme of the Bible . . . certainly could not be man’s religion and religious morality, nor his own sacred divinity. The Godness of God—that was the bedrock we came up against . . . God’s absolute unique existence, power and initiative, above all in his relationship to men.”  

In short, he was toppling the liberal pillars of experience, ethics, and history, showing that, when it comes to knowing God, we bring absolutely nothing to the table. ...continue here.

-- Mark Galli

Falling

The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.

-- Marcus Aurelius

 We enjoyed some R&R this week and this year's colors of Fall (more pics from Saugatuck State Park here...).

The concept of a path as a metaphor for the journey of life has grown on me over the years, so here are a few more contributions to this imagery.

Upon the Heights

Poem for the week -- "Upon the Heights":

And victor of life and silence,
I stood upon the Heights; triumphant,
With upturned eyes, I stood,
And smiled unto the sun, and sang
A beautifully sad farewell unto the dying day.
And my thoughts and the eve gathered
Their serpentine mysteries around me,
My thoughts like alien breezes,
The eve like a fragrant legend.
My feeling was that I stood as one
Serenely poised for flight, as a muse
Of golden melody and lofty grace.
Yea, I stood as one scorning the swords
And wanton menace of the cities.
The sun had heavily sunk into the seas beyond,
And left me a tempting sweet and twilight.
The eve with trailing shadows westward
Swept on, and the lengthened shadows of trees
Disappeared: how silently the songs of silence
Steal into my soul! And still I stood
Among the crickets, in the beauteous profundity
Sung by stars; and I saw me
Softly melted into the eve. The moon
Slowly rose: my shadow on the ground
Dreamily began a dreamy roam,
And I upward smiled silent welcome.

-- Yone Noguchi

What will you do with your surplus?

What will you do with your surplus?

If you have a safe place to sleep, reasonable health and food in the fridge, you're probably living with surplus. You have enough breathing room to devote an hour to watching TV, or having an argument you don't need to have, or simply messing around online. You have time and leverage and technology and trust.

For many people, this surplus is bigger than any human on Earth could have imagined just a hundred years ago.

What will you spend it on?

If you're not drowning, you're a lifeguard.

-- Seth Godin

Fraudulence

​I've noticed...that there seems to be something a little bit fraudulent in everyone.  And, as much as I hate to admit it, there is fraudulence in me, too.  Something imperfect, something inconsistent, something that tends to keep track of the ways this is true in someone else, even while I, myself, think and do many of the very same things.

Fraudulence is not mitigated very much by comparison either.

LT: Flawless Execution

​Success is not determined by flawless execution of a plan.  It is determined by how people react to failure.

-- Don Schmincke

Architect vs Victim

​You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.

-- James Clear

Holy Now

​Everything is holy now. The only resistance to that divine flow of holiness and wholeness is our human refusal to see, to enjoy, and to participate.

-- Richard Rohr

In the end, silence has the loudest voice in combating our resistance.

Don't Let Pain

Instagram: mariagoff

Don't let pain keep you from going to deep places,
from doing some work on your hurts
so you can get on with the important business
of living the rest of your life.

-- Maria Goff

Strictly Speaking

Poem for the week -- "Strictly Speaking":

There is the question
of bearing witness, of being yourself seen
by yourself, & seen clearly, cleanly,
without weapon or bible in hand;
as this was the wish,
the sturdy & not-so-secret wish
of those who named us—

our parents wanted us to be
known to ourselves without confusion:
without judgment,
sans suffering. Never force it,
they said, always find it.

OK, strictly speaking, that’s not entirely true.
My particular, sole, insistent, moody mother & father
probably never thought much about it at all.
Those two anxious citizens,
they were never exemplars of patience.
The weightlessness of detachment & acceptance
as I think of it now
would have frightened them—
for good reason.

If you could see these words
I’m speaking to you tonight printed on a page
as typeface & magnified x 500
you would feel just how ragged & coarse
they really are, heavy.

Well, playing the part of a butterfly
must be tiring, right?
I’m happier being the old ox, right?

On some plane of existence
these two scraps are all my news:
where the mess is
that’s where my heart is.

-- David Rivard

Don't Let Other People

Instagram: bobgoff

Don't let other people
decide who you are.

-- Bob Goff

Unknowing & Recognizing

​I've noticed...that life seems to unfold in a series of periods; periods where I live with a lot of unknowing, followed by periods of recognizing what is going on or what has been happening all along.

I may not be able, in fact, to the have the latter without the former.  So, the times of unknowing need not be as disquieting as they seem.

LT: It Is My Job

​Being a leader means that it is my job to help others do theirs.

More Courage

​It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.

-- W.B. Yeats

Work In The Soul

​God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what it will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process.

-- Gerald May

The Age You Peak At Everything

After some consideration of this, it might dawn on us that such things are happening, as they were designed to happen.  Perhaps, the goal is not for all things to be present or happening at the same time.  Perhaps, we should see wisdom in not trying to adjust when things occur and let things occur when they are supposed to, when they occur most naturally.  Perhaps then, we can be more at peace with who we are, in our existence at any given moment.

In Autumn

Poem for the week -- "In Autumn":

When within ourselves in autumn we feel the autumn
I become very still, a kind of singing, and try to move
like all things green, in one direction, when within ourselves
the autumn moves, thickening like honey, that light we smear
on faces and hands, then touch the far within one another,
something like autumn, and I think when those who knew
the dead, when they fall asleep, then what, then what in autumn
when I always feel I’m writing in red pencil on a piece
of paper growing in thickness the way a pumpkin does,
traveling at fantastic speed toward orange, toward rot, when
in autumn I remember that we are cold-smitten as I continue
smearing red on this precipice, this ledge of paper over which
I lean, trying to touch those I love, their bodies rusting
as I keep writing, sketching their red hands, faces lusting for green.

-- Mark Irwin

From the author:

“What’s terrifying about autumn is not so much the end of things, but that there’s a hidden beginning in some middle you can’t yet see but feel, the way one feels the earth move when a bulldozer tears down a building while the world turns red and yellow.”

Humility

​Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.

-- C.S. Lewis

Anger

​I've noticed...that I need to feel my anger, but not hold on to it.

LT: Hard Workers

Leaders are hard workers. They never expect more out of the people around them than they are willing to give themselves.

-- Jim George

Impact

​It is interesting to observe how we feel -- how we see ourselves -- when we no longer clearly see our impact on others.  Though, at times disorienting, such periods are both good and clarifying.  They re-orient us to how we know ourselves and detach us from the addictions we can so easily form to our dependencies on feedback.

Relief

​More often than not, all we want from God is relief.... He's not too happy about that; not for His sake, but for ours.

God knows that we want a LOT more (even if we have no clue about that). And, in His infinitely loving way, He refuses to comply with our childish demands.

Dignity & Respect

The Sin of Pride

Poem for the week -- "The Sin of Pride":

turns out not to be a sin at all, but in the guise
Of self-esteem a virtue; while poetry, an original
Sin of pride for making self-absorption seem heroic,
Apologizes again and shuts the door. O Small
Room of Myself, where everything and nothing fits,
I wish the night would last forever as the song assures,
Though it never does. I make my way not knowing
Where it leads or how it ends—in shocks of recognition,
In oblivion deferred, too little or too late, consumed
By fears of the forgotten and of the truly great. Morning
Brings a newspaper and an ordinary day, the prospect
Of a popular novel, though it’s hard to read. I write to live
And read to pass the time, yet in the end they’re equal,
And instead of someone else’s name the name I hear is mine—
Which is unsurprising, since our stories all sound alike,
With nothing to reveal or hide. How thin our books
Of revelations, the essential poems of everyone
Mysterious on the outside, but with nothing to conceal—
Like the stories of experience I go on telling myself
And sometimes even think are true, true at least to a feeling
I can’t define, though I know what I know: of a mind
Relentlessly faithful to itself and more or less real.

-- John Koethe

Very Confining

​Possessions are very confining; pretty soon you don't own them, they own you.

...a quote from a recent episode of  Michiana Chronicles; unfortunately, I don't remember which one.

Attraction

I've noticed...you can't legislate attraction.

LT: Vastly Greater

Great leaders know that the total knowledge of those around them is vastly greater than everything they know alone.

-- Simon Sinek

Best In Others

​When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.

‪-- William Arthur Ward‬

Both Are Mercy

First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God.

-- St. Julian of Norwich


Here, perhaps, is another kind of mercy:

...taken today at Warren Woods in Three Oaks, MI.