A Quote

•"When our notion of God is confined to the nightmarish enraged Parent so many pretend to love, it is difficult to imagine God's love as other than barely tolerant pardon for ourselves and apparent favoritism towards others.  But when we meet the God and Father of Jesus Christ, God's love emerges as a kaleidoscope of wonderful, merry and different operations.  And your sin, while real, proves not to be the most important or interesting thing about you.  At least as important as being forgiven by God is having God explain you to yourself."  (Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls, by Gary Moon & David Benner, p.88)

Catalyst Rules of the Office

My friend Ben Redmond sent these to me last week.  I know he probably (can you say "know" and "probably" in the same sentence?) read them on the Catalyst Blog but I am giving Ben credit for passing them along anyway.  I am of a fan of these office environment rules! Implement them if you dare.

1. If you have something exciting to announce, scream it or make a noise with an instrument. But just be loud if it is worthy of announcing.
2. Open Source policy on the drinks and snacks situation. Replenish the snack area as well as the drinks in the frig if you take something.
3. You are always open to a prank….. and you are always free to provide one….. but if you give out a prank, be ready to receive one in return. It’s like the Cold War nuclear policies between the US and USSR….
4. If you’re part of the Catalyst team long enough, you WILL have a nickname. Hover, The Body, Lager, etc.
5. Anyone has the freedom to speak into a project, design, layout, or idea. Anyone’s ideas can be criticized or built on.
6. Business attire is not allowed.
7. We ring bells CONSTANTLY to celebrate.
8. Your title can really be whatever you want it to be.
9. If at all possible, don’t schedule a meeting. We despise meetings, unless it is really needed and leads to action. Or is a collaborative project and requires multiple people speaking into it. But meeting just for meetings sake is lame.
10. Get it done. Always. Execution and the completion of projects is like a drug to us. We take great pride in moving the ball across the finish line.
11. We thrive on competition. None of us like to lose. Fun moments usually involve competition of some sort. Especially cornhole or relay races.
12. We actually like to be around each other. Novel concept I know, but it actually works.

A Quote on Values, Meaning, and Making Sense of Life

I found this quote about 20 years ago and wrote it on a little piece of paper.  Somehow, that little paper keeps resurfasing in my office lately (this may be a sad commentary on the orderlyness of my office).  Anyway, I thought it was worth sharing with anyone who may have a minute to read it.  Who knows, maybe you'll like it enough to write it on some scrach paper and share it with someone in 20 years.

"I have concluded that the accumulation of wealth, even if I could achieve it, is an insufficieint reason for living.  When I reach the end of my days, I must look back on something more meaningul than the persuit of houses and land and machines and stocks and bonds. Nor is fame of any lasting benefit. I will consider my earthly existance to have been wasted unless I can recall a loving family, a consistant investment in the lives of people, and an earnest attempt to serve the God who made me.  Nothing else makes much sense."  
- Author Unknown

On Teaching Spiritual Formation

I am taking a class right now on the life and work of Henri Nouwen and I am also teaching a class on spiritual formation.  That is turning out to be an excellent combination, since Nouwen was a celebrated teacher of spirituality at both Yale and Harvard.  In my readings, I ran across this qoute, which serves as inspiration in my own work as a teacher.

"We are not asked to teach a discipline like mathematics, physics, history or languages, but we are called to make our own faith available to others as the source of learning.  To be a teacher means indeed to lay down your life for your friends, to become a 'martyr' in the original sense of witness. To be a teacher means to offer your own faith experience, your loneliness and intimacy, your doubts and hopes, your failures and successes to your students as a context in which they can struggle with their own quest for meaning.  To be a teacher means to have the same boldness as Paul, who said to the Corinthians: 'Take me as a model as I take Christ' (1 Cor. 11:1). To be a teacher means to say as those who want to learn what Jesus said to his disciples: 'Come and see' (John 1:39)" - Henri J.M. Nouwen (cited in Wounded Prophet by Michael Ford, 106-107)

Metaphor on storms of life

"A geologist was being interviewed. He was a beach geologist, so his field of study was beaches and sand and the like. And at the time he was being interviewed, there was a large hurricane pounding the Outer Banks off the Carolinas. He was being interviewed about what hurricanes do to beaches. We all know what hurricanes do to beaches and beach houses and such. We feel they're very destructive, right? They destroy homes and take down power lines and take away sand, and whole beaches disappear in a hurricane. This is what got my attention: The geologist said, 'You know, I can't wait to get out there in the next 24 hours.' And the interviewer said, 'What do you expect to find out there?' and I was listening and I thought he was going to talk about all the destruction he was going to find. What he said really surprised me. He said, 'I expect to find a new beach.'" - Margaret Wheatley

A thought on spiritual growth

"It is simply not possible to proceed very far along the path of spiritual growth without honoring the need for individual time, without valuing subjective personal experience, and without cultivating and exploring your own inner life. The wisdom of the ages, if one but culls out the most self-serving of the messages of organized religions, is that the spiritual life begins with the inward journey and moves outward from that. If it does not begin there, it is simply a matter of outward forms - a parody of the religious life in which church is merely a forum for social connection and advancement, and 'outreach' a way of assuaging one's conscience. Faith without works may be dead, as St. Paul argued, but works without a deeply rooted, faithful inner life is shallow, superficial, and ephemeral. More important for our purposes, it does nothing to advance one along the way toward true spiritual growth and the development of the kind of maturity that is essential to life and work in our new cultural paradigm." - C. Michael Thompson, The Congruent Life: Following the Inward Path to Fulfilling Work and Inspired Leadership, p.236

A little encouragement

"Concerning all acts of initiative and creation there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote of the Day

"If human words are incapable of describing the distinctive aroma of coffee, how could they possibly cope with something as subtle as God?" - Ludwig Wittgenstein

A thought on inner Prayer

"Mental habits of inward orientation must be established. An inner, secret turning to God can be made fairly steady after weeks and months and years of practice and lapses and failures and returns. It is as simple as Brother Lawrence found it, but it may be long before we can achieve any steadiness in the process." - Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion

On seeing beyond the surface.

"He who feels the beauty of the tulip while it is still in bulb covered by the snow has love for the tulip." - Ira Progoff

On ending world hunger...

"Jesus knows he can end the groaning bellies of the world's starving children, but he resists and says that he will trust in the church." - Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, from Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers, p.46

On helping others...

"I have lived my whole live with a desire to help others in their journey. But I have always realized that I had little else to offer than my own. The journey I am making myself. How can I announce joy, peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation unless they are a part of my own flesh and blood." – Henri J. M. Nouwen

More Quotes

The following two quotes are from the DVD documentary on Henry Nouwen entitled "Journey of the Heart". The final quote is by Dietrich Bonhoffer.

"What is most personal is most universal." - Henri Nouwen

"God has loved us before the creation of the earth and He has gifted us with these few short years on this planet tht we might have the chance to say, 'I love you too'." - Adapted from Henri Nouwen

"Conversion is claiming again and again and again the truth of myself. And what is the truth of myself? That I am God's beloved child long before my father and my mother and my teachers and my church got involved. And I will be God's beloved child long after I have died." - Henri Nouwen

"The first service we owe to others in fellowship is to listen to them. If we fail to listen, there are spiritual consequences. He who can no longer listen to his brother, will soon be no longer listening to God either." - Dietrich Bonhoffer

Advice

"We may not need each other's advice nearly as much as we need each other's prayer and prayerful understanding and affirmation." - Jeannette Bakke, Holy Invitations p.143