Occupy!

When Jesus wanted to teach something, he usually told a story.  He used the stuff of everyday life in Israel—a country of shepherds—for his parables.  It’s hard to improve on stories for making a point clear.

The longer I live and think about these stories, the more I am struck by how they favor action and initiative, creative thinking and problem-solving.  In one parable, he commends a dishonest property manager for being creative in making for himself a soft landing place with some old clients when he is fired for incompetence.  He regards his initiative and problem-solving, if not his loose bookkeeping.

In one of his stories, a landowner gives portions of his goods to different people with the command “occupy until I return.”

Occupy?

The phrase “occupy” these days is freighted with all sorts of meanings and nuances.  Occupy Wall Street.  Occupied territories.  But what did Jesus mean when he used this particular verb?

His parable paints a picture of the kingdom of God.  And his command is to occupy—do business, be industrious, generate a return on investment.  Those who lazed about and did nothing got it in spades when the master returned.

There is a time to pray and a time to act.  That’s axiomatic.  But there are moments when to be on a kneeler is to miss the mark entirely.  When you are supposed to be hitting the pavement and drumming up business, your act of “occupying until I come” becomes an act of worship, even prayer.  I often wonder if God isn’t waiting for us to be the answer to a lot of our prayers.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Am I being passive in the pursuit of my goals?  Do you wait around for God and people to do for you what you are really supposed to do for yourself?  As one has said, you can’t hire another to do your pushups for you.
• Am I quick to give up when I encounter resistance in the pursuit of my goals? Sometimes we flag and cave, thinking that “it wasn’t meant to be” simply because the goal we pursue doesn’t come easy.  Stuff that is valuable costs time, effort, money…blood, sweat and tears.
• What would happen if I gave another hour or two a day to the pursuit of my goals?  We tend to plateau in our skills and objectives for lots of reasons.  But one is simply that we don’t give that extra effort to really master a thing.  It is the difference between dilettantes and professionals.  Professionals stay at it until they own it.

Enough now.  You get the picture.  Go occupy.

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Phil Keaggy Casts A Giant Shadow

I’ve been playing the guitar for thirty-six years now.  I started as a twelve year old in 1976, pulled into the music world by the incredible coolness of watching friends play “Smoke On The Water,” “Dream On” and “Time In A Bottle.”

I started studying under a fine guitarist named Don.  Don had the good sense to teach me how to read music.  He had a fine ear as well.  And so, along with learning the rudiments of guitar and music, he taught me the music of my heroes.  Led Zeppelin.  Jimi Hendrix. Yes.  The Allman Brothers.  It was an exciting time to learn.

Very early on, Don kept telling me about an amazing guitarist named Phil Keaggy.  I didn’t know who Phil Keaggy was.  I knew that, like Don, he was a Christian and I had not been exposed to the Jesus Music of the 1970’s.  Was I in for a surprise.

I left my lessons in the late 1970’s carrying home records of all my favorites and recordings of Phil Keaggy as well.  I was stunned.  This gifted guitarist could play lead guitar and fingerstyle equally well.  He played incredibly fast, something that got my attention in the days where Eddie Van Halen was breaking in and breaking speed records on six strings.

Like Phil and Don, I eventually became a born again Christian and Phil’s music occupied a big part of my life and repertoire.  My favorite album of Phil’s, to this very day, is The Master and the Musician.  It is an instrumental album trading in all different genres for the guitar.  Classical.  Folk.  Jazz.  Rock.  Fingerstyle.  It has it all.

Phil has made a career of uniquely overdubbing multiple guitar parts when recording, creating rich textures of sound.  It opened a new world for me and taught me to listen more carefully to music.  Not just the melodies and tunes, but to the architecture.  In that way, he carries on very much in the tradition of Jimmy Page, who also specialized in multi-layering of guitar parts.

Here are some other unique Phil facts:

• Phil is missing the middle finger of his right hand.  He lost it in an accident at his family farm when just a wee lad of four.  This makes his fingerstyle work all the more stunning.
• Phil is highly in demand as a studio musician but does not read a note of music.
• Phil is about five feet, five inches tall.  And yet he casts a large shadow in the world of the guitar.
• For acoustic guitars, Phil favors handmade instruments from luthier James Olson.  In his earlier years, he played a handmade Mark Evan Whitebook.  The sounds of these instruments are stunningly rich and full.
• For his electric work, he favors his sunburst Gibson Les Paul.  His 1971 flame top Gibson Les Paul Deluxe, which he used in his band Glass Harp, now rests in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
• Phil lives in Nashville TN but is a native of Ohio.  For about five years in the 1970’s, he lived near Ithaca NY—close to my home—and friends of mine were instrumental in bringing him to upstate New York.

Buy Phil’s albums.  The Master and the Musician is a fine place to get acquainted with this remarkable musician.  You’ll be glad you made the effort.

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Got Thumos?

What lights a fire in your heart? What drives you to get out of your comfort zone and set off into the dangerous unknown?  What is that inward power, that energy that gets a man or a woman out of their seats and into action–the kind of action that protects life and brings lasting change and good to society?  Where does that kind of heat come from?

The ancient Greeks had very rich languages and dialects.  Greek is a lot like math with its precision.  Many of us are familiar with the many Greek words for love, one of the most common and oft-misunderstood words we use.  Storge.  Phileo.  Agape.  And, of course, eros.  These words talk about the various manifestations of love.

They also gave us the word thumos.  Doctors and nurses will recognize its kinship with thymus, one of the organs in our immune system.  It is not a common word when used in the world of biblical studies—an area very important to many of us.

Thumos may be described as “an inner fire that motivates action.”  It is used of the soul, but, unlike psuche—from which we get words like “psychology”—it describes the soul with a fire lit under its seat.  It is protective by nature.

I first came into contact with writer Paul Coughlin a few years back.  His book No More Christian Nice Guy radically took apart my idea of virtue, namely, that being nice and being good are not necessarily the same thing.  Jesus is the embodiment of goodness.  But he wasn’t always nice.  And He didn’t always play nicey-nice.  He would get into a lot of trouble today, upsetting the applecart.  Being good, rather than just nice, has a way of doing that.

I’ve been reading another of Coughlin’s books lately.  Unleashing Courageous Faith: The Hidden Power Of A Man’s Soul picks up on the themes introduced in NMCNG.

Thumos is the fire, the motivation that enabled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to champion civil rights—a fight that ended in his death.  It enabled Martin Luther to challenge a corrupt and ossifying Church with the need of reform.  It enables people to defend those who are bullied.  It is the enables action—change of behaviour—not simply a change in an intellectual position, a modified idea.  To use one of Bill Hybels’s favorite metaphors, it’s what pushes Popeye to say, “That’s alls I can take; I can’t takes it no more.”  Then out comes the spinach, the muscle and the bad guys are put in their place.

So….how’s your thumos level today?

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The Problem With Shortcuts

“I do not deny that many appear to have succeeded in a material way by cutting corners and by manipulating associates, both in their professional and in their personal lives. But material success is possible in this world and far more satisfying when it comes without exploiting others.” (Alan Greenspan)

Bernie Madoff.  Michael Milken.  Ivan Boesky.  Charles Ponzi.  Jack Abramoff.   Enron.

The aforementioned are catalogued in the annals of infamy for cutting corners financially, hurting a lot of people and ending up in jail.  Greed and hubris motivated them all.  Plus the fatal narcotic of self-deception, thinking they could get away with their crimes.

There is no shortcut to the building of a large and stable estate.  Wealth grows in the soil of patience, competence and hard work.  There are no substitutes.

A good deal of the writings in the book of Proverbs came from Solomon, son of David, Israel’s wisest and wealthiest king.  Here is what he had to say about the acquisition of wealth:

• Pro 28:8  Whoever multiplies his wealth by interest and profit gathers it for him who is generous to the poor.
• Pro 28:19  Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits will have plenty of poverty.
• Pro 28:22  A stingy man hastens after wealth and does not know that poverty will come upon him.
• Pro 10:4  A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.
• Pro 21:17  Whoever loves pleasure will be a poor man; he who loves wine and oil will not be rich.
• Pro 22:16  Whoever oppresses the poor to increase his own wealth, or gives to the rich, will only come to poverty.
• Pro 13:11  Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it.

Avoid like the plague the get-rich-quick mentality.  Build your estate, your wealth, day by day, dollar by dollar on a foundation of hard work, thrift, competence and compassion.  You are not Gordon Gecko.  You’re better than that.  Avoid the siren song of cutting corners and coloring outside of the lines to get ahead.

“Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.” (Sophocles)

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I LIKE Bill Hybels. Here’s Why.

“Leadership in church is one of the biggest challenges that the Church is facing because without strong leadership, the church rarely lives out its redemptive potentials.” (Bill Hybels)

I have been a student and disciple of Bill Hybels for many years.  There’s a reason for this.  To be sure, Bill has been the brunt of a lot of criticism for his church—Willow Creek Community Church of North Barrington, IL—and their “seeker sensitive” approach to guiding irreligious people to become fully devoted followers of Christ.  At times I criticized Bill for what I thought his approach to seeker-sensitivity meant.  I was way off mark.  I regret that now.

Here are some things I’ve learned from Bill:

• It was Bill who turned me on to the concept of delayed gratification and the writings of M. Scott Peck, chiefly The Road Less Traveled.
• Bill has exemplified, year in and year out, the concept of the disciplined life.  He runs religiously, now in his mid fifties.  He applies the same discipline to journaling, sermon preparation, budgeting and time management.
• He is a man of heart.  You only have to watch or listen to him but a little to realize that, though he doesn’t take himself too seriously, he takes lost and hurting people very seriously.
• Bill, more than any evangelical leader of his stature (his church numbers north of 20K), realizes it is not about him and really eschews the whole self-promotion toxin that comprises so much of American public life.
• Bill is intensely practical, a man’s man and down-to-earth.  I like that.  A lot.
• He has a summer residence in South Haven, MI–a town I lived in from 1967-69.  He has that same kinship for the eastern shore of Lake Michigan as did my family.

Check out his books.  They are down-to-earth and well-written.  Among my favorites are Courageous Leadership and Honest to God?. 

Don’t waste your time with the critics.  Go to the source.  Read Bill.  You’ll be all the better for it.

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To The Young Skipper

I had been married all of one month in the spring of 1988.  It was then that I hired in as the manager of a full-line bakery here in northern New York.  I was fairly green at the young age of twenty-four.

That first year of reorganizing the bakery was trying and fatiguing.  I learned lots of lessons and made plenty of mistakes.  I was the sole man in charge and my boss, the owner of a chain of bakeries, lived a hundred miles away in the Mohawk Valley.  I saw him rarely.  I was on my own.

One of the early challenges I faced was leading a crew of employees, many of whom were at least ten years older than me.  It was intimidating.  There was plenty of “we didn’t do that when [insert a previous manager] ran this place.”  It goes with the territory.

I was faced with the difficulties of leading with heart, fairness and a strong hand.  I did well some times; other times I blew it.  I would do things differently today, but it is well-known that hindsight is a 20/20 enterprise.

At a mentoring meeting last Spring, we discussed the challenges of being a young leader who has to grasp the nettle and lead—and yes, fire—employees old enough to be our parents.  It is never easy.

What to do then?

The apostle Paul, writing to his young protégé Timothy, commanded him “let no man despise your youth.”  Among other things, that meant that Timothy had been given charge and oversight of a group of people and he was not permitted to duck the responsibility of steering the ship competently and forcefully.

Here are some time-honored principles for leading with distinction:

• Lead by example.  Paul told Timothy to be an example to the people under his charge by the way he lived his life.  You must be the first to do the heavy lifting.  The motto for Israeli officers today is “After me!”  People buy into you and your leadership when you get into the trenches and sweat.  It’s much easier to take directives from a leader with his sleeves rolled up and perspiration on his brow.
• Avoid arrogance like the plague.  Giving people the back of the hand—harsh remarks, constant criticisms with no commendations, sarcasm—will sink the ship and demoralize the troops.  Be humble.
• Treat people old enough to be your parents with deference befitting their age.  Paul told Timothy to treat elders like fathers and mothers.  That makes it much easier when you have to make tough executive choices.
• Don’t apologize for being young.  You got hired to do your job because you demonstrated some level of leadership acumen.  Even if you feel “all at sea” with intimidation, you need not show it.  People respect a man or woman who can make a decision and abide by it.
• Be optimistic and avoid petty shop gossip.  As one of my supervisors counseled me, “In everything you do, be a class act.”

You have the wheel of the ship.  Sail on and prosper!

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Are You A Stallion Or A Gelding?

Do you know what gelding is?  It is a stallion that has been neutered.  Stones removed.  Castrated.  Those who raise horses geld stallions for lots of reasons.  One of them is to make the horse more sedate.  Well-behaved.  Easier to manage.

There is one considerable drawback.  Geldings cannot stud.  They are sterile.  Unable to reproduce.  But they’re nicer, I suppose.

In his book The Journey of Desire, John Eldredge recounts an unsuccessful counseling experience he had with a guy named Gary.  Gary was nice.  Well-behaved.  Easy to manage.  His wife was worried because he had no passion for anything.  He was a “nice Christian boy.”  Did all the right things.  But not out of any deep sense of conviction.

A gelding.

Sterile.

Eldredge was unable to help a man who’d lost all drive for anything in life.  A good deal of this hemorrhage of basic testosterone was no doubt rooted in a distorted idea of what the ideal Christian male is.  “Gentle Jesus–meek and mild.”  You get the picture.  Not the type of person who drives thieves from the sanctuary with a whip and uses strong, impolite language with religious bullies.

Passivity, especially in males, is the bane of our age.  It sours marriages.  It produces mediocre job performance.  Is often sedentary and unambitious.  It leaves those who count on us without a leader.

Geldings don’t change the world.  Sorry, but it’s true.

When I read about heroes in history, I find they were possessed with passion for whatever their mission was in life.  Teddy Roosevelt.  King David.  Richard Branson.  Peter.  Even disastrous Jeroboam.  And Jesus Christ.  True, they made mistakes (our Lord excepted).  And when they screwed up, it was a disaster.  But when they triumphed, it made history.

Your wife wants you to be passionate.  So do your kids.  Your friends and colleagues too.

In fact, the whole world wants it.

This is your time to be all there.  Find something—anything—worth doing and do it with all your might.

Suggestions:

• Get out of your chair at night and get moving.  Exercise, do extra work, take on a new project demanding effort and adrenaline.  You don’t want to end up like so many poor souls whom you see at the discount stores, grossly overweight, listless and unhappy.  Too many cheap carbs and time in front of the boob-tube.  It doesn’t have to be you.
• Start a blog.  I did.  This one is sticking and having the net effect of making me get off my duff and practice what I preach to my readers.
• Repeat after me: “I matter.  I can do this.  I am not a nobody.  And the world is counting on me being fully there in whatever I am doing.”  Again, if it isn’t worth doing with all your might, it probably isn’t worth doing.  You be the judge.

You’re called to be a stallion.  Don’t sell yourself short.  Go and produce life!

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A Gift From Down Under: Sons of Korah

This past year, I discovered a hidden treasure from Australia.  Sons of Korah is a project band, the lion’s share of whose work has been putting the Psalms to music.  It is beyond good.

The group is primarily acoustic guitar-based, with strings, piano and percussion added to fill the mix.  Their sound is, at times, quite unconventional and has a distinctly Middle Eastern vibe in certain pieces, taking you, as it were, back to David and his harp.  How he must have sounded. How it must have felt hearing him.

Today, as I listened to this group play through various Psalms, I was again taken into the biblical world of earthy reality contained in the Psalter.  SOK does not simply put the “happy” Psalms to music.  They explore musically the darker realities of places like Psalm 137 and themes of abandonment, pleas for deliverance from enemies and mockers and so forth.

That is relevance.

“Life,” as Walter Brueggemann reminds us in The Message Of The Psalms, “is savagely marked by disequilibrium, incoherence, and unrelieved asymmetry.”  Many Psalms–and these tend to be avoided because of their raw appraisal of life in a sinful world–reflect a profoundly disoriented existence, even for God’s covenant people.  But we need these Psalms just as much as Psalm 23, “The Lord Is My Shepherd.”  Maybe even more.  SOK does us the service of bringing them to life once again with their remarkable gifts.

Listen carefully to these guys.  They get it.

And so will you….

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Solzhenitsyn On Good And Evil

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

–Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

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Chasing Details

Years ago, when Focus On The Family was a much smaller organization, Dr. James Dobson fired off a memo to his staff (in the hundreds at the time).  Paraphrasing his missile, he reminded Focus staffers that FOTF was a detail organization.  That he was drowning in details but following up and expected the same for everyone else on ship.  If they were unwilling to chase details, they simply didn’t belong in the organization.

The memo was blunt and filled with characteristic Dobsonian fire.  But it was effective.  Apparently a letter—this was the Jurassic era, pre-internet—lay on someone’s desk for three weeks.  The letter from a FOTF listener sought help and was not followed up on and then forgotten.  Word of the failure reached the president’s desk.  Thus Jim Dobson’s ire.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff” has become a very popular mantra these days.  Just ask Richard Carlson, whose bestselling book championed the cause.  I read the book and found a lot of practical tips for chilling out and getting past the anxiety curve over stuff that is genuinely not a big deal.

It’s just the “and it’s all small stuff” part that I can’t subscribe to.

Disclosure: I am a retentive.  Ask anyone who knows me.  My pastoral office was always kept so organized that one of my bosses quipped, “This is so well organized, it’s sin.”  Our secretary and her children used to go into my space when I was away and put things out of order and balance just to mess with me.  (This was long before Feng Shui became the rage.)  My IT desk suffers from the same affliction though a tad more relaxed.

All kidding aside, I’ve learned that more often than not, details—and attention to them—make all the difference in the world.  The key is learning that not all details are created equal.

In my daily work in the Information Sciences, I interact with very complex relational databases.  Spreadsheets, SQL queries and CAD drawings are where I make my living.  Anybody who’s worked for any length of time with these kinds of programs and applications knows that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of points of failure if the details are not cared for.  Spreadsheet searches return nothing if you add an extra space or character that doesn’t belong.  Code and query strings will fail to execute successfully if the syntax (the precise arrangement of parts) is not exact.

Little things mean a lot.

I’m reminded of the Bible story of Moses.  When he led the children of Israel out of Egypt, they stopped at Mount Sinai.  It was there that Moses went up into the mountain to speak with God.  And there God gave him the Torah—His law.  Not just the Ten Commandments, but numerous other laws covering everything from the treatment of foreigners to dietary restrictions and allowances.

Moses was also given technical information.  Specifically, God gave him a blueprint to construct a tent for worship.  God told Moses to build it exactly as he’d been shown it on the mountain.  Failure to follow precise details—curtain lengths, incense recipes, etc.—would cause God to reject the whole project.  And Moses would’ve risked his life to improve on God’s design.

I’ve always been struck by this reality.  God cares about details.

Here’s the challenge:  Weigh the import of the details of every thing you do.  Some details are liquid.  But others need to be maintained.  Here are some:

• Appointments.  Time is inelastic and irretrievable.  Being on time means being early.  A thirty minute meeting—if announced thus—ends at thirty minutes.
• Birthdays and Anniversaries.  Don’t mess this one up.  It matters a lot.
• April 15^th.  Unless you are filing for an extension, you need to complete your income taxes by this date.  Lacking an extension, you’ll find out that our government takes details seriously.
• Names.  Take whatever time and effort you need to learn accurately the names of those you meet.  It’s been said that the sweetest sound another person can hear is their own name spoken.

Attention to detail will distinguish you.  It is usually what sets apart the excellent from the mediocre.  Make the effort.

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