Work for peace and you will find love and mercy

Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army

Peace is elusive. It is futile. And yet we are still responsible for seeking it, creating it, and not supporting anything that would hinder it.

This shouldn't upset us. The Christian life is full of paradox. We can be glad for them. They remind us that this life is complex enough to keep us from reaching any cut-and-dry, declarative conclusions on subjects that are not meant to be ours to control. Anything simpler would be a hobby.

This paradox gets juicier: Can we ever be truly at peace with any peace that we find?

The famous Micah 6:8 exhortation lists the three simple expectations placed on us:

• Act justly


• Love mercy


• Walk humbly with your God

What are the implications for peace? If you do those three, peace will be a byproduct. If you achieve peace, you will have realized those three as well.

So, that's easy enough, right?

Sort of. You know that Megadeth album? Peace Sells, But Who's Buying? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that achieving peace takes a lot more effort, ingenuity, genius, and work than managing war.

But that's not quite what we're discussing here.

Who needs peace? Victims of violent inequities: abuse, economics, genetics, guilt.

• The now-adult woman who was repeatedly brutalized as a child and remained silent because she assumed no one would believe her. She is plagued by nightmares and haunted by feelings of worthlessness, unable to be comfortable with any good thing because of the conviction that it will dissolve in an imminent instant. She needs us to reassure her, nobly, kindly, tenderly.



• The out-of-work husband and father who can't find hope in the midst of a rising horde of militant creditors. He needs us to hire him.



• The third-world family who needs to travel by foot two hours each way just to get enough nominally clean water to survive every day. When the water hole dries up, or becomes contaminated, they will die. They need us to build infrastructure in their community, and show them how to use and maintain it.



• The young urbanite who has concluded that the best course of action for safety and growth is to join a gang that will validate his involvement in something important, but only in exchange for his involvement in rape, theft, extortion, and murder. He needs us to show him security beyond violence.



• The manic-depressive who left her manic phase behind months ago and plans this week to be her last. She needs therapy and medication, and she needs us not to judge her for that.



• The junior high school student who is ridiculed and humiliated, on the verge of doing something drastic and final to himself or herself, or to others. They need those of us who have survived it to come alongside and remind that ridicule and humiliation are not the antithesis of self-worth (and, indeed, may actually be signs of jealousy).



• The veteran who wakes up screaming, overwhelmed by images of atrocities witnessed, or perpetrated by him. At the risk of great peril, is it our right to expect someone else to show him that his hands were made to do the work of something better than destruction?

Do you notice a connection here between peace and love? A life of peace will love others. A life not of peace will withhold love from others.

Peace happens on an individual basis, mano a mano. It's one of the few things we can give to someone else without losing it ourselves. Give it out liberally.

Now let's get to work.

This post is part of
Bridget Chumbley's One Word at a Time Blog Carnival.
Previous carnival entries have focused on lust, love, and church.

Lazy wind

Used with permission: CC msmyzr

Our memories come to us in present tense. When something triggers them, it's not an I was; it's a briefly disassociated I am. We are in that moment, that place again. The line between reality and imagination is blurred when memory reactivates and we travel, for a brief instant, into the past, viscerally. We taste, we sense, we smell, we feel again, rushing back, often unwittingly, an overwhelming reminder that we are not allowed to escape the consequences of what has already transpired. We are products of the sum of our decisions and all the things that happen to us. We are accidents of mathematics.

In this sense, we don't have formative years. We have formative moments, instants of deep transformation, often noticed, sometimes not until later. We experience many of these instants during adolescence, but they're by no means confined there. It is unbearable to imagine that they should be, that we should cease having chances to take a new direction. We are in constant flux, and we are ever subject to the reminder of these formative instants, powerful catharses, unimaginable terrors, silent and beautiful calms at the eyes of storms. We have one foot in the here and now, and one foot in the before, never quite completely at home in either one by itself. We are hybrids, circus freaks, and half-breeds, part unwitting journeymen with a longing to lay anchor, part prisoners of the now with a yearning for what was.

And so we are all time travelers. It's best of course to travel intentionally towards the present, that elusive moment that we always overconfidently think we have in our grasp just as it slips away again, into that fog of memory. It's best to be the Captain, to have a course laid out, to navigate ourselves safely around the rocks and shoals and sandbars, from port to port, gaining or leaving cargo here and there. It would be nice to always be one of those mythical people who have it all together.

But sometimes we can't be in the present. Sometimes the map has an error, or circumstance has another idea, or we take the wrong turn at Albuquerque. Sometimes we're yanked from our sure footing to another time, unavoidably, a reminder that we are not always the captains of our own collections of moments.

We are transported without being asked for permission.

I am in Aberdeen, on the beach. The wind is cold and brisk, unsympathetic, and I am full of dreams and hopes, thoughts and hormones, ideas and wishes and hopes, holy and unholy. The North Sea strikes against the shore with its relentless warning, Don't mess with me, sukka. Some have tried. You think you can do better? It's summer, but as an American who's not used to such things, who would know?

A local friend comes up next to me. He's wearing a light sweater--jumper, they would say. I'm wishing I brought a down parka with a fleece liner. Scotland in July can be like that. He tells me, "We call this a lazy wind."

Lazy? There doesn't seem to be anything lazy about this wind. This is a savage wind, heading west over Scotland to become a terrifying banshee on the Irish moors in a few hours. If it were anthropomorphized, it would be lifting me up and slamming my head repeatedly against the rocky and sandy dune, grabbing me by my unfortunately nonexistent down parka collar and shaking me until my brain was jellied, beating the living tar out of me, and then setting me back on my feet and dusting me off with an apology, because lazy Scottish winds are polite like that.

"Lazy?" I ask, fighting to be heard over the rush of salty air.

"Yeah. We call it a lazy wind because instead of taking the time to go around you [I hear "aroond yoo"], it goes right through you."

And so it does. The rest of my life is to be filled with an assorted collection of lazy winds, thoughts, ideas, unavoidable episodes, setbacks and opportunities, challenges and triumphs, deplorable decisions and unanticipated victories. Sometimes, the lazy wind blows everything away indiscriminately, not bothering to sift out the good from the bad, uprooting the wheat and the tares.

Sometimes it goes still and drops heaven at your feet.

I'm eating a baked potato while a diamond ring burns a hole in my pocket. I've accidentally put too much secret-recipe hot sauce on the potato, so I'm getting a matching hole in my stomach lining. I've flown 3,000 miles to propose to my girlfriend of two years that evening after she's done with work, but she invited me to have lunch with her near her workplace. It's an unusual treat.

Or a trick. My fork is midway between my potato and my mouth when she informs me that she would like to have nothing to do with me for an indefinite period of time.

A decade and a half later, that indefinite period is more or less still in effect (by her will or mine? it's irrelevant at this point). And the fork is still there, suspended. I can freeze that moment, but I cannot rewind it. I hate that instant--the lazy wind almost annihilates me and there's nothing the hot sauce can do to provide triage--but without it, I would not be here, now, writing this paragraph while a beloved wife-who-is-not-baked-potato-bar-girl sleeps nearby and two children rest peacefully in their upstairs bedrooms.

That instant will always be that instant. But I have more instants.

I'm having coffee with a man of the cloth, years later. In some ways, I'm still not quite healed from the baked potato. Any utensil--fork or spoon, or occasionally even a coffee cup--making its journey from the table to my lips elicits the automatic, primal notion that I should recoil for the announcement of something disastrous, although, mercifully, by this year I occasionally forget why.

There's something burning a hole in my pocket again. It's two sheets of paper, neatly folded, a list of issues I have with him and his associates, grievances perhaps, stumbling points, ideas that don't resonate well with the way I've understood the world up until this point.

He shares his story with me. Our stories have very similar beginnings, but his meandered somewhere along the way. I've been trying to tell myself for several years that his lazy wind blew him way off course, but he doesn't give a defense. He gives me his heart. Inside his heart is his story. It's not the story of a man who's been pushed somewhere he doesn't want to go. It's the story of a man who's been gratefully brought to something far more wonderful than he could ever possibly have imagined.

I want in that story. I want it to be my story. I want to forget about the baked potatoes and the lazy winds and the bad decisions.

The note stays in my pocket.

I take a sip of coffee, and the lazy wind stops blowing.

I drop anchor. I'm home.

Leadership lessons learned from my father-in-law

Used with permission: CC (Wim Mulder)

My wife's father has history. No, I don't mean he has a history. I mean that he's one of those people who's far more interesting than the average.

You can't live someone else's life, of course, but maybe you can hope to embody and actualize some of the great characteristics of people you admire. Here are a few from him:

• Make plans. I've never seen him undertake something without notes. I get a secret, giddy euphoria when I see him with a pen and a blank sheet of paper, because I know that something amazing is about to be brought into existence. I love seeing an idea become a plan, a plan become an action, actions become results, and positive results become success. He seems to have a secret for making that machine run.



• Involve people. I honestly don't know if he's an extrovert. I think perhaps not. But he is a leader. He doesn't take the notes on that formerly blank sheet of paper and do all the work himself. He builds a team. A team gets to enjoy each other's company, to solve problems collectively from enough different perspectives that disaster can be averted quickly, and to celebrate victories together.



• Give affirmations liberally. People achieve beyond their own awareness of their capabilities when you inform them that they can. I've never seen anyone on a team with him (myself included) who didn't come out a better person on the other side when the project was over. He doesn't assign work to break you down. He manages tasks to make you shine. And he lets you know when you do. (I finally realized that he knew you would anyway.)

I could list a thousand interesting facts about him, but taken individually, each one wouldn't be very interesting. Put them together, though, and you get a story.

Maybe that's what we all are: a story that's a collection of all the interesting things about us. By themselves, each of the facts are pretty boring. But add them together and the sum is fascinating, a person, pulsing and living, thinking, dreaming and growing, with interrelating ideas and actions that form some sort of identity.

Connect ideas to yourself and you'll find that you've become who you are. Now how the heck did that happen?

But while you're at it, invest in people. Watch the investment increase. It's an amazing thing to see a person blossom into their potential. Nothing else matters, really.

Question
What quality of leadership have you admired in someone else?

Haiti aid providers call for caution, cash

Used with permission, CC: shrff14

Parts of this article borrowed from my post at Examiner.com

When disaster strikes, we want to help. It's a natural human response. This blog is about connecting people, and there's nothing like a good disaster to bring us together.

The Haiti quake this past week has created a firestorm of volunteerism. Leaders of aid organizations are collectively calling for sober consideration of best response.

"The greatest immediate need is cash," says World Vision CEO, Richard Stearns.

Stearns spoke today on a conference call, along with fellow evangelical leaders Bill Hybels and Max Lucado. I was fortunate enough to participate in this call. The facilitators explained and justified the call for cash donations as the best way to respond to the immediate necessities for health, water, shelter, and nutrition.

Stearns, Lucado, and Hybels all cautioned against heartfelt and well-intentioned individuals or teams traveling to Port-au-Prince with a sincere but ill-informed intent "to help out as needed."

Haiti's health ministry reported today that there could be more than 750,000 displaced, upwards of 250,000 wounded, and approximately 50,000 deaths estimated. (The Haitian secretary of state for public safety has placed the estimated death toll as high as 140,000.) The pressure on the already broken local industry to support several thousand unexpected visitors would create more of a demand on the system than their work there would justify.

The first phase of recovery, Stearns explained, must allow in those who are invited medical, search-and-rescue, or disaster recovery professionals who are trained to provide the most rapid and effective response in crisis. Infrastructure repair and social provision will take place in a later phase, and there will be a place for these.

"This is a teaching opportunity," said Hybels. "We need to do well at doing good. We need to stay out of the way when it's time to stay out of the way."

Hybels also encouraged pastors looking for inspiration for their congregations: "Don't shrink back." The conference call was not intended to be a request for inaction and passivity, but a reminder for vigilance and preparation, for teams to be ready to mobilize when the rebuilding phase activates.

Do we know ourselves?

Used with permission: CC, paurian

Who am I?

For that matter, why am I asking you? Really, I didn't mean it rhetorically. Shouldn't I be able to answer the question better than you can?

In an introductory post (see Why do I blog?), I said this blog would be about three types of connections: people to people, people to ideas, and ideas to ideas.

Did I miss one? I think I might have. How many of us are well-connected to ourselves?

The older I get, the less I know who I am, pulled in more directions, increasingly disconnected from who I was.

We are ever on a journey to become ourselves. The question is: do we ever get there?

Watch this video that introduces us to someone who knew exactly who she was:



Can I say with that sort of certainty that I know who I am? Can I tell you, "I'm Jeff?" I think I'm more stuck between "I was Jeff" and "I will be Jeff."

It's the curse of complexity.

In City Slickers, the character Curly taught us that integrity and identity are found in simplicity: Focus on one thing.

What's your one thing? Who are you?

I'm Jeff. At least, I'm pretty sure I'm Jeff.

Stay tuned in case anything changes.

My beloved is mine and I am his: a spiritual look at lust

Used with permission (CC: rverspirit)

This is part two of a series on love. The first is here.

Both are entries in Bridget Chumbley's One Word at a Time Blog Carnival.

I get a little confused when I hear those nine references in the Hebrew scriptures that remind us that God gets jealous. God gets jealous...

Ponder that for a second. I thought jealousy was a bad thing. Love is not jealous, says St. Paul. God is love, says St. John. There's a paradox in here somewhere, but then, God is complex enough to defy comprehension on our terms, so we'll let this one slide.

Here's the point: God wants us so much that if we put anything in the way of the two of us, he gets seriously pissed off. Pissed off enough to destroy it. And "collateral damage" doesn't count. Now that's some seriously powerful desire.

Does it seem so odd that someone who loves us that passionately might expect the same in return from us.

We're made to be passionate. We're supposed to be passionate. We're good at it. We like it. God gives us the capability to be passionate, but leaves it to us to direct it properly (and learn from the consequences when we don't).

We enjoy being consumed by our passion to the exclusion of all else. Sports fans understand fixation and obsession. They're consumed. They think about their team constantly. They ponder what plays will be run this weekend. They fantasize that they're the coach, or the quarterback, or the star receiver. You ask them a question about the stats and they flinch like you're reading their mind and just caught them daydreaming again. They think about their team when they want to, when they don't realize they're thinking about it, and when they're thinking about something else at the same time. They're excited. It's their favorite subject. It's their love.

Now try going to a church that's structured around a detailed calendar, that has a setup where every week, day, hour, and moment has an appointed purpose, an activity to be taking place having something to do with a designated act of worship. Obsessive? Oh, yeah. Just about as obsessive as God is about us.

If... If we actually took part in every single one of those activities (that is to say, if we lived saintly lives), we might be scratching the surface of understanding how consumed God is by his own love for us (so much that he might, say, be willing to destroy himself in the process?). Every second, every heartbeat, would be lived with the conscious awareness of what aspect of devotion was the focus of the moment. Oh, we CAN. The schedule's there on paper. And some do, or at least claim to. The rest of us (like me) make concessions and exceptions and exclusions and excuses. We show up when we can, when it's convenient. We call Sunday "the Lord's day" as if the other six are ours.

So how do we get where we need to go?

• Filters on. There's that verse that says to take every thought captive for Christ (2 Cor 10:5). Do that. He's not kidding.



• Direct lust. Don't be so prideful as to think you've overcome it. Even God is consumed, which maybe says it's okay to be consumed. Take all your capability for passion and obsession and point it at the right goal. Need it. Go ahead, hunger. Take it. The kingdom of God suffers violence, and the violent take it by force (Mt 11:12).



• Be consumed. He won't relent until he has it all. Desire the beloved as he desires you. You won't have room for any lusts that are contrary to God. Be full of devotion to him and you will be empty of devotion to anything else.

Lust is destructive. It consumes and erodes. Be sure you are consuming and being consumed by the holy.

I hope you will put up with a little of my foolishness; but you are already doing that. I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him (2 Cor 11:1-2).

---

ADDENDUM:

Shall I apologize for this post going on too long? Don't make me, please.

Does God accept us as we are? If so, it's dangerously easy to use that fact as an excuse to remain as we are.

Now listen to this song. It's the same theme, but the character reaches realizations that won't allow her to ever be the same.

She is the woman at the well. She is the Magdalen healed of demons. She is the harlot who comes with oil to annoint. She is Everywoman. She is us, you and me. I dare you to listen to this without crying. Go ahead. Try. She is you. This is your song.



You are now released from your lusts. You are no longer required to continue expressing them.

Go, and sin no more.

Your brand needs to be simple, or, How Dyson sucked me in

How does something get our attention? It pops. It wows. It has that ooooh, cooooooool factor to it.

Take vacuums. Vacuums didn't change much through the 20th century. Kirby and Hoover all worked pretty much the same. Then along came some new kid.

In case you've been living under a rock for the past few years, the Dyson is a revolutionary new vacuum. It's completely shifted the paradigm for how a vacuum is supposed to work, basically turning the technology inside out. It's energy efficient. It's effective. And unlike the preexisting technology, it doesn't weaken over time. It costs quite a bit more than the average bag-based cleaner, but it's supposed to make up for that difference (and a lot more) because of the electricity it'll save over the life of the unit. It's mechanically simple, doesn't require a lot of cleaning and maintenance, and even if it does, is manufactured by a company with a good reputation for service and support.

How do I know all this? Because of their advertising campaign. That's what sucked me in, if you'll pardon the expression. I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. And there's no reason I shouldn't have. I'm not here to sell the Dyson. I'm here to sell the way the Dyson sells.



This commercial isn't like other commercials, but the vacuum quickly became the highest-grossing line in the US market. Why?

• Simple. The commercial doesn't have a lot of graphics, great music, special effects, high-technology. It's just one guy letting you know that he made a vacuum. Wow. You don't need to make a big deal out of a big deal. It can do that all on its own.



• Average guy. Never mind that Sir James Dyson's estimated net worth is £1.1B. You can't tell that by watching the commercials. You can't tell if Dyson is a huge manufacturing organization with 5000 employees in a sweatshop in southeast Asia, or if it's just that one guy in his garage. He reaches you personally and tells you his short story. You relate to his frustration. You feel it. You want to benefit from his solution.



Check out Carmine Gallo's The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs for a great look at someone else who's known for the same style.



• The product is green. Say what you will, but green is in. People are finally starting to realize that conservation isn't a costly gimmick, but a means to resource optimization, waste reduction, and cost-cutting. Some people go with the flow. Some people go against the flow. Dyson decided to go with the cultural flow while he was going against the technological flow. Genius!



• You win. I'm not a cynic; everyone else is! People have a "what's in it for me" mentality. The Dyson will save you money. It doesn't lose suction over time. There are no bags. And, the aforementioned greenness mean that you won't use nearly as much electricity over the life of the unit.

The Dyson commercial campaign reminds me a little of that Honda commercial from a few years ago. Remember that one that has a single line at the end spoken by someone who sounds a bit like Garrison Keillor? "Isn't it nice when things just...work?"



The beauty of that commercial is that it has precisely zero special effects. None. Zip. Don't take my word for it. Go watch it again. And it was done in a single take. One. No edits. No special effects. No animation. Just a camera and a great idea and one little push on a gear at the beginning. Yeah, it took them seven months and over 600 takes, but when they finally got it right (the genius of patience and design) they made a point: Honda does all the hard work for you so you get simple elegance and precision machinery.

Keep it simple.

Stupid.

Question:
How do you need to change the way you're branding yourself?

Connelly calls for Pay It Forward Power Wave

I just got this message from Sue Connelly.

Hello Everyone,

For five days, starting this Monday, January 11, I need your help to do something important.

Now is the time to harness the power of the incredible people of our KIT List community to make a radical difference in the job market.

After hearing reports of 12.5% unemployment in California, and not much better for the rest of the country, I had an idea…let’s use the power of friends helping friends to create a tremendous wave of focused effort to get people back to work!


The Idea:

For five days, every person on the KIT List does just ONE thing each day for a friend to help with his or her job search. The first day will be Monday, 1/11/10.

You can help a different friend, family member or colleague each day or help the same person for multiple days.

With over 64,000 people on the KIT List, doing one thing for each of the five days, we’ll generate over 320,000 actions that will create an incredible wave of results!

Pass The Word:

This is not limited to the KIT List, please email this idea to other friends, share it on blogs, Twitter and Facebook so we can multiply this effort and get more people back to work quickly.

I’ll also launch this on our blog at www.KITlist.wordpress.com and through KIT List emails, giving ideas each day for what you can do to help a friend find a job. People can share their ideas and results via the comments section, too.

Let’s make a huge difference together with this Pay It Forward Power Wave!

Sue

Sue Connelly
Founder KITlist.org

Three-hundred and twenty THOUSAND positive actions should help.

I'm in. You in?

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ADDENDUM:

I have just discovered the @JobAngels account on Twitter. Seems fitting with the theme. (Thanks to Mashable for the reference.)