Archive for the ‘Ancient Text’ Category
Start Anywhere Not Over
Starting over, would you do it different?
Today’s project? This job? That relationship? This marriage?
Looking back, we all see some things that would benefit from a shift in approach.
I was recently talking with a new college grad in a job with significant responsibility. He wants to do great work, but the immense pile of work before him and the fast pace environment seem to conspire against ever feeling caught up, letting alone doing the exceptional stuff he did in college. I recognize lots of friends and clients in this same spot. Most of us have been there or perhaps that is our permanent home.
But if you started over, you’d do things differently.
Really?
Some things. Perhaps. But those old patterns are woven deep into the fabric of our approach to any given day. Starting over may not have the cleansing effect we hope for. There are no easy answers to managing your time to do great work. Saying “No” to some work and “Yes” to other work is part of the solution. Learning to focus and keep distractions at bay is another piece. Lots of people have lots of advice for how to deal with this and much of it is quite good. Seth Godin distributes advice like this every day. Free. His “The Dip” is all about when to quit and when not to.
Training Day
Maybe the pressures we face today or this year have everything to do with the direction we need to grow. Maybe the pressures we face are part of how we are to be shaped right now. I’m fond of an old dead poet/king/dancing machine. In this particular ancient text of his, he offered that the troubles we find ourselves in have a disruptive quality designed to help us look again for balance. And balance is found in a deepening alignment with, well, God. Whether in today’s project, this job, that relationship and especially this marriage. This poet had strategies for his pursuit. Those strategies make sense any time we’re wondering whether we should just start over. And his strategies make even more sense if we’re trying to figure out how to pick up just one piece right now. Right in the middle of the pressure—which piece can I start that will unravel this tangled mess?
Before you start over, start anywhere.
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Image Credit: via thisisnthappiness
I Wish More Churches Observed This Convenient Fiction: Outsiders Are Among Us
Outsiders seeking truth won’t settle for bland spirituality
Our church is at its best when we say to ourselves there are people here kicking the tires of Christianity. I think it can be true, but in the church I attend, I rarely meet anyone who has not already bought the car. Still—don’t we all keep kicking the tires?
Saying there are outsiders lets us drop the clichés and insider language. It lets us jettison the assumptions about being good or put together. It makes us all a bit less stodgy and a bit more honest. Even the most deeply devoted person keeps thinking through the issues of her or his life where they are still kicking the tires: can I trust God in an economy that keeps swirling in the toilet? Or to guide my grown-up kid to make good choices? Can I still trust God when (perhaps) more years lie behind me than before me? Life constantly changes, of course. There is always more living than there is faith to meet the next challenge. But then we watch together for how God intervenes even with faith to move forward.
I like boiling down clichés and disposing of the club mentality that insider language inevitably fosters. But this is not the same as the traditional understanding of seeker-sensitive, where actual content is tossed aside in favor of a bland spirituality. No, Christianity has some barbs that are difficult to understand and hard to come to peace with. The key is to present the barbs honestly and admit we struggle with them too. All while hearing regularly from the ancient texts that have always informed the church. That is a text that speaks to any outsider willing to listen–and is the time-honored antidote to bland spirituality.
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Image Credit: Max Streicher via 2headedsnake
Joseph, Seth Godin’s Dip and Knowing When to Quit
Practice Your Craft In the Dip Or On The Rise
wait, where is that basket tethered?
It’s funny what ideas collide on any given day. I’ve been re-reading Seth Godin’s The Dip while also re-reading the ancient text Genesis. In Genesis I’m at the point in the story where the Creator needs to clear out his favorite people—the ones He’ll use to help all subsequent generations and peoples—to a foreign land so they’ll survive a famine. The front man is Joseph, sold into economic slavery by his not-so-well-meaning brothers. Joseph winds up as #2 man in Egypt. You know the story. Maybe you are already singing the tune from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
It turns out not just any dream will do, as Mr. Osmond so famously sang, because there were a lot of very big falls and rises in Joseph’s life. And a lot of waiting, which served to focus the dream. Quitting would have been an excellent option for any of the many dips he experienced. Because there were no guarantees the dip would ever end. There were no guarantees he would ever rise out of the slavery/prison. Interestingly, the author of Genesis points out that Joseph continued to work out the processes behind his dream: his gift for organizing people and stuff. His gift of leadership. So that wherever he was, as household slave or in jail, he organized and led using the same skills that would help him manage a nation’s food supply through thick years and thin.
The dream seemed to be about fame at the beginning—that’s what Joseph’s brother’s thought. Maybe Joseph thought that too. But the dream became a byproduct of practicing the gifts given him, even at the lowest points of the dip. To quit would have been to stop practicing the thing he was made for, which would be to give up hope. I think Webber did a good job capturing the optimism that must have been warp and woof of Joseph’s life.
Where does that optimism come from? Maybe from practicing one’s craft when up or when down. Maybe that optimism comes from understanding a much larger plan is in the works and you are in it, whether you on the rise or languishing in the dip.
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Image credit: Scribner’s Monthly Via OBI Scrapbook Blog
Big Church
big church extends deep into the work week
There are big churches—but this post is not about large buildings and lots of people. There is the political big tent, which tries to draw together all sorts of people with diverse viewpoints. There is the Big Ten and the big top and the big bang theory and the Big Gulp—from which Mayor Bloomberg wants to save New Yorkers. This post is about none of those, though perhaps Big Bang is closest.
This post is about Big Church.
It’s not about size so much as messaging. Not about authority so much as a disbursing of gifts, talents, passions and mission. Not about one person’s vision and that person’s ability to pull others with him or her so much as it is about a silent listening of many to One, and each responding in kind.
Sometimes we need to state what something isn’t to figure out what it is (a kind of apophatic attempt, you might say).
I’m stuck on a quote from an old dead guy who wrote letters trying to help his readers recognize the big church already at work among them. I wrote about a couple of this guy’s quotes here, and I’ve started with all the “this is not’s” because I’m convinced we mostly don’t see what this old dead guy was saying. That is, we don’t see it, though it is there and vibrant and alive in ways that are still largely invisible to us.
Big church is an entity that communicates persistent care through all its parts. We may think the pastor is the voice of the church, but that’s not so. The pastor is one voice. But the voice of the church looks like words and action. It looks like words and action that extend deep into the work week, far beyond Sunday morning. Big church lives out a redemptive message while embedded in culture and work and relationship. And big church is constantly inviting. But not inviting to a place or a political party. Or to put on a narrow (or wide) filter. Big church invites people into relationship. And it invites people already in relationship to go deeper.
All this because the individuals who comprise the big church routinely step out of self-created subcultures—we’ve done so for centuries—as seasoning for the broader culture. Stepping out carrying God’s passion for other individuals, in all the many ways God has in mind. Big church seamlessly folds in “together” and “apart.” That’s why church is big. And certainly much bigger than a place you go for an hour on Sunday.
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Image Credit: OBI Scrapbook Blog
Going to Church? Hear All the Voices
did you feel that?
Any pastor who cared would say the same thing: no solitary voice can ever speak for an entity as all-encompassing as the church. And except for the rare despot-in-training or the health/wealth preacher coercing you with anti-Bible blather to line his or her pockets, most leaders will say they want something like laminar flow, not just robotic followers.
Laminar Flow? Back when I wrote about mechanical heart valves we talked about the flow across leaflets and disks and how that flow of blood could have a cleaning effect or a stagnating effect. 
Cleaning was good: it kept the mechanism moving. Stagnating—not so good: clots could form, which could impinge on the movement. The key was to design valves where flow was largely in the same direction. And that sounds like a bunch of conversations sprouting from individuals but moving in the same direction.
All-Encompassing? This notion the Apostle Paul talked about in some of his letters (like here and especially here) is far too large to leave in the hands of pastors and professionals and volunteer leaders. And it wasn’t just Paul: Old Testament dudes were saying the same things in different language and with different emphases. It takes an entire people—across ethnicities and nations and generations—to even begin to grasp the full story. An entire people writing the story with words and deeds and conversations.
This thing is big. Really big.
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Image credit thisisnthappiness, RC Modelers of Laredo
Going to Church Today? Consider This.
expect a conversation that will help sort things
Probably someone will speak to the group—that’s typically what happens. And there will be singing. Prayers will be offered. You’ll shake a few hands. Maybe you’ll learn something new. Maybe you heart will be lightened. Your load lifted.
If heart-lightening or load-lifting happens, stop and think why. Was it because of magic words spoken from the pulpit? Not likely, as there are no magic words. But there are words that find a home in a person’s conscious thought and get absorbed there to do some work. One of the tests the old church fathers used to determine if a letter or text should be included in the Canon (our Bible today) was whether it had the power to change people—did the text speak with authority into a people’s lives? Did something happen because of hearing the text? When those old words get uttered from the pulpit today—they are not magic—but their truthiness has sticking power.
Just as likely: you meet someone who says something that affects you. Makes you think. Makes you reconsider an impending decision. And perhaps that same heart-lightening or load-lifting occurs. Sometimes we meet people who speak truth and it has the same effect.
And consider this: perhaps you go into that time expecting to hear something. What I mean is, sometimes we move into a situation actually expecting to hear something that could have the power to change how we think or act. You might call this listening. Or attentive listening. Or attenuated listening. Or listening on steroids. But whatever you call it, this is the most productive penultimate approach: listening with expectation. Then you pick up the tasty truthiness from any source.
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Image credit: Douglas Smith via 2headedsnake
Is it Time You Wrote Your Autobiography?
I’m not writing one. Then again, who isn’t adding to their autobiographical material daily, whether with words or deeds?
but surely I am king of something
I’ve been reading the autobiography of R.G Collingwood, an Oxford philosophy professor of the last century. He set out to trace the outline of how he came to think—a kind of personal intellectual history. Early on in his life (at 8 years old) he found himself sitting with a philosophy text (Kant’s Theory of Ethics). And while he did not understand it, he felt an intense excitement as he read it. “I felt that things of the highest importance were being said about matters of the utmost urgency: things which at all costs I must understand.” (3) That reading set one course for his life.
One thing that makes this book worth reading is his notion of how questions and answers frame our production of knowledge. Collingwood said he “revolted against the current logical theories.” (30) He rebelled against the tyranny of propositions, judgments and statements as basic units of knowledge. He thought that you cannot come to understand what another person means by simply studying his or her spoken or written words. Instead, you need to know what question that person was asking. Because what that person speaks or writes will be directly related to the question she or he has in mind. This is incredibly useful when studying ancient texts—like a letter from the Apostle Paul, for instance. It’s also incredibly useful when listening to one’s wife (ahem), or a student or to anyone we come in contact with.
Another thing that recommends this book is hearing him tell about his main hobby: archaeology. Collingwood was the opposite of a couch potato. He spent a lot of times in digs around the UK, unearthing old Roman structures and then writing about them. Here too, he explained that while some archaeologists just set out to dig, he only set out to dig when he had formed a precise question to answer. His digging (tools, methods, approach) were all shaped by this question. By starting with a question, he came to very specific answers and, of course, other brand new questions.
Questions begat answers. And more questions.
What question is your life answering?
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Image credit: J-J. Grandville via OBI Scrapbook Blog
You’re Soaking In It—Creative Unresolve and the Good Life
The issues that roil your nerves and kick you in the gut may be instrumental in pushing you forward.
let creative unresolve lead you forward
A few days back I wrote about sitting with unresolve as long as you can, as one method for producing creative ideas. John Cleese had a few choice words on the topic. After talking about this in class and listening to Mr. Cleese and experiencing it afresh with my own writing, I realized a couple of ancient voices had been swarming around, punching me in the face with this very point—only applying it to the rest of life.
One voice is a warrior-poet. Aside from being handy with a lyre and deadly with a sling and stone, he had a very lucid and descriptive (often prescriptive) way of asking God to do terrible things to his enemies. And yet, though he often had the power and opportunity to take action, he didn’t. Instead, he turned from the shortcut, obvious solution and waited. We all know that waiting for God seems to take longer than anyone likes.
Same thing with another Old Testament character—Habakkuk. He saw bad stuff coming (a brutish band of thugs coming to decimate his homeland) and decided also to fix his attention on God. And wait.
Something happens when we wait. Sometimes we can fix things in life right away. Often we can’t. So we wait. And just like when we’re working through a creative solution to a thorny business or communication problem, we sit with unresolve and let the discomfort itself push us forward.
Same thing with life. We wait and seek and wait. And–this may be most critical—we reach out. We reach out when things are not right with us. And reaching out is nearly always worthwhile. Reaching out looks like a phone call. Reaching out looks like an email. Like prayer.
Some students from my copywriting class are graduating. Everyone says it’s a low-energy job market—difficult for the job hunter. I sympathize. To these graduates I simply offer the notion that your creative unresolve can lead you forward into networking, conversation and, yes, to reach out in prayer.
I still maintain that the best stuff in life happens in and through the choices and actions made directly from chaotic, creative unresolve.
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Image Credit: itchy banquet via thisisnthappiness
Copywriting Tip #4: Speak Truth to Profits (Dan’s Story)
ancient copywriters rocked
I’m fond of a particular collection of ancient texts. One tells the story of a copywriter named Dan. Dan’s client was all-powerful and routinely dismantled (sometimes literally) those who did not do exactly as he asked. This client never hesitated making impossible requests and had no problem forcing his teams to guess his mind.
Dan was an employee who had been groomed and mentored and specially-trained for leadership. And yet Dan retained a commitment to the recognition that even his abusive, ill-tempered, seemingly all-powerful employer had to answer for his actions and did not have as much control as he liked to believe. This perspective had been shaped early in Dan’s life by his large, extended family.
Dan’s understanding of life held sway over his work. And while he was dedicated employee, he had committed himself to write truth, no matter the cost. This put him in a bind when it came to this client, because this client’s wealth and power routinely corrupted those around him, so most everybody told the despot exactly what he wanted to hear.
The story goes that one gruesome assignment forced the entire team to guess what the employer dreamed and interpret that dream. Or be dismantled. Of course no one could do it, and so they said. The employer force the point and the team prepared to be dismantled. Dan heard of the impending mass dismantling and he and his buddies thought they better act on their understanding that even the king answered to God. So they prayed. That’s right, this is a story of a copywriter who conversed with God so he could do his work better. Dan would often point to these conversations with God when people praised his insights.
And he did get insight. From God. It was not an insight that put the employer in a good light, but Dan told it anyway. And everyone lived another day.
The Moral
Truth matters more than appeasing the abusive despot before you.
And This
The copywriter’s work has always been about providing insight into the soul of a client and the heart of a client’s audience. Get help with that.
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Image credit: Douglas Smith via 2headedsnake:
What Grid Are You Using Today?
Everyone uses a grid to sift the events and inputs of any given day. Your grid is your life experience that informs how you hear and see everything: all that you’ve read. How you’ve experienced life. The dark and bright sides of life you’ve experienced. Nerd or jock. Pretty or not: all of this speaks to how you hear conversation and how you interpret actions. Even your intentions and dreams are part of the grid.
Over at MultiCultClassics, the bloggist(s) sees ads and news through a grid of inequality. Copyranter uses a polarizing screen to force communication events into best or worst categories, with little in between. At church on Sunday the teacher reads an ancient text through a doctrine developed centuries later, invariably forcing the ancient author to say what the author never meant. Werner Herzog reads Curious George showing one species making a buffoon of another (what, you thought Curious George was a kid’s story?).
But there is no escaping our grid. We’ve always been a subjective species. Always will be. The best we can do is identify the baggage we carry that holds us to our interpretations. And it’s best if we can be honest with each other about where we are coming from when we read this text, or interpret that comment.
Honesty about how we understand things makes for good conversation.
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conversation is an engine 