My friend Matt and I were on our way to breakfast recently. Matt's claim to fame is that he nearly died on a Tibetan mountain pass when his car broke down one time. He, his wife and son were saved by the thoughtful actions of their driver. He pointed the disabled car toward the fading sunlight and, using the hood, redirected sufficient rays to thaw the frozen line. Matt has other claims to fame, but that was the coolest one I heard during this particular breakfast.
At any rate, on the way to food, we stopped for fuel. I would think by now we would have standardized the gas pump. Apparently not. This one, with it's unique variety of questions to answer, selections to make, and buttons to push, nearly stumped us. And that's saying something: Matt's an engineer and me, well, I graduated from Ball State University.
Once the gas was flowing we noticed the button and sign shown below. Apparently we were not alone in our frustration with the complicated pump. It looked liked someone had tried with great vigor to "speak with an attendant," enough vigor to snap off portions of the button!
I recently attended a conference at Wheaton College. I'd been to the school before, but didn't really know where anything was. My friend Matt and I parked within a dozen yards of a banner denoting our conference. But it turned out that was mostly a good place to hang a banner, not really the main place where the meeting was being held.
As we walked up toward the banner we were met by a couple young people in orange shirts. They informed us that our first order was to register in the gym. "Follow the sidewalk that way," the orange shirt pointed and said. Matt and I strode off obediently. Just at the point when I was thinking, "Where's the dang gym?" another orange shirt materialized and said, "Need to register? Just this way." At the gym, an orange shirt opened the door. At dinner a particularly intrepid orange shirt held open two doors at once to let in the thronging masses. Like signs in the Paris Metro, the orange shirts seemed to always be where I needed them.
I wanted to bring one home with me.
How cool would that be? Someone who knew the schedule, knew where the places were that you needed to be, and held open the door when you got there. And all this with a smiling face. Amazing and wonderful.
It makes me wonder if the orange shirts all came from Utah or maybe Enterprise Car Rental.
Last Saturday I had a cool opportunity to sit with a few others, listening to our senior pastor Gregg Parris talk about what it means to be a leader. He spoke briefly about some of his success as a leader. He also spoke in depth about several of his devastating failures. I’ll blog some of those stories in coming days.*
Drawing from the book of Esther in the Bible, Gregg presented us with eight leadership lessons. I missed many of the connections to Esther, so you may want to read the book for yourself. It’s a fascinating story. Eight Lessons in Influence from Esther
Pray to see things as they are. Often times the stated issue isn’t the real issue. Gregg said the younger you are when you learn this, the better off you’ll be for the rest of your life. Ask, “God, what is really going on in this conflict?”
Influence influencers. Gregg said that this principle is why he showed up on Saturday morning to speak to our small group. He sees potential to influence in our little band of interns. (No pressure, guys!)
Be courageous and self-sacrificial. You will never be a great leader unless you’re willing to suffer. Those who suffer with grace do so because of their courage.
Timing and preparation are crucial to influence. You have to pick your battles. And you need to be prepared. With regard to issues of the kingdom of God, timing is everything.
Be crucified to personal ambition. Authority to lead comes to the degree that you lay down your life for the people you serve. If you will take care of the depth of your relationship with God, he’ll take care of the breadth of your influence.
Be positive, not destructive. Destruction is what happens when we’re not positive. Think the best of people.
Get control of your pride and ego before exerting influence.
Trust God with the results.
If I had to choose one or two of these to consider in my life, maybe to focus some growth and training on, I think I’d go with “Pray to see things as they are.” I could also do with a greater sense of personal sacrifice and courage, but I’d rather not think about that.
One thing I see at work in my life, that I delight in, is the privilege I have to influence influencers. I spend a good bit of my time speaking to and writing for people who love Jesus and want to respectfully invite others to follow him.
How about you? Any of these you’d like to grow in? Any you’ve seen God give you or build in you lately?
*OK, truth be told: Gregg didn’t talk about failure and I wouldn’t blog it if he did. I just put that in there to encourage you to keep reading!
Here’s something I’m thankful for today: Food. Yummy food in ample quantity. Many people around the world do not have ample food, tasty or otherwise. If there’s food to buy, they lay awake at night wondering how they’ll afford to get it for their kids. Other people can’t enjoy food right now like my friend who struggles with anorexia and my dad who finds little or no appeal in food as he battles cancer.
But I’m thankful for the food I’ve enjoyed today: Fresh blueberries to put on my cereal this morning; tasty kettle-fried potato chips with the box lunch at the conference I’m attending; and as I walked to the workshop in which I’m typing this, some young volunteer was passing out Dove ice cream bars. Wow. Culinary utopia and dinner hasn’t even happened yet.
Of course I’d trade it all to see my friend and dad share a large pizza or a bag of White Castle hamburgers. And whole cities, nations where the food is running out? Well, that’s hard to even imagine.
Ann and I added a new house rehab skill to our toolbox tonight. We installed a flexible gas line from the propane tap in the basement up, down, around and through the floor to a gas stove.
I don’t know about you, but Ann way prefers cooking with gas. Switching from electric will make her happy, which in turn makes the rest of us happy! My Dad should be happy to know that we used pipe dope instead of teflon tape!
If you realize after a week or so that nothing new has shown up here after this post, maybe you could swing by the house and check on things. Just put out your cigarette before you open the front door!
I got off the plane feeling pretty cool with life: Got car reserved, a cheap hotel room waiting, and a presumably nice drive in the morning through a part of the US I’d never visited. Like a good vibe black hole, the rental car agent sucked all that joy away in a moment.
“We’re out of compacts, so I’m putting you in a Town and Country.” Somehow, my mind heard that as a bigger, nicer car than what I had reserved. Then it began to dawn on me, “A Town and Country is a ding dang minivan.” Ack. The movie in my mind involved me zipping around the great forests of the Northwest in a zippy little car. It just didn’t work if you took out the Focus or the Mazda 3 and replaced it with a minivan.
“Surely you have a car,” I implored imploringly.
“Yes, we do,” she answered hopefully. “It will cost you $10 extra.”
“Ten bucks for the whole rental period?” I asked stupidly.
“Per day,” she responded with triumphant finality.
Lacking extensive blogging experience, I don’t know if it’s good manners to say the name of the rental car company. Suffice it to say, even if you’re really trying to be thrifty (wink wink, nudge nudge), I’d still advise renting from Enterprise.
The next morning I drove my decidedly uncool car out of Seattle into some of the most beautiful geography I’ve ever seen. It inspired this photo essay called, “Un-cool Car in Cool Places.”
I participated in a helpful workshop yesterday about dialogue education based on the ideas of an apparently very bright woman named Jane Vella. I want to learn more and more how to help people capture and apply valuable information. A good sermon still packs a punch, a powerful speech builds vision, inspires passion and catalyzes action, and well written articles (and blogs?) extend the range of communication. But many people learn best in a situation in which they’re given a chance to interact with the content being taught. Creating such settings was the point of this workshop.
Here are a couple of key take aways for me:
Six principles of effective adult learning theory
1. Respect: Respect your students because they each bring something to the table. Their life experiences matter.
2. Immediacy: Help students understand how they can immediately use the information being conveyed.
3. Relevance: Similar to immediacy, communicate the relevance of the content to the students’ lives.
4. Safety: Build a learning environment that is challenging, but not threatening. Students should feel like they can be involved without embarrassment.
5. Engagement: Students should be involved in the learning event, not simply passive recipients.
6. Inclusion: Teachers should make an effort to engage all students.
I plan to review my next several talks to see how they measure up to these six principles. I think I do well with respect, safety and inclusion, but could do better with immediacy and relevance.
Our instructor, Karen Ridout, also laid out four ways to involve students during a class or presentation by giving them four types of learning activities. She called it:
The Four A Model
Anchor (inductive): This is a task that has the learner access their own prior knowledge or experience with the topic or content. It helps them center on the topic and realize they have stuff to bring to the table.
Add (input): This a learning task that has the student hear, see, or experience substantive new content (information, research, theory, skill).
Apply (implement): With these tasks the learner puts the new content into action during the class.
Away (integrate): This is a task that connects the new learning back to the life of the learner and its future use. Think, “homework with a purpose.” These tasks include action plans and commitment statements.
My plan is to integrate one task from each of these categories into the next four talks I give.
Go here for more info on these ideas. Go here to buy Dr. Vella’s books.
I had a chance recently to talk to forty or fifty kids at our church. I don’t often talk to kids other than my own, so I was a bit nervous. I felt some pressure to be cool, but not to look like I felt pressure to be cool or was in any way responding to that sort of pressure. So I wore a decidedly dopey seer sucker shirt and sandals. I doubt any of the kids thought as I walked forward, “Wow, that’s one cool old guy.”
Even so, by the time my 30 minutes were up, I felt like I had communicated what I wanted and had connected, at least a little, with the group.
I used to challenge my friend Dave to blog his sermons. He didn’t really want to. Something about modesty and not wanting Rick Warren’s lawyers giving him grief for copyright violations, or something like that. I can’t really remember.
But I thought it might be fun to post an outline of the talk I gave the kids and invite your feedback. At least watch this video that we showed at the start of my talk. It’s amazing.
Battle at Kruger
In case you don't watch it, this video is amateur footage of a wild life battle in South Africa. Some lions cut a Cape Buffalo calf from the herd and wrestle it to the ground at the edge of a watering hole. They fight with a crocodile for possession of the calf before the herd fights to take it back. Ultimately the herd frees the calf and chases away the lions.
With that background, I began my talk:
Cast of characters: • baby buffalo in distress • lions on the prowl • the thundering herd • opportunistic crocodile, aka: oppy croc
Who of these are you right now? I’ve been most of these (I threw in some confession sort of stories here.)
Bible in I Peter 5.8: says our enemy is roaring lion, seeking someone to devour
Jesus is the the buffalo (I told them that saying Jesus = Buffalo could get me fired from my job, so let’s just keep it among ourselves.)
Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees and the woman they caught in adultery is an example of him being the buffalo to rescue someone.
One of Jesus main instructions was: "Follow me. Believe what I say, sure, but also do what I do." We need to be the herd for each other.
I asked how we do this. A couple students offered: "We hold each other accountable to following Jesus and we give each other a shoulder to lean on." I said, "Don't gossip. Hang out with the smelly girl. And look for people who are getting drug down to the water."
Questions • Who’s one person you might need to watch out for at church? • Who’s one person you might need to show some care for outside of church? • What’s one way you need the others here to watch out for you?
We ended by shouting together: Will you be my buffalo? Yes, I’ll be your buffalo!
The ending was pretty fun. I’d never roused a bunch of kids to yelling and it was pretty enjoyable. I suppose there’s a paragraph early on in the Youth Leader’s Manual that advises: Don’t mistake rowdy yelling for successful communication. I’ll keep that in mind.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe I get to do this job. I’m writing this post from a ferry in the Puget Sound, going from a Perspectives class last night to my final Perspectives class of the spring tonight.
This part of the U.S. is unbelievable. I'm a hazard driving around, my head swinging back and forth as I try to drink in all the beauty. I can’t figure out why we don’t all live here. Sure it’s remote. Sure there’s a little bit of the weirdness that comes with living on a island (no, offense, Marti and Nanette). But God is at work here: Three healthy Perspectives classes and lots of people wondering how they can make their lives count for God’s purposes, how they can lovingly and respectfully invite others to follow Jesus.
On the way to church today we passed two dead turtles about fifty yards apart, run over and lying on the shoulder of the road. Not cuff link sized pets that you might see in a small fishbowl, these were hub cap size snappers.
This isn't one of the turtles we saw. This lucky snapper made it across the road!
How do you hit a turtle driving in your car? The second turtle I can understand. It got run over because someone was looking at the first dead turtle. But that first one has me confused.
I mean it’s not like a squirrel that starts to cross the road, stops, starts, feints, dodges, head-fakes, reconsiders, sprints, jukes, faints, revives, runs down the road away from your car, then does an abrupt 180 and dives for your tire. No one blames you for hitting a squirrel. But a fourteen inch snapping turtle? Even a sleepy driver’s ed student should be able to judge the trajectory of a turtle and guide the car safely by.
Plus there is the morphology to consider. Hitting a turtle is like running over an aluminum briefcase only to discover it’s full of spaghetti sauce and fried chicken. It can’t be good for your car.
Chapter three of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath has some interesting thoughts about turtles and highways. Go here and scroll down a bit to read it.
The coming summer promises to hold some fun and productive times for our family. Today was the first full day of summer school break for the kids and Ann. It was a little bumpy, resulting in the following challenge from the Mom and teacher: “Tomorrow will see improved behavior and a higher percentage of chores done or we go right back to school!”
Should that not happen, the kids have some fun stuff ahead. On June 23 they’ll start a week long service project with church. The older three will spend the whole week at the church, sleeping in class rooms and spending their days throughout the city building, tearing down, pulling weeds, painting, giving away candy and cleaning toilets. Ann and I will serve as coaches, doing what we can to help a couple teams succeed. You're welcome to join us on Friday evening for the big Party in the Parking Lot wrap up event. Look for me doing my staff duty, sitting in the dunk tank for the amusement of all!
I have two training opportunities in June. I’m excited about the Perspectives National conference that will be held in Dallas. It should be a great chance to hang out with some of my heroes and colleagues, and it may open some doors for new speaking opportunities. A couple weeks later, I’ll attend an Alpha training event in preparation for our church running that program in the spring.
We also have tons of family and friends coming in for visits. Ann’s brother and his family will fly in from Arizona because they heard in Indiana it’s a “wet heat!”
Throughout the summer, I’m teaming up with our Commonway pastor to host a training internship for several young leaders in our fellowship. We’re planning to help these guys take steps toward the roles of vision and influence that God has in mind for them.
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