Stalled out.
One foot slides forward, the other stays put as the drumbeat of the first verse echoes back, and I stand straddling the text.
I set aside the online Bible, as much as I love my Biblegateway.com. The feel of worn paper better moves in my heart. So I reach for my leatherbound and push fingertips over the words.
Turning pages fails to drown out the drumming while words march in straight lines and the ground rumbles beneath my feet with the rhythm.
The rhythm.
→ 2 CommentsCategories: grace · redemption · sacrifice
Tagged: redemption, Rest, rhythm, Samson
Seven minas remain unaccounted for.
That’s my conclusion when I read Jesus’ parable of the ten minas in Luke’s Gospel.
The man of noble birth, before embarking on his quest to be made king, called ten servants and gave them ten minas with instructions to “put the money to work.”
Never mind the part about how much his subjects hated him and trailed behind to subvert his plans. He became king anyway. Once crowned, he sent for the servants to make an accounting.
The first reported that his one mina earned another ten. The second showed how he took his one mina and netted five more.
A delighted king put these faithful servants who understood return on investment in charge of a number of cities commensurate with their earnings.
Another servant cowered in fear and unwrapped his one mina from a protective cloth. He returned it unharmed, but unimproved. The king, who did not want just his mina back but wanted back his mina plus, flipped a royal nutty and gave the man’s sparkling but solitary mina to the servant with the keener investment sense.
So we know that story. And we know Matthew’s version of it with the three servants and the talents of money apportioned to them based on their ability.
But what about the other seven in Luke’s record?
What did they do with their minas?
→ 5 CommentsCategories: High Calling Blogs · Loving Monday · Risk · Sharing Life
Tagged: High Calling Blogs, investment, Loving Monday, parable of the minas, Risk
I called my dentist and asked him if he could meet me at his office. He was kind enough to agree.
Yes, it was a Sunday morning. Yes, I left church just before the worship service started. But had I waited until the next day, regular office hours, that small area of swelling would have looked more like I’d sprouted a second head out of my neck.
Isaac’s elbow-plant to the right side of my face the night before during a tickle fight (this was several years ago) turned out to be well placed. It released to the surface the mysterious origin of two long years of pain and discomfort.
→ 8 CommentsCategories: Finding Life
Tagged: Beatitudes, comfort, hunger, mourning, pain, Scripture memory
“Do you ever look back on the day and wonder what we’re doing here?”
Debbie closed the case file we’d been brainstorming and set it on her lap. She leaned back in the side chair and took a deep breath, and then just looked at me in that way of hers. The one with the light smile, knowing eyes. The one that always told me that she knew my struggle.
It was hers too, though it was a fight she fought much better than I.
“You know what we’re doing,” she said.
“I don’t,” I replied. “Not really. Debbie, if I made two lists — one of all the things that make my heart beat and one of all the things I do here every day — and pinned them up side by side on my cubicle wall, it would be a perfect list of opposites.”
→ 14 CommentsCategories: High Calling Blogs · Loving Monday · Work
Tagged: High Calling Blogs, Loving Monday, Work
I grimace a little.
The sound makes me.
Is it the rubbing? Kind of like metal on metal.
But not really.
More like the squeak-shriek of a clown twisting a skinny yellow balloon into a poodle.
Only different.
Maybe fingernails on a chalkboard.
Except not quite.
→ 5 CommentsCategories: Finding Life · Walking with God
Tagged: Finding Life, soft heart, unyielding
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)
::
Whatever it takes.
→ 8 CommentsCategories: Reminders
Tagged: Reminders, Shema
The crumpled chart probably still sits somewhere amongst my old school papers, sandwiched between an analysis of theories of nuclear deterrence and a report on Mesoamerican prehistory.
It’s how I was taught to order my life.
A five-piece pie, promising to bring balance and structure and make me a super saint.
Social.
Physical.
Intellectual.
Recreational.
Spiritual.
That’s all there was to life, and if I could just keep the pieces the right size, I’d coast along nicely.
It worked.
I got up at dawn, ran the dorm steps to the weight room, cleaned up, headed to the student center to meet friends for morning prayer, hit the cafeteria for breakfast, and ran to class. One hour physical, one hour spiritual, half hour social, two hours intellectual . . . And so would go most of my days. I even had the color coded daily schedule to prove out my balance at the end of the day.
I liked the order, the slots, the compartments.
And who doesn’t like pie?
→ 7 CommentsCategories: High Calling Blogs · Loving Monday · Work
Tagged: High Calling Blogs, Loving Monday, Work
If you’ve read Steven Covey, or even sat under the instruction of one who has, you’ll be familiar with the urgent/important matrix. More than just a time management principle, it’s a solid basis for prioritizing most anything in life.
The principle breaks our activity into four quadrants that looks something like my crude sketch.
Managing life or work this way depends on being able to distinguish between important and not, and urgent and not. Often related to crises, the Important and Urgent things are important (must be done) but are also urgent (must be done now).
Not Important and Urgent tasks look more like interruptions or distractions. These things don’t need to be done but they capture our attention because if they’re going to be done at all they need to be done now.
Not Important and Not Urgent activities don’t contribute to meeting our goals, but somehow lure us away into dorking around with them, keeping us from those things that matter.
It is understood by those who ascribe to this philosophy that high performing people and groups devote the greatest share of time and resources Important and Not Urgent activites — the prize behind Door Number Two. Important and Not Urgent are tasks that may not have time-sensitivity but are so crucial to accomplishing what we desire and becoming who we long to be.
High-value activities like planning, training and preparation.
High-value activities like exercising and eating right.
High-value activities like prayer and study and being with Jesus.
But in real life, when so much demands immediate attention, we throw out what packs the biggest punch in favor of what screams the loudest.
And so we spend more of our time on things that matter less.
I’m not teaching a class on time management, though I truly wish I’d have thought of Lazarus the last time I did. Because long before there was a Steven Covey, Jesus was already practicing one of the most foundational principles of time management ever known to man.
Jesus knew the impact of Important and Not Urgent.
Jesus got it.
→ 4 CommentsCategories: God's glory · Lazarus
Tagged: God's glory, Lazarus, Priorities, steven covey, time management
“This is not a teaching moment. Don’t you dare use it as one.”
I forced a grin back into its straight place before I looked up. I knew who stood in front of my desk. She announced her arrival in my office 100 yards before she got there with quick stomps, rustling papers and the seesaw sounds of her indecision between gasps and sighs.
I always knew. Of all the folks I had the privilege to manage, she was my favorite.
As she threw herself backwards into the chair, the file ejected from her hands onto my desk. I grabbed the papers as they slid by.
“What are you working on?” I asked, peeking out from behind my manila shield.
“I’m buried,” she said.
Gasp.
“I just need to know if there’s coverage. Yes or no? That’s all, just the answer.”
Sigh.
“Don’t help me find it. Don’t ask any questions. Just tell me.”
A half-swallowed laugh stuck in my throat and interrupted her next gasp. I straightened in my chair and stared her down.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked.
→ 9 CommentsCategories: High Calling Blogs · Loving Monday · Work
Tagged: High Calling Blogs, Loving Monday, Work
Guest post by Paul Willingham
Last summer while on a pilgrimage to our daughter’s home in the northern suburbs, Bette and I pulled up behind a Prius, Toyota’s hybrid entry in the development and marketing of greener vehicles. (If it was last weekend, it probably would have been parked on the shoulder, now that Toyota’s recall problems are in the news.)
It wasn’t the hybrid that caught our eye, however. It was the vanity plate on the vehicle.
We often get a smile from some of the plates that we spy while others challenge us to try to figure out what the owner is trying to tell the world. I’m convinced that many times, the significance of the abbreviated, obtuse and hidden message is only obvious and important to the owner of the vanity plate. But the plate we saw was very plain and left no doubt as to the message.
It read I TITHE.
We spotted this plate in a heavily traveled, traffic-delaying intersection known locally as the Devil’s Triangle. I don’t believe that there is any spiritual significance in that but you never know (cue the Twilight Zone theme).
→ 8 CommentsCategories: Posts from My Dad · Uncategorized
Tagged: Guest Posts, Humility, tithing
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