Receive Love

In order to receive, I have to trust.  When I first heard this concept I thought what a strange combination of idea's.  How are love and trust related and can't I receive love even if I struggle to trust.  But then I remembered Brene Brown's Ted Talk on shame and vulnerability.  She made statements that vulnerability is the gateway to freedom, love, creativity.  I then think about believing.  To believe by faith is to believe something that does not yet exist or cannot be seen, which is a risk.  It may or may not be.  Yet we must take the risk to believe by faith in order to receive God's salvation and His Holy Spirit.  All of these things require us to become vulnerable.  To take the risk to believe something puts us in the vulnerable position that it may or may not be true.  To take the risk to tell someone a need puts us in the risk of being hurt by them if they choose to not step into our need.  To take the risk to be vulnerable with another person, puts us in the risk of no longer being accepted by them when they know more about us.
So to choose to not be vulnerable is to choose to hide, or conceal who we really are and keeps our true selves from being accepted.

Think geometry and proofs.  I love proofs and as I have been writing, I  discovered that I am trying to prove that in order to receive love we must trust and to trust is to become vulnerable with another.  We have this at work with God and we have this at work with others.

Sorry about the rambled thoughts above, but this is often how I begin to think and learn.

A Deep Significant Purpose

I have been banging around the website called Kahn Academy.  They have a mission to provide a world class education for free, for anyone, from anywhere.  A purpose like that moves me.  I recently heard a speech by Elon Musk, his purpose in Tesla was to promote electric cars by driving the price point lower so that people will drive more electric cars and less gasoline powered cars and this will cause less environmental impact to our world.  His purpose moved me.

I think its possible to have a mission in any business that is moving.  A mission that people can get excited about and want to contribute to.

I want my little mechanical contracting business to learn how to help people grow.  And by grow, I mean grow as a human being, such that their workplace is better, their work is of higher quality, their family life is better, and grow in that they give back to humanity from their greatly developed capacity.  That sounds fun to me.

I also think hidden in the gospel of Jesus Christ, are principles that work in businesses and teams and communities.  They are strategies that come from grace, and we can be ambassadors of grace to those we work with.  Since grace is not conditional, but free, we can give grace freely to those we work with.

Just thoughts from my day.

The gospel leads us into eternity

So the thought is you can be in eternity, or you can be outside of eternity.  No scriptures, just my heart searching for the place I long to live.  When I am trusting God and His gospel, I can separate myself from worries that I have made mistakes, told lies, been less than righteous and these things will catch up to me and bring disaster with them.  Also, when I am trusting God and His gospel, I can separate myself from anxieties in the future, knowing that God will be with me and loves me and is in control.

So I can be in the moment that exists right here right now, facing what is before me with faith.  Living in the present where there is no time and the time that is measured, will never end.  Interesting thoughts for me this day.

So heretical I get worried about what you will think of me, knowing I think this way.

There is a truth that I find in the bible.  I find it in Galatians, Ephesians, in fact in almost all of Paul's writing.

The truth is this, it is no long I who live, but Christ who lives in me.  Galatians 2:20

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.  This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.  Ephesians 5:31-32

So if Jesus lives in my heart and has become one with me and everyone else in the body of Christ, it should be a given that I love my heart with my whole heart.  After all, wouldn't that be loving Christ?

If Christ lives in me, then I might ought consider to love my life and not hate it.

If I am to have a relationship with Jesus and I find him inside of me, then I should seek to have a great relationship with myself.

If I am wanting a relationship with Jesus and he is in other Christians hearts, then I might have success with that goal as I get to know the hearts of others.

How can it be true that "Christ lives in me" and "if I say I have no sin I deceive others and the truth is not in me"?  Could it be that Christ can live in me even when I sin?

Am I a liberal Christian?  Such a terrible label and yet I am not sure what it means.

Story

The power of a story is amazing.  Somehow a story allows us to connect in a manner which facts do not allow.  I was confronted with this a year ago in a meeting I was participating.

In the meeting, I was asked to tell the story of my success.  I started off telling the facts about why I thought we had been successful. I talked about insight I held on the market I was working in, as well as the strategy I used to bid, the effort to maximize the work that the overhead I had working in the office could handle.  Then our facilitator asked me if rather than share the facts, could I tell my story.

I had to struggle to determine where to start, what to tell, but in the next few minutes I began to gain some traction and I told my story, the emotion I felt, the struggles I encountered.  When I was done we went one by one around the room and asked each member of the group which presentation they liked better.

It was overwhelming how much more power the story was described as having than the facts and strategic points of information.

I think often our stories allow people to see our humanity, our errors, and even our sins.  These are the things that make us real, within a persons reach.  They are inspirational, because we have found our stories have similar scenes, we can no longer disqualify ourselves for the errors that were in the success story we just heard.  That is why we become inspired.  I can do this too!

Self Compassion

One of the hardest things that we do as humans is offer to ourselves compassion.  It is easy to offer others compassion, but when it comes to me, I rarely qualify.

I think that when Peter wanted to refuse to allow Jesus to wash his feet, this same principle was at work.  He was not about to allow himself to receive something he did not deserve.

I think this tendency to not offer ourselves compassion also creates in us stress which then causes behavior that we would not intentionally set out to do.  For instance, when my wife asks me a question like when am I planning to till the garden, I can answer out of my view of myself rather than from giving her the information she wants.  If I have a frustration with myself for not getting more things done, then as she asks the question, I will begin to defend why that particular thing is not done yet.  I am defending myself from my own shame, rather than simply trying to give her the information she is simply asking for.  It is amazing how answering a different question than the one that was asked can lead to fight.

I think the Gospel gives us the freedom to have self-compassion.  It has been interesting as I have practiced self compassion, one of the things I have noticed is that when I cut myself some slack, I can't help but cut others slack too and I end up liking them more, being less irritated by their imperfections.

The second commandment, you shall love your neighbor as you love your self, speaks to this need for loving ourselves.  God loving us while we were yet sinners speaks to the same principle.  Striving for faith in the gospel, is striving to let Jesus wash our feet, striving to believe we are who God says we are when we believe Him, striving to believe that God likes us and loves us.

So my suggestion is cut yourself some slack.  Let God love you, with all your imperfections and notice how your interactions with others begin to change.

Go ahead, give it a try and take the risk!

Calling

I feel as if I have never been quite as excited and jazzed as I have this week.  I have been reading a book titled Synchronicity by Joseph Jaworski and as I have been reading the book, I am seeing a convergence of themes that have been brewing in my life.

I am not so sure I can yet put words to the convergence, but for as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by Einstein's quest for the unified theory.  I feel that there is a unified theory in psychology, business, theology and now believe it or not physics.

In the book mentioned above, Joe talks about being in a flow where people come together and things happen out of relationship, out of connection to one's purpose, out of a group of people becoming one.  And when in "the flow" it seems miracles and coincidences occur to make the result seem easy.

I have experienced this flow in my company.  We have created a place where the recession did not hit.  Our competitors are failing, and we are not.  In fact, we have been growing.  We have created what we dreamed of having.  A place where people can grow and prosper.

One of Einstein's peers was a man named Bohm.  Dr. Bohm a physicist, in his later years devoted his thinking towards all of creation being connected with all of creation.  He made the statement that our language with nouns and verbs, lends itself to us looking at creation as independently separate pieces.  If you go to the story of the tower of Babel you see how God used language to bring separation among people.   A theory proven in 1964 actually shows that matter is connected to each other even when separated by far distances.  This interconnection is an actual reality and humans have the capacity to effect reality as we connect deeply to one another.  In Colossians, we find that Jesus is in everything and holds all things together.  In a simple way, Jesus is the unified field theory.

These deep connections are through empathy and emotion.  Einstein has a quote in which he says intuition is a gift and the rational mind a great servant, but our culture has viewed the rational mind the gift and forgotten intuition.  We have decided if we can't measure it, then it does not exist.  Yet reality may actually be something that cannot be measured.  Do you think you can measure God?

So as I ramble here are the pieces that to me are converging in a manner where God will reveal great power to affect all of creation.

The words that I feel are connected are:  Jesus, shame, sin, faith, love, create, relationship, communities, trust.

The concepts that I feel are connected are:

Faith that God, loves us and likes us and is for us.

Reality is only as it exists in each moment as God sustains it and it is created new in each and every moment.  This actually lines up with physics that says that matter is always changing, from mass, to energy to waves, to nothing and then back to matter.  So we might perceive the rock to be unchanging and fixed, but in fact it is new every moment.  Believing that reality is changeable can lead us to a new place of hope and adventure where we can create a new reality in the new moment before us.
As we trust in God and what Jesus came and did for us, and embrace our imperfectness, we find strength to believe that we can create our dreams, we find strength to believe we have not disqualified ourselves.  We can learn new things.  New ways to relate to one another.  And in our embracing our imperfectness, we can actually stay in the flow of God's blessing, and stay in faith, trusting God.

It seems to me that leading like a sinner, allows a person to share with integrity our experience which brings forth great connection with others.  From that connection, as God has made each one unique, a greater whole is created which brings newness to thinking, new ideas, new creations.  It is difficult to lead with our sin, the things we feel shame about, but the gospel gives us strength, hope, and joy where the shame brought isolation.

I am  excited about the adventures God has before me.  The communities of businesses that will create new realities.  The company I am a part of now has created a reality where there has not been a recession.  I believe business can create communities where things work differently and better than ever before.  I believe business leaders can make their own businesses places of health and love and provision for those they touch.