What Can It Do?

SOURCE:  "The Ice Cube is Microwaving" by Chris Ritter.  

https://peopleneedjesus.net/2020/07/30/the-ice-cube-is-microwaving/

KEYWORD:  Improvisation, Imagination, Creativity, Ministry, Church 

The movie Apollo 13 is famous for the line, “Houston, we have a problem.” But the more important scene is when the engineers at NASA get in a room to figure out what to do about it. Flight Director Gene Krantz (Ed Harris) announces: “I want you all to forget the flight plan. From now on we are improvising a new mission. How do we get our people home?” With so much blown apart, they had to figure out what systems were still operational enough to sustain life.

"I don't care what anything was designed to do.  I care what it can do."

In Revelation 3:2, the church of Sardis was challenged to “strengthen what remains.” There are U.S. churches within United Methodism that are doing amazing ministry, reaching people for Jesus, producing new leaders, and deploying people for ministry. We have many pastors who called, gifted, and effective. Strong mission partnerships exist. There are denominational leaders and staffers who have vision, drive, and Kingdom vision. These folks need to be freed to do their best work… independent of any goal of denominational institutional maintenance.

Cross-Generational Connections

SOURCE:  "The Rotarian Conversation,"  The Rotarian, July 2020, pg 52.
KEYWORD:  generations, old, young, lonely, loneliness, connection, fellowship, koinonia

Marc Freedman is one of the leading experts in the United States on the longevity revolution and the transformation of retirement.  He was named a Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the World Economic Forum in 2014 and was featured by AARP the Magazine in 2012 among its "50 over 50 influencers. 

"There is a growing appreciation of connections in general these days, fostered by the awareness of how profound the problem of loneliness is in America and elsewhere.  People need a variety of connections -- with their peers as well as across generations.

A Harvard study found that relationships are the key to happiness throughout adulthood.  It shows that older people who connect with younger people are three times as likely to be happy as those who fail to do so.  Why is that bond so important?  One reason is that as we reach the time in our lives when there are fewer years ahead of us than behind us, it's a great comfort to know that what we've learned is likely to live on in younger friends and family members."

The End of the Story

SOURCE:  "You Decide the End of This Story."  The Daily Stoic.  July 23, 2020.

KEYWORD:  eschaton, faith, Abraham, hope, kingdom of God, 

Nothing better encapsulates Admiral James Stockdale and his heroism than this one quote, which applies today to our own adversity just as it did to the horrible ordeal that he went through:

"I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade."

Hiding Money in Books

SOURCE:  "The Still Hide Money in Books," Daily Stoic, June 26, 2020.
KEYWORDS:  knowledge, wisdom, leadership, education

As a young boy, the famed basketball coach George Raveling learned an invaluable lesson about the power of both knowledge and ignorance from his grandmother, who raised him.

“Why did the slave masters hide their money in books, George?” she asked the young boy, standing together in her kitchen.

“I don’t know, grandma,” he said.

“Because they knew the slaves wouldn’t open them,” she said.

...

From this early lesson, George Raveling came to see reading as a moral duty. To not read, to remain in ignorance, was not only to be weak, it was to ignore the people who had fought so hard, who had struggled at such great cost to read and to provide for future generations the right and the ability to do so. It was to spit in the face of Frederick Douglass, of Booker T. Washington, and, of course, of Martin Luther King, Jr. who Raveling had gotten to know.

Tower of Babel

SOURCE:  from the John Paul II National Shrine by Fr. Marko Rupnik 

KEYWORDS:  inhumane, incarnation, person, man, arrogance, power, kingdom

Fr. Marko Rupnik created this mosaic to depict the Tower of Babel from Genesis.  The faces of the builders are covered to suggest that as they try to exalt themselves, they lose their own humanity.  

We Want God

SOURCE:  "A Key Coronavirus Question: Do We Want God?" by KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ; May 25, 2020. https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-john-paul-ii-centenary-we-want-god/
KEYWORDS:  hunger, desire, love, God-shaped hole, humanity

Do you remember when Pope John Paul II went back to his native Poland, about eight months into his pontificate? The Communist officials couldn’t not let him in — he was too beloved. But when they did, they didn’t stand a chance. And, as Pulitzer Prize winner Peggy Noonan, author of John Paul the Great: Remember a Spiritual Father, has written, from the moment he arrived there, “the boundaries of the world began to shift.”

Despite the government’s attempts to keep Poles from getting too emotionally invested in the visit, the people lined the streets to see him. During his first Mass there, in Victory Square, the crowd thundered the declaration that “we want God,” stopping a powerful homily with a cry from the human heart so deep and insistent — and resilient — that the coming victory over the evil of Communism was beginning to be seen, in the victory of Christ over death.

It was the vigil of Pentecost, when the Apostles were given the Holy Spirit to set fire to the world. And the Poles were ready, too. Their Polish pope was a sign like no other that freedom was coming, that God was not leaving them orphaned in their suffering. In his sermon, Pope John Paul II said: “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude of geography. The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man. . . . The history of the nation is above all the history of people. And the history of each person unfolds in Jesus Christ. In him it becomes the history of salvation.”

He went on to say: “It is right to understand the history of the nation through man, each human being of this nation. At the same time man cannot be understood apart from this community that is constituted by the nation. Of course, it is not the only community, but it is a special community, perhaps that most intimately linked with the family, the most important for the spiritual history of man.”

QUOTE: Whale Through a Net

SOURCE:  Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (pp. 36-37). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:  Law vs. Faith, culture, society, religion, restraint, self-government, freedom,

In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked:

We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams understood that liberty under the Constitution could only work if the people were virtuous, restraining their passions and directing them toward the good—as defined, presumably, by Adams’s rationalistic religious belief. Fortunately, having gone through the First Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, America was strongly Evangelical, and citizens had a strong shared idea of the Good and a shared definition of virtue. Unfortunately, this would not last.

QUOTE: Failure to Listen

SOURCE:  Ailes, Roger. You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (p. 55). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:  Empathy, Love, Neighbor,

As psychologist Carl Rogers wrote, “Man’s inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively, skillfully, and with understanding to another person.”

Communicate or Die

SOURCE:  Ailes, Roger. You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (pp. 6-7). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
KEYWORDS:  Fellowship, koinonia, community, social, society,

Captain Eugene “Red” McDaniel was a Navy pilot shot down in North Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war for six years. In his book Scars and Stripes, he describes the desperate need of prisoners to communicate with one another to maintain morale. He says POWs tended to die much sooner if they couldn’t communicate. On many occasions, Captain McDaniel endured torture rather than give up his attempts to stay in touch with other prisoners, especially when he was in solitary confinement. Prisoners risked death to work out a complicated communications system where they would write under plates, cough, sing, tap on walls, laugh, scratch, or flap laundry a certain number of times to transmit a letter of the alphabet.

Captain McDaniel writes, “One thing I knew, I had to have communications with my own people here in this camp. There were people like myself who wanted to live through this, if at all possible. Communication with each other was what the North Vietnamese captors took the greatest pains to prevent. They knew, as well as I and the others did, that a man could stand more pain if he is linked with others of his own kind in that suffering. The lone, isolated being becomes weak, vulnerable. I knew I had to make contact, no matter what the cost.”1 For those brave men, it was communicate or die.

When we think of survival, we usually list food, shelter, and clothing as the essentials. I believe communications belongs in that grouping. Babies have died in hospitals because of lack of attention, caring, and handling.

Words and Music

SOURCE:  Ailes, Roger. You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (p. 45). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

KEYWORDS:  Spirit vs. Law, Faith vs. Religion, passion, inspiration 

Mark Twain was a renowned speaker in his day as well as a famous writer. One morning as he was dressing, he found a button missing from his shirt. Annoyed, he took another shirt. But it was also short a button. Exasperated, he took a third shirt from his bureau. It, too, lacked a button.

Twain flew into a rage, swearing like a stevedore. When he was through, he was startled to see his wife standing at the door, fuming in her own way at his intemperance. Carefully, slowly, and without a trace of emotion, she repeated every obscene word just uttered by her husband.

That took several minutes. When she was through, she stood impassive and silent, hoping her display would shame Twain. Instead, with a twinkle in his eye, he puffed on his cigar and said, “My dear, you have the words, but you don’t have the music.”