We Should See Other Blogs

• How do you motivate people to do something they don’t want to do? Say you’re moving someone from an executive to a more sales-oriented role. And they don’t want to do it. Let’s say they use every possible excuse to avoid their new job, keep finding ways to do their old job despite access restrictions, and in the meantime generally get in the way. Oh, and let’s say it’s in a company with only one level of management and that level of management is afraid of conflict. One more thing… it’s all family. How do you do that?
• Hiring family is generally a mistake. Nepotism has no place in business, not simply because it’s unfair, but because it’s destructive. Hiring family makes you weak: You have to choose, sometimes, between your family and your business. And of course you choose family. Hiring family makes hard choices much, much harder.
• I feel like playing Monopoly sometime soon. I don’t know why. I just developed a hankering for the game.
• Do you find that in-line spell checking makes you spell better? I don’t mean, does it help you make fewer mistakes. That’s pretty obvious. I mean, does it make you more likely to spell things right the first time? Do you dread that little wavy red line?
• I’ve finished drinking some coffee that John at church gave me. I’m not sure if it’s Panamanian or Columbian or what, but it’s pretty good stuff. My favourite by far is still the coffee I bought in Cuba, of all places. Who ever heard of good Cuban coffee?
• Speaking of good Cuban coffee, the cappuccinos Laura and I had in Cuba… wow. I don’t think I’ve ever had better coffee anywhere. I’m not kidding. We got up in the morning and stumbled bleary-eyed into the heat just to enjoy one of those bad boys. And it was worth it. No matter how swelteringly hot it was outside.
• I have been married for a year and one month. That’s… crazy. But awesome at the same time.
• God’s plans are so much better than my plans are. Even when he works through hard means. I can attest to this personally. He turns things to good.
• Mom just showed up at the office and is now fetching me a coffee — I hope. Either that or she forgot totally and I shall remain with no coffee left.
• How do you make a really good pulled pork dish anyways? I’ve made a few educated guesses, but I don’t really know.

• Chris asks a good question via Twitter: Is there a way to do church without burning leaders out? I think the answer comes back to something Joel Main and I talked about the other week. There are different ways to do church. We assume that church always revolves around a couple guys, but is that really how it has to work? What if the church is more of a collaborative environment where more people get involved? And what if instead of creating programs and activities with the implicit goal of getting people involved in peripheral matters, why not embed them at the heart of the whole thing? Of course the quality will go down as people with varying talent levels get involved, but church isn’t a stage show or some kind of theatre. Maybe sacrificing some polish would be a good thing. If it spared people’s marriages and drew people in and made authentic community.
• I’m beginning to hate the word “authentic”. It’s so over-used — and by me, too, yes — that the word itself seems inauthentic. Which makes me wonder if what we mean when we say “authentic” is actually just “cool”. That thing that as soon as it become mainstream becomes uncool. Or unauthentic.
• There are people I usually like a great deal who turn into raging idiots around politics. They become incensed that “their party” is being “attacked” and so they go on the offensive and “defend” them. This is true of both Republicans and Democrats, both Liberals and Conservatives, but it seems to be worse with those who mix religion and politics. More to the point, people who genuinely believe that the Republican party is another arm for the body of Christ seem to get more upset when their precious idol is under attack. I don’t know why this is. I know and respect many Republicans and Democrats who don’t do this. I know many who are measured and rational. But there’s always a few who seem to think they’re helping. But they’re not. They’re making arses of themselves.
• Today I’m going to have some sort of burger for lunch. But because I took public transit — which really isn’t public, as I still had to pay for it: Why do I have to pay for public transit but not public healthcare? — I’ll have to walk there. I need an hour lunch break for exactly that reason.
• I went to Nick’s profession of faith yesterday. It strikes me that before any of us go after the Catholic church for whatever doctrinal failings that branch of Christendom may espouse, we should clean up our own houses first. Especially when we’re still perpetuating a bunch of baroque rituals whose purposes are exemplary but whose roots are not in scripture. Even when you know the rituals aren’t grounded in scripture, and you can say as much. You can know what you like and say what you like but what you do is what matters. If you tacitly or implicitly put something on the level of scripture, you have absolutely no right to speak up against those who do so vocally and in the open.
• I am hungry!
• Laura and I went into Toronto for a while on Saturday and just walked around for a long time. It was fun: We don’t go to Toronto enough, it seems, even though we live on the border of Mississauga and Toronto. All this to say that one day I would very much like to live in downtown Toronto. Maybe not something as posh as Queen’s Quay, but something close to everything. It’s a grand city. Or, as Torontonians seem to blather on about, it’s a world-class city.
• And that’s it folks! Also, I hope Obama wins. He’s the lesser of two evils, and I’m a great fan of rhetoric. Ever since I watched the West Wing, it seems, and developed a peripatetic crush on Aaron Sorkin.

It’s easy to look at those people — no matter who those people are — and mark up their personal failings. It’s easy because personal failings are always more pronounced and obvious in those people. Especially after the fact.

You can look at those people in light of their most recent transgressions and say, Ah, I see the failing that led up to this calamitous fall. Or, Ah, I always suspected. Or, Ah, I told you so.

There is some value to this, of course, if you examine yourself through and through, if you comb through your own life to find if that same root might one day flower into a full-grown plant, to find if you’re hiding the same sort of bodies in a closet somewhere.

As a leader of a church you can ask yourself how you can prevent your charges from falling into grievous sin. But from a human perspective there isn’t anything you can do. People are good at façades, good at erecting walls and appearing perfect when they are in fact anything but.

Quite a few churches seem oblivious to this fact. It’s non-obvious to them, and probably for good reason. After all, if the intensive study of scripture, if participation in an ancient tradition, if having the right doctrine and presumably the right relationship with God, if the right kind of exegetical preaching with enough emphasis on sin, if these things don’t produce a church full of the proper kind of people, what can? Everyone feels like they should be better; they should be sinning less, they should be doing more, they should be… something. And everyone else looks just like this portrait of the perfect Christian, so we all just pretend.

This happens in every kind of church. Post-modern, modern, ancient, whatever. Because it’s human nature, and human nature is a hard thing to get over.

It doesn’t, of course, have to be this way. The recognition of sin shouldn’t drive people ever more into a world of spackle and paste and paint and fabric, but deep into the arms of God’s grace. The recognition of imperfection should drive men and women to break down the walls between then, no matter what these walls are made of. Whether they’re middle-class suburban perfection, or theological precision, or a pious but empty care for the disenfranchised.

What else do we share? Rich, middle-class, poor: We’re all deeply and entirely flawed. Flawed to the point that each of us, apart from Christ, is liable to fall horribly. Even in Christ we still have that old man nipping on our heels.

I speak from deep within this myself. I am imperfect. I am part of a community of believers who are imperfect. Our leadership is imperfect. Our feeble attempts to draw close to God are imperfect.

But the most important thing, I think, is the realisation, and then the action. A kind of humility that gives grace to those who have fallen, who have done terrible things, whether they are living in rebellion against God or not, and whether they are seeking forgiveness and reconciliation or not.