Leadingchurch.com

Interesting little graduation speech.  Hope to find time to write some comments.

from bookworm beauty

• She liked the worship and the band
• had issues with the pastor’s insensitivity to depression
• felt very uncomfortable with enforced hugging at mutual greeting time
• Correspondence with the church over her concerns did not go well. (Note to church, try a personal conversation instead of email.)

Love it

Link

1. Start with “I” not “you”
2. Keep it about the behavior, not the person.
3. Focus on how your partner can succeed.

Avoid attitude.

 Complaint vs. Criticism

The Faith Path We Prefer

Most religions, churches and or would-be spiritual guides seem to offer a scenario like this:

I want to encourage you or convince you to chose to follow our way of thinking, living, believing, etc. If you do so you will be rewarded with the kinds of things you and most everyone wants and likes

• Success in what you chose
• Power, beauty, strength,
• Comfort, Security,
• Vindication for your ideas and your tribe
• This will continue forever into eternal joy and bliss.

What We Get

If you read the book of Genesis you might notice just how hard things are for Jacob and his family.

• Jacob is indeed blessed with a large family but it is enormously dysfunctional
• His sons are liars and murders who would sell their own flesh and blood into slavery and lie to cover it up. The favoritism and the cover-up will bind the family decades.
• For all Jacob’s faith and promises he has diminished to be an old man clutching to his favoritism and his sons have been bound by their lies to embrace their father’s demeaning favoritism and even protect it.
• When a famine brings his family to the point of starvation a nosy and mysteriously perceptive Egyptian potentate has given them a temporary reprieve from starvation but demands that the most cherished son of Jacob’s obsessive favoritism must be put at risk for the family to survive. This sounds terribly like grandfather Abraham and that bizarre episode on Mt. Moria with father Isaac.

Judah Steps Up Continue reading →

from his blog. I’m making this my “Delightful Article of the Month” winner for July (even though it came out Aug 2). Thanks Chuck for doing what you do.

CT