26 February 2008

book recommendation

I'm reading a book that I'd like to recommend to anyone who's job it is to be a communicator: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dad Heath.

The authors lay out the critical elements of a sticky idea. They are--
* Simplicity: the idea must be stripped to its core, and the most important concepts should jump out.
* Unexpectedness: the idea must destroy preconceived notions about something. This forces people to stop, think, and remember.
* Concreteness: avoid statistics, use real-world analogies to help people understand complex ideas.
* Credibility: if people don't trust you, they'll ignore you. In some cases, they will be openly hostile, which means they'll actively try to dispute your message!
* Emotional: information makes people think, but emotion makes them act. Appeal to emotional needs, sometimes even way up on Maslow's hierarchy.
* Stores: telling a story [gets] people into paying closer attention, and feeling more connected. Remember the Jared Subway commercials? ('Gleaned' from Brian Bex Huf's review on Amazon.com)

Very interesting reading, I just wish I could've finished it before preparing the message that I gave last weekend... No worries. Always room for growth.

he had a PRESENCE about him

I spoke at the gatherings this past weekend at Lakeside Church. It was the second installment in a four-week series on the Holy Spirit, entitled, "The Advocate." It's my hope that people went away with a better understanding of the relationship between the work of the Spirit and the task of following Jesus. For the Spirit continues the work of Jesus in the life of the believer, and through the active presence of the Spirit, we continue Jesus' work in the world. It's available on-line if you are interested.

14 February 2008

forgiveness, Henri Nouwen

"Forgiving does not mean forgetting. When we forgive aperson, the memory of the wound might stay with us for along time, even throughout our lives. Sometimes we carry the memory in our bodies as a visible sign. But forgiveness changes the way we remember. It converts the curse into a blessing. When we forgive our parents for their divorce, our children for their lack of attention, our friends for their unfaithfulness in crisis, our doctors for their ill advice, we no longer have to experience ourselves as the victims of events we had no control over.
Forgiveness allows us to claim our own power and not let
these events destroy us; it enables them to become events
that deepen the wisdom of our hearts. Forgiveness indeed
heals memories."

Image "gleaned" from http://www.burkhartstudios.com/burkhart/religion/forgiveness.jpg

05 February 2008

this I believe... we all need mending

by Susan Cooke Kittredge
February 3, 2008 ·

Like most women of her generation, my grandmother, whom I called Nonie, was an excellent seamstress. Born in 1879 in Galveston, Texas, she made most of her own clothes. Widowed at 43 and forced to count every penny, she sewed her three daughters' clothes and some of their children's, as well.

I can knit but I cannot sew new creations from tissue-paper patterns. Whenever I try, I break out in a sweat and tear the paper. It clearly requires more patience, more math, more exactitude than I seem willing or capable of giving.

Recently, though, I have come to relish the moments when I sit down and, somewhat clumsily, repair a torn shirt, hem a skirt, patch a pair of jeans, and I realize that I believe in mending. The solace and comfort I feel when I pick up my needle and thread clearly exceeds the mere rescue of a piece of clothing. It is a time to stop, a time to quit running around trying to make figurative ends meet; it is a chance to sew actual rips together. I can't stop the war in Iraq, I can't reverse global warming, I can't solve the problems of my community or the world, but I can mend things at hand. I can darn a pair of socks.

Accomplishing small tasks, in this case saving something that might otherwise have been thrown away, is satisfying and, perhaps, even inspiring.

Mending something is different from fixing it. Fixing it suggests that evidence of the problem will disappear. I see mending as a preservation of history and a proclamation of hope. When we mend broken relationships, we realize that we're better together than apart, and perhaps even stronger for the rip and the repair.

When Nonie was 78 and living alone in a small apartment in New Jersey, a man smashed the window of her bedroom where she lay sleeping and raped her. It was so horrific, as any rape is, that even in our pretty open, highly verbal family, no one mentioned it. I didn't learn about it for almost five years. What I did notice, though, was that Nonie stopped sewing new clothes. All she did was to mend anything she cold get her hands on as though she could somehow soothe the wound, piece back together her broken heart, soul and body by making sure that nothing appeared unraveled or undone as she had been.

Mending doesn't say, "This never happened." It says instead, as I believe the Christian cross does, "Something or someone was surely broken here, but with God's grace it will rise to new life." So too my old pajamas, the fence around the garden, the friendship torn by misunderstanding, a country being ripped apart by economic and social inequity and a global divide of enormous proportions — they all need mending.

I'm starting with the pajamas.

Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

Image 'gleaned' from http://www.explodingdog.com/dumbpict51/mending.gif