Albert Camus
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Written: |
7/19/00 |
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Published: |
3/28/09 |
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Bibliography: |
The Call, by Os Guinness |
“Albert Camus said, ‘Man’s first faculty is forgetting.’ Ingratitude and forgetfulness are ultimately moral rather than mental; they are the direct expression of sin. No culture has nourished such tendencies as consistently as ours. We pride ourselves on autonomous, self-created, and freestanding. A modern world with no need of God produces a modern people with no sense of gratitude.”
I agree with the first and last thoughts, although I must say I never thought I’d have such heart agreement with a French Existentialist like Camus. I think the popular notion (here, expressed by the eminent Os Guinness) that our present day culture is somehow ‘worse’ than previous generations, or that we are tending to more and more distance from God is slightly off-center—when I read Isaiah, for example, I do not see any less of a tendency in Hebrew culture from 3000 years ago to forget God than I do in modern Australian or American culture.
Trust God and do the next thing
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Written: |
3/27/09 |
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Published: |
3/27/09 |
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Bibliography: |
Biography of Oswald Chambers |
When Oswald Chambers and his wife were asked how they carry on their work in the Kingdom, they replied, ‘well, we just trust God, and do the next thing in front of us.’
A profound truth for me, now.
As a leader and a manager, I pray for our projects and people, but don’t just ask God for the next step—I ask for the whole plan. I want the plan, not just the next step…because I want certainty.
I am learning that certainty is something the Lord is not willing to give—and that this, while a significant challenge for me, is a gift.
Trust God, and do the next thing.
love = wisdom
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Written: |
2/11/09 |
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Published: |
2/14/09 |
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Bibliography: |
Philippians 1:9 |
“And this is my prayer, that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight…”
I am stirred by the thought that it is at least partly through having love in increasing measure that we begin to see clearly into a matter.
The word ‘insight’ here is translated from the Greek word aesthesis, and in this context means “having the capacity to perceive clearly and hence to understand the real nature of something”. The word ‘love’ in the original Greek is agape, and means “having love for someone or something based on sincere appreciation or high regard.”
What Paul says here is a deep truth that has potentially profound implications for how one views the path to wisdom and discernment.
I try to imagine one of my university professors pausing in the midst of a lecture on how to solve third order differential equations and saying, ‘now, you know the best way to get the root of this equation is to focus yourself on selfless love for others’, and I smile.
Certainly it is true in my own life that I begin to view life situations and people differently when I am not overly task-focussed or self-focussed—when I am filled with a love for them, everything changes. Including, perhaps most importantly, my perspective.
It is not until now that I have considered that seeing them ‘differently’ (when I am filled with love vs. what’s next on my Outlook calendar) may actually be seeing them more clearly or completely.
If I can only begin to see into the true nature of a matter, or a person’s need when I am operating from a paradigm of agape love, the critical question to begin actualizing this truth is what can I do to cultivate this love for others, as a complementary action to God’s working in me?
Calling
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Written: |
5/23/02 |
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Published: |
2/10/09 |
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Bibliography: |
The Call, by Os Guinness |
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Calling is the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion, dynamism, and direction lived out as a response to his summons and service…
…our primary calling as followers of Christ is by him, to him, and for him. We are called first and foremost to Someone, not to something.
This is illuminated as I reflect on Phil 1:9-11: “This is my prayer that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight…to the glory and praise of God.”
It is all for his glory—all of it. As a created being, I exist primarily to glorify and to worship the Creator—this is my chief end, or telos.
This is not simply abstract theology to me—it is profoundly practical and applicable to my everyday life.
If my goal is to glorify God in all that I do, rather than subtly seeking my own advancement or self promotion, it will impact my conversations, the stories I tell to others, my recreation, my descriptions of mine or other’s performance, who and why I criticise, and the education and training I seek.
I am not sure I am ready, or capable to fully confront this tendency in me to self-promotion vs. God-promotion.
Deliberate practice
| Written: | 2/2/09 |
| Published: | 2/2/09 |
| Bibliography: | “Success is all in the Mind”, by Shelley Gare, January 24, 2009. The Australian. |
Anders Ericsson founded the idea of ‘deliberate practice’. Deliberate practice, whether it’s applied to sport, or business, or the arts, begins in the brain. This isn’t a child doing an hour of piano scales every day while imagining the fun they will have afterwards. Instead, what makes someone spectacular in their field–and keeps them there–is training via a kind of focused, repetitive practice in which the subject is always monitoring his or her performance, correcting, experimenting, listening to immediate and constant feedback, and always pushing beyond what has already been achieved.
In May 2006, “Freakonomics” authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner wrote a piece about his work in The New York Times. Titled ‘A Star is Made’, it caused a furore. The notion that the stars of sport, arts, business and politics, the Bill Gates, Tiger Woods and Vladimir Ashkenazy icons of the world, are just like you and me–except they’ve applied themselves–outraged people more used to the idea that the great performers are born with special abilities.
I suspect that for anyone seriously involved in sport, academics, or business, this is not a surprise. It is my experience that I get better at a certain activity by being intentional about it—practice, feedback/coaching, refinement of my technique, having a goal, and more practice.
For example, I used to be a terrible swimmer. When I decided a few years ago to give triathlons a go, I knew that swimming would be my Achilles heel—I was a really terrible swimmer. My method was straightforward: I began to swim regularly. Knowing that it can’t be right to swim backward when you’re trying to swim forward, I also enrolled in swim lessons where, among other tools, the coach studied my stroke by taking underwater video footage and analysing it with me. I then did drills, isolating one element of my stroke (such as brushing my fingertips over the surface of the water during stroke recovery) and doing laps just focusing on this part of the stroke.
It was through this intentional practice and constant feedback that I slowly began to swim forward more often than I swam backward. I am pleased to say that in the last three years I have significantly improved my speed in the water (especially when compared to going backwards!).
I have noticed in the churches I have attended that this principle of intentional practice, or deliberate practice is not a part of the vocabulary or mission. While most pastors I know commonly emphasise the need to pray and read the Bible, and uncommonly will delve deeper into the need to practice common spiritual exercises such as fasting and solitude, the motivation given is ‘because you should do it’, rather than ‘because it is an essential part of your training into Christlikeness‘.
I believe that if those who have made a decision to apprentice themselves to Jesus were to view the notion of deliberate practice discussed above as a parallel concept to Paul’s exhortation to Timothy in 1 Tim 4:7-8 to ‘…train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, godliness has value for all things…’, we would experience a revolution of spiritual growth.
I believe it would also begin to answer the question I have been hearing from practicing Christians with greater frequency in the last few years–Why do I still struggle in the same areas of my life? Why do I not seem to have grown in this area of my life in the last ten years?
The point that Jesus has been teaching me in the last few years is that like improvement in sport, running a successful business, or becoming a virtuoso on the violin, spiritual growth is not accidental—it comes about by deliberate and intentional practice, through God’s grace.
