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I was listening to the Catholic Laboratory podcast by Ian Maxfield yesterday, where he was bemoaning a recent report in NewScientist magazine about the effects of mental practices on recovery from illness. Yeah, stunning, I know. If you are grounded in your thinking, this will help you recover faster. [...] You might have heard the notion of leader as servant. I imagine that it might be based in the model of Christ as servant of His people, I’m not sure. But I have some experience with the idea that I might like to share. Here’s the core of the idea: The group is the ones [...] We lost a big chunk off of one of our big trees with last week’s snow storm, and I spent a lot of time today cleaning up the mess. It gave me some time to think about the importance of pruning, especially since this is the time of year that I look at trimming my [...] One of my other roles at church is to help out with our parish’s RCIA program. Yesterday, despite a somewhat tenuous weather situation, we all traipsed down to the Cathedral in Denver for one of the Rite of Election services with the Archbishop. As always, he was a wonderful Shepherd for his flock, helping our [...] My colleague Tony made this observation in a discussion last week: “We can be powerful without being perfect.” It really struck me as an important concept, one that I need to constantly remember on my journey of life. [...] I’ve observed a number of conversations recently where people are coming up against what appears to be a brick wall of tasks. There’s so much work to be done, an infinite number of problems to be fixed, a huge number of people to convince…. Daunting is a relatively weak word for what it feels like. [...] A colleague today raised an interesting question which caused me to start thinking pretty deeply. Here’s the problem: How do we get someone to fix something that they’re satisfied with, but we’re not? If they have control of the situation, and they’re satisfied with it, it’ll take a lot of concerted effort to get them [...] “It is for us to make the effort. The result is always in God’s hands.” – Mahatma Gandhi In our culture, we are very focused on results. Goals, money, achievement – things that represent the crowning results from our work. But you might notice that this leaves little room for God to work in our [...] I had the opportunity to sing Compline with the schola from another parish last night – a wonderful and prayerful experience. But earlier in the week, the director tangentially referred to me as “the professional.” Say what? I mean, I’m a neophyte at this chant, and have only been working on it for a few [...] Here’s an interesting idea I get from Clay Shirky’s video above (if you can’t see it, try this link): Many useful things these days are being done purely by volunteers. That’s a huge change from the way we usually think. We tend to focus on what organizations do through their employees, and by money [...] |