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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 [...] I’m really enjoying God’s gift of yearly cycles. During the summer, especially, is my time to refresh, re-energize, and re-commit. This is possible because so many things slow down during this season as people focus on vacations and family. Sometimes the summer “break” feels a little weird because our kids are grown up and I’m [...] Colorado's state flower Summer is my time to reflect and renew my commitments for the coming year. I talked about this some last June, when I was struggling with whether our schola would achieve critical mass. Looking back on the progress, we now have grown to a dozen loyal and talented members, now including [...] 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. [...] “Life is not about avoiding broken eggs. Life is about presence (broken eggs and all)” – Terry Hershey There’s so many problems, so many things to be fixed. We live in fear of what is and what’s to come. And meanwhile, we spend our lives constantly focusing on the future. Here’s the deal: Your presence [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] Last time I talked about the upcoming big chant gathering we have next Sunday. Well, we had our practice yesterday, and finally got a chance to meet and find out what we’ve learned, and whether it was the same thing. [...] |