We all need doubt.

We all need doubt. It’s the driving force behind change, creativity, and independence of thought of every kind. Authoritarians and conformists — no surprises here — much prefer faith in fixed dogmas. As circumstances become more complex and challenging, the temptation is to fall back on supposed certainties. Yet that is exactly the time greater doubt becomes most essential.

Contextualisation

Cut this "bit" from a "big bit" from a discussion on modern missionary approaches.

British missiologist Stuart Murray-Williams who suggests some pretty pungent reasons as to why it is so necessary for us to learn the lost arts of contextualization.

• Because there is a general recognition of a yawning cultural chasm between church and contemporary culture that hinders movement in either direction. Church members struggle to bridge the gap at work or relaxing with friends; many know their friends will find church incomprehensible, irrelevant, [or] archaic.
• Because inherited forms of church are attractive only to certain subcultures (especially white, middle-class, educated and middle-aged conformists) and are have proved themselves ineffective in mission beyond these.
• Because of the increasing alarm that we are losing from our churches many former members who are not losing their faith but find church uninspiring, disempowering, crushing and dehumanizing. In post-Christendom, institutional loyalty and inertia no longer prevents this hemorrhage of disillusioned Christians.

walking into the light

walking into the light
Originally uploaded by jonnybaker

Getting to the front isn't always a bright idea

Nearly everyone would be better off if they paid less attention to what others around them are doing and more to the consequences of their own actions.
Getting to the front isn’t always a bright idea. Sometimes that crowd is running straight towards an unseen precipice. There’s not much survival advantage in being first over the edge.

ealing common fog

ealing common fog
Originally uploaded by jonnybaker

Just love this picture of a fog. Can't remember the last time, must be decades, when I encountered a fog.

Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples

Hon Kevin Rudd MP - Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples

I move:

That today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations-this blemished chapter in our nation's history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.

A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.

A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.

A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.

A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

---

There comes a time in the history of nations when their peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future. Our nation, Australia, has reached such a time. That is why the parliament is today here assembled: to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a great stain from the nation's soul and, in a true spirit of reconciliation, to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia.

Last year I made a commitment to the Australian people that if we formed the next government of the Commonwealth we would in parliament say sorry to the stolen generations. Today I honour that commitment. I said we would do so early in the life of the new parliament. Again, today I honour that commitment by doing so at the commencement of this the 42nd parliament of the Commonwealth. Because the time has come, well and truly come, for all peoples of our great country, for all citizens of our great Commonwealth, for all Australians-those who are Indigenous and those who are not-to come together to reconcile and together build a new future for our nation.

Some have asked, ‘Why apologise?' Let me begin to answer by telling the parliament just a little of one person's story-an elegant, eloquent and wonderful woman in her 80s, full of life, full of funny stories, despite what has happened in her life's journey, a woman who has travelled a long way to be with us today, a member of the stolen generation who shared some of her story with me when I called around to see her just a few days ago. Nanna Nangala Feijo, as she prefers to be called, was born in the late 1920s. She remembers her earliest childhood days living with her family and her community in a bush camp just outside Tennant Creek. She remembers the love and the warmth and the kinship of those days long ago, including traditional dancing around the camp fire at night. She loved the dancing. She remembers once getting into strife when, as a four-year-old girl, she insisted on dancing with the male tribal elders rather than just sitting and watching the men, as the girls were supposed to do.

But then, sometime around 1932, when she was about four, she remembers the coming of the welfare men. Her family had feared that day and had dug holes in the creek bank where the children could run and hide. What they had not expected was that the white welfare men did not come alone. They brought a truck, two white men and an Aboriginal stockman on horseback cracking his stockwhip. The kids were found; they ran for their mothers, screaming, but they could not get away. They were herded and piled onto the back of the truck. Tears flowing, her mum tried clinging to the sides of the truck as her children were taken away to the Bungalow in Alice, all in the name of protection.

A few years later, government policy changed. Now the children would be handed over to the missions to be cared for by the churches. But which church would care for them? The kids were simply told to line up in three lines. Nanna Feijo and her sister stood in the middle line, her older brother and cousin on her left. Those on the left were told that they had become Catholics, those in the middle Methodists and those on the right Church of England. That is how the complex questions of post-reformation theology were resolved in the Australian outback in the 1930s. It was as crude as that. She and her sister were sent to a Methodist mission on Goulburn Island and then Croker Island. Her Catholic brother was sent to work at a cattle station and her cousin to a Catholic mission.

Nanna Feijo's family had been broken up for a second time. She stayed at the mission until after the war, when she was allowed to leave for a prearranged job as a domestic in Darwin. She was 16. Nanna Feijo never saw her mum again. After she left the mission, her brother let her know that her mum had died years before, a broken woman fretting for the children that had literally been ripped away from her.

I asked Nanna Feijo what she would have me say today about her story. She thought for a few moments then said that what I should say today was that all mothers are important. And she added: ‘Families-keeping them together is very important. It's a good thing that you are surrounded by love and that love is passed down the generations. That's what gives you happiness.' As I left, later on, Nanna Feijo took one of my staff aside, wanting to make sure that I was not too hard on the Aboriginal stockman who had hunted those kids down all those years ago. The stockman had found her again decades later, this time himself to say, ‘Sorry.' And remarkably, extraordinarily, she had forgiven him.

Nanna Feijo's is just one story. There are thousands, tens of thousands of them: stories of forced separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their mums and dads over the better part of a century. Some of these stories are graphically told in Bringing them home, the report commissioned in 1995 by Prime Minister Keating and received in 1997 by Prime Minister Howard. There is something terribly primal about these firsthand accounts. The pain is searing; it screams from the pages. The hurt, the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental humanity.

These stories cry out to be heard; they cry out for an apology. Instead, from the nation's parliament there has been a stony, stubborn and deafening silence for more than a decade; a view that somehow we, the parliament, should suspend our most basic instincts of what is right and what is wrong; a view that, instead, we should look for any pretext to push this great wrong to one side, to leave it languishing with the historians, the academics and the cultural warriors, as if the stolen generations are little more than an interesting sociological phenomenon. But the stolen generations are not intellectual curiosities. They are human beings, human beings who have been damaged deeply by the decisions of parliaments and governments. But, as of today, the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end.

The nation is demanding of its political leadership to take us forward. Decency, human decency, universal human decency, demands that the nation now step forward to right an historical wrong. That is what we are doing in this place today. But should there still be doubts as to why we must now act, let the parliament reflect for a moment on the following facts: that, between 1910 and 1970, between 10 and 30 per cent of Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their mothers and fathers; that, as a result, up to 50,000 children were forcibly taken from their families; that this was the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state as reflected in the explicit powers given to them under statute; that this policy was taken to such extremes by some in administrative authority that the forced extractions of children of so-called ‘mixed lineage' were seen as part of a broader policy of dealing with ‘the problem of the Aboriginal population'.

One of the most notorious examples of this approach was from the Northern Territory Protector of Natives, who stated:

Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes-

to quote the protector-

will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white ...

The Western Australian Protector of Natives expressed not dissimilar views, expounding them at length in Canberra in 1937 at the first national conference on Indigenous affairs that brought together the Commonwealth and state protectors of natives. These are uncomfortable things to be brought out into the light. They are not pleasant. They are profoundly disturbing. But we must acknowledge these facts if we are to deal once and for all with the argument that the policy of generic forced separation was somehow well motivated, justified by its historical context and, as a result, unworthy of any apology today.

Then we come to the argument of intergenerational responsibility, also used by some to argue against giving an apology today. But let us remember the fact that the forced removal of Aboriginal children was happening as late as the early 1970s. The 1970s is not exactly a point in remote antiquity. There are still serving members of this parliament who were first elected to this place in the early 1970s. It is well within the adult memory span of many of us. The uncomfortable truth for us all is that the parliaments of the nation, individually and collectively, enacted statutes and delegated authority under those statutes that made the forced removal of children on racial grounds fully lawful.

There is a further reason for an apology as well: it is that reconciliation is in fact an expression of a core value of our nation-and that value is a fair go for all. There is a deep and abiding belief in the Australian community that, for the stolen generations, there was no fair go at all. There is a pretty basic Aussie belief that says that it is time to put right this most outrageous of wrongs. It is for these reasons, quite apart from concerns of fundamental human decency, that the governments and parliaments of this nation must make this apology-because, put simply, the laws that our parliaments enacted made the stolen generations possible. We, the parliaments of the nation, are ultimately responsible, not those who gave effect to our laws. And the problem lay with the laws themselves. As has been said of settler societies elsewhere, we are the bearers of many blessings from our ancestors; therefore we must also be the bearer of their burdens as well. Therefore, for our nation, the course of

action is clear: that is, to deal now with what has become one of the darkest chapters in Australia's history. In doing so, we are doing more than contending with the facts, the evidence and the often rancorous public debate. In doing so, we are also wrestling with our own soul. This is not, as some would argue, a black-armband view of history; it is just the truth: the cold, confronting, uncomfortable truth-facing it, dealing with it, moving on from it. Until we fully confront that truth, there will always be a shadow hanging over us and our future as a fully united and fully reconciled people. It is time to reconcile. It is time to recognise the injustices of the past. It is time to say sorry. It is time to move forward together.

To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry. I offer you this apology without qualification. We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted. We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied. We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments. In making this apology, I would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation-from Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.

I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of the government and the parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally. Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that. Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing. I ask those non-Indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you. I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive. My proposal is this: if the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation, in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia. And it is to such a new beginning that I believe the nation is now calling us.

Australians are a passionate lot. We are also a very practical lot. For us, symbolism is important but, unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance, it is little more than a clanging gong. It is not sentiment that makes history; it is our actions that make history. Today's apology, however inadequate, is aimed at righting past wrongs. It is also aimed at building a bridge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians-a bridge based on a real respect rather than a thinly veiled contempt. Our challenge for the future is to cross that bridge and, in so doing, to embrace a new partnership between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians-to embrace, as part of that partnership, expanded Link-up and other critical services to help the stolen generations to trace their families if at all possible and to provide dignity to their lives. But the core of this partnership for the future is to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians on life expectancy, educational achievement and employment opportunities. This new partnership on closing the gap will set concrete targets for the future: within a decade to halve the widening gap in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes and opportunities for Indigenous Australians, within a decade to halve the appalling gap in infant mortality rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and, within a generation, to close the equally appalling 17-year life gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous in overall life expectancy.

The truth is: a business as usual approach towards Indigenous Australians is not working. Most old approaches are not working. We need a new beginning-a new beginning which contains real measures of policy success or policy failure; a new beginning, a new partnership, on closing the gap with sufficient flexibility not to insist on a one-size-fits-all approach for each of the hundreds of remote and regional Indigenous communities across the country but instead allowing flexible, tailored, local approaches to achieve commonly-agreed national objectives that lie at the core of our proposed new partnership; a new beginning that draws intelligently on the experiences of new policy settings across the nation. However, unless we as a parliament set a destination for the nation, we have no clear point to guide our policy, our programs or our purpose; we have no centralised organising principle.

Let us resolve today to begin with the little children-a fitting place to start on this day of apology for the stolen generations. Let us resolve over the next five years to have every Indigenous four-year-old in a remote Aboriginal community enrolled in and attending a proper early childhood education centre or opportunity and engaged in proper preliteracy and prenumeracy programs. Let us resolve to build new educational opportunities for these little ones, year by year, step by step, following the completion of their crucial preschool year. Let us resolve to use this systematic approach to build future educational opportunities for Indigenous children to provide proper primary and preventive health care for the same children, to begin the task of rolling back the obscenity that we find today in infant mortality rates in remote Indigenous communities-up to four times higher than in other communities.

None of this will be easy. Most of it will be hard-very hard. But none of it is impossible, and all of it is achievable with clear goals, clear thinking, and by placing an absolute premium on respect, cooperation and mutual responsibility as the guiding principles of this new partnership on closing the gap. The mood of the nation is for reconciliation now, between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The mood of the nation on Indigenous policy and politics is now very simple. The nation is calling on us, the politicians, to move beyond our infantile bickering, our point-scoring and our mindlessly partisan politics and to elevate this one core area of national responsibility to a rare position beyond the partisan divide. Surely this is the unfulfilled spirit of the 1967 referendum. Surely, at least from this day forward, we should give it a go.

Let me take this one step further and take what some may see as a piece of political posturing and make a practical proposal to the opposition on this day, the first full sitting day of the new parliament. I said before the election that the nation needed a kind of war cabinet on parts of Indigenous policy, because the challenges are too great and the consequences are too great to allow it all to become a political football, as it has been so often in the past. I therefore propose a joint policy commission, to be led by the Leader of the Opposition and me, with a mandate to develop and implement-to begin with-an effective housing strategy for remote communities over the next five years. It will be consistent with the government's policy framework, a new partnership for closing the gap. If this commission operates well, I then propose that it work on the further task of constitutional recognition of the first Australians, consistent with the longstanding platform commitments of my party and the pre-election position of the opposition. This would probably be desirable in any event because, unless such a proposition were absolutely bipartisan, it would fail at a referendum. As I have said before, the time has come for new approaches to enduring problems. Working constructively together on such defined projects would, I believe, meet with the support of the nation. It is time for fresh ideas to fashion the nation's future.

Mr Speaker, today the parliament has come together to right a great wrong. We have come together to deal with the past so that we might fully embrace the future. We have had sufficient audacity of faith to advance a pathway to that future, with arms extended rather than with fists still clenched. So let us seize the day. Let it not become a moment of mere sentimental reflection. Let us take it with both hands and allow this day, this day of national reconciliation, to become one of those rare moments in which we might just be able to transform the way in which the nation thinks about itself, whereby the injustice administered to the stolen generations in the name of these, our parliaments, causes all of us to reappraise, at the deepest level of our beliefs, the real possibility of reconciliation writ large: reconciliation across all Indigenous Australia; reconciliation across the entire history of the often bloody encounter between those who emerged from the Dreamtime a thousand generations ago and those who, like me, came across the seas only yesterday; reconciliation which opens up whole new possibilities for the future.

It is for the nation to bring the first two centuries of our settled history to a close, as we begin a new chapter. We embrace with pride, admiration and awe these great and ancient cultures we are truly blessed to have among us-cultures that provide a unique, uninterrupted human thread linking our Australian continent to the most ancient prehistory of our planet. Growing from this new respect, we see our Indigenous brothers and sisters with fresh eyes, with new eyes, and we have our minds wide open as to how we might tackle, together, the great practical challenges that Indigenous Australia faces in the future.

Let us turn this page together: Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, government and opposition, Commonwealth and state, and write this new chapter in our nation's story together. First Australians, First Fleeters, and those who first took the oath of allegiance just a few weeks ago. Let's grasp this opportunity to craft a new future for this great land: Australia. I commend the motion to the House.

Wednesday, 13 February 2008

Each day ..

As Heraclitus said:
"Keep an open mind and think again. Life will continually surprise you. Nothing is permanent and you shouldn't be a slave to your assumptions."

untitled

untitled
Originally uploaded by jonnybaker

Say nothing, or speak out and suffer for it.

At a recent meeting I made some comments about some things. Vague, I know, but it's enough to know. Sufficeth to say my words were twisted and quite cruelly turned back on me. As I was reading in another place, why was I surprised. Why am I surprised when what I say, or ask, is twisted. Everyone's are. Which is why people say nothing. Which is why I find myself more and more "out there" saying and asking and getting "beaten" for it. Why do I speak when all the "wise" people keep their mouths shut?
And if you are a devotee, thus runs the plot tension of a whole stack of West Wing episodes: Bartlett knows what should be said, but is advised he can't. Then at the last minute a way is found that he can, and all is good. In other words, we know this stuff should be said, and feel good when it is on TV, so what is stopping people talking intelligently in the public domain? As Prime Minister Rudd showed yesterday is the Apology to Aboriginal people and his saying "Sorry", why can we not in our small ways - speak the truth?

In my University days I was a reader of the works of Herbert Marcuse. I have a copy of Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man" that the inside cover says I bought in May 1973. I think Marcuse's analysis in that book is really good. He writes that there are basically three ways that the dominant powers push people down - flatten them into nicely manageable one-dimensional beings. All three ways are lies, and they run like this:

The first lie: "Things are too big and complicated for you to be able to change them. Things have gone too far to change anyway."

The second lie: "If you do try to change things, you'll be risking all you've got - your own status and position and financial security."

The third lie: "And if you still persist in taking these big topics on, and are prepared to pay the cost, people will just laugh at you."

These are the main reasons why people simply don't do anything: it'll cost me, it's too big, people will laugh. And I regret that the people who manage those lies, even in the areas in which I work, are beginning to wear me down.

Optimism is the one responsibility no leader should delegate

An invitation has come inviting this article to be placed on our blogs & inviting discussion.

John Ortberg on Hope Management

I don't have a problem with delegation. I love to delegate. I am either lazy enough, or busy enough, or trusting enough, or congenial enough, that the notion leaving tasks in someone else's lap doesn't just sound wise to me, it sounds attractive. But I am coming to the conclusion that the one task a leader can never delegate, especially in the church, is hope.

I have been reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's wonderful biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, No Ordinary Time (Simon & Schuster, 2004). She notes that Franklin was not the most intelligent president of all time (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously called him a "second-rate intellect but a first rate-temperament.") He was surrounded by leaders who were more educated, more accomplished, more gifted, and more knowledgeable. But he had one gift that mattered more. "No factor was more important to Roosevelt's leadership than his confidence in himself and in the American people," she wrote.

The White House Counsel, Sam Rosenman, observed that FDR had a capacity to transmit this confidence to others; to allow "those who hear it to begin to feel it and take part in it, to rejoice in it—and to return it tenfold by their own confidence." Labor Secretary Francis Perkins noted that, like everyone else, she "came away from an interview with the President feeling better, not because he had solved any problems…but because he had made me feel more cheerful, stronger, more determined."

In the middle of a Great Depression, or World War II, or a capital campaign, or a staff crisis, people inevitably wonder: "Can we get through this? Is it worth all the effort and confusion? Can we really overcome this challenge?" They inevitably look to the person at the core; the man or woman leading the charge, the one who sees the big picture. When people see a leader with this kind of vital optimism, who radiates a sense that together we can do what needs to be done, then people tend to decide not to waste their energy wondering about "if" but focus their energy going after "how."

On the other hand, when Eeyore is at the helm, the whole ship is in trouble. Eeyore may be the most intelligent, gifted, attractive, educated, credentialed person in the room. But if he or she is easily deflated, sensitive to defeat and criticism, and de-motivated by setbacks, the whole community begins the long slow spiral downward.

The church is in the hope business. We of all people ought to be known most for our hope; because our hope is founded on something deeper than human ability or wishful thinking. Martin Luther King was fond of citing Reinhold Niebuhr's distinction between hope and optimism. Optimism believes in progress; that circumstances will get better. Hope, however, is is built on the conviction that another reality, another Kingdom, already exists. And so hope endures when hype fades.

And yet, even ministry can be hope-draining. Churches can become places of cynicism, resistance, and pessimism. Spiritual resistance, my own sinfulness, and the sheer gravitational pull of the status quo can drain away the power to dream. Both hope and pessimism are deeply contagious. And no one is more infectious than a leader.

For this reason I've realized that I must learn the art of hope management. I must learn about the activities and practices and people who build hope, as well as the activities and practices and people who drain hope.

When I looked back at my old journals it came as a surprise to me how often they were simply chronicles of failure. I would write down how I felt inadequate as a pastor, incompetent as a dad, and not-all-that-great as a Christian in general. These weren't so much confessions with absolution and forgiveness; they were vague general expressions of discouragement that left me more discouraged. They were the opposite of what David did when he "encouraged himself in the Lord." I was "discouraging myself in the Lord."

So now I try to steward my hope; not by avoiding thinking about my sin, but trying to confess it, learn from it, and live in the reality of newness and grace. I have identified people in my life who breathe energy and hope into me, and I try to get large doses of time with them—especially on Mondays.

Psychologist Martin Seligman, though not religious himself, notes that not only does faith produce hopeful people, but more robust faith produces more robust hope. For all the great hopers are mystics. And long before FDR said we have nothing to fear but fear itself, a great hoper known as Julian of Norwich sang her song from the depths of the Black Plague-infested fourteenth century:

But all shall be well,
And all shall be well,
And all manner of things shall be well…
He did not say, "You shall know no storms, no travails, no disease,"
He said, "You shall not be overcome."

You can't delegate hope.

John Ortberg is editor at large of Leadership and the pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California.

More on happiness

A member of the congregation knowing that I've made a number of references recently in sermons to "happiness" sent me this.

Here is what Bertrand Russell, Nobel Prize winner, mathematician, and philosopher wrote in 1930:

The emphasis upon competition in modern life is connected with a general decay of civilized standards such as must have occurred in Rome after the Augustan age. Men and women appear to have become incapable of enjoying the more intellectual pleasures. The art of general conversation, the knowledge of good literature — who in our age cares for anything so leisurely?

Some American students took me walking in the spring through a wood on the borders of their campus; it was filled with exquisite wild flowers, but not one of my guides knew the name of even one of them. What use would such knowledge be? It could not add to anybody’s income.

The cure for this lies in admitting the part of sane and quiet enjoyment in a balanced ideal of life.

It seems little has changed in 78 years.

Recently, there have been various media reports about a survey that showed happiness was mostly related to age: the young and the old are happier, in general, than those in the middle years of life.

Why might this be?

One reason might be that neither the young nor the old are involved in the world of work. The young have targets at school, of course, but there are people whose job it is to help them reach them. They have their own stresses, but the survey seems to show most are happy. Their dreams are still before them, unsullied by reality. They still believe in the future.

The old have said goodbye to work and come to terms (hopefully) with accepting what they attained and what they didn’t. Whatever the problems of age and failing health, they aren’t striving to get anywhere any more. Now they have nothing to do but enjoy whatever they have.

Only those in between — the people trying to earn a living and get ahead — find themselves locked in competition and struggle. They’re the ones under all the pressure from a society obsessed with getting as much as possible in the shortest possible time. They’re the ones locked in constant competition, fueled by greedy corporations. They’re the ones whose dreams are hitting reality head-on. They’re the ones who often view the future with fear, not anticipation.

Our ancestors had exactly the same amount of time as we do. Days, hours and minutes haven’t become shorter. There are still 12 months in a year. What’s changed are our expectations about what we should accomplish in the time available to us; what we should have to show for the middle part of our lives, when we build families and careers — and try to turn youthful dreams into mature achievements. As we cram more and more into our lives, obsessed with getting ahead, doing everything faster seems the only way to square the circle.

Time management isn’t the answer. That’s about increasing your productivity, so you can do even more. You need ways to do less in the time you have; to cut out low priority activities, so you have enough time to enjoy the rest to the full; to slow down enough to think about your life and focus on what truly matters.

Slow down, expect less, accept fewer demands, do them properly, and give yourself time to enjoy life.

Your aim should be to wake up every morning knowing you’re living the life you want to live; and living it in a purposeful and satisfying way. Take the time you have and use it well. Instead of being like a hamster in a wheel, running and running and going nowhere, try settling for what matters most to you and ignoring the rest.

My guess is you’ll find you achieve far more that matters. You’ll certainly get more enjoyment from whatever you have.

My life ..

From somewhere in SA country

Lots of quotes from John Naisbitt's "Mind Set!"

Here are lots of quotes I've been sent from John Naisbitt’s Mind Set. Makes me want to go out and buy the book. In fact I've planned just that.

Everyone has a mental picture of the world. It comes largely by extrapolating what they see in their own piece of the world through their own grid or mind set. The international best-selling author of Megatrends is a compulsive traveler, a sponge for information, and a voracious reader of newspapers. He has examined his own mental filters, the rules that help him recognize trends. He also includes a few major trends, including the impact of the visual culture, the growing power of economic domains over nation-states, the growth of China, the decline of Europe, and the future of innovation in this century.

Here are the 11 mind sets he describes:
1. While many things change, most things remain constant.
2. The future is imbedded in the present.
3. Focus on the score of the game.
4. Understanding how powerful it is not to have to be right.
5. See the future as a picture puzzle.
6. Don’t get so far ahead of the parade that people don’t know you’re in it.
7. Resistance to change falls if benefits are real.
8. Things that we expect to happen always happen more slowly.
9. You don’t get results by solving problems but by exploiting opportunities.
10. Don’t add unless you subtract.
11. Don’t forget the ecology of technology.

Some mindsets that were not included in the book:
1. Look at what is rewarded and what is punished.
2. A proposition doesn’t have to be true; it just has to be interesting – a good way to stimulate thought.
3. To appraise the viability of a society or a company, examine its ability to be self-correcting. (94)

“I match and measure information against my own experience, using my values and mindsets. And so does everybody else.” (xvii) “My pictures of the future…are based on an analysis of the present…” (xx)

“A common purpose of the 11 Mindsets in this book is to…focus on the things that have and will have the strongest influence on our lives.” “Differentiate between basics and embellishment, rules and techniques, trends and fads, breakthroughs and refinements.” (10)

“Most change is not in what we do, but how we do it. Within all the hype, the more we are able to differentiate between constants and change, the more effectively we will be able to react to new markets and profit from change.” (5)

“Core values in a visionary company form a rock-solid foundation and do not drift with the trends and fashions of the day.” (8, quoting Collins in Built to Last.)

“My bottom line is that ‘the only certainty in business is change’ is just not true.” (9)

“…we, focusing too far out into the future, can stumble over what is right in front of us.” (11-12)

“Only an objective and unbiased study of the present can reveal the future.” “It is not saying that the future will be little more than an extension of things as they are. It is saying that we find the seeds of the future on the ground, and not in the width of the sky.” (13) If you lose perspective, fads can block your view. (14)

“Basic change is the result of a confluence of forces, rarely because of just one force….” (17)

“Newspapers are our great collaborators. They are not only the first draft of history but the first to give us a glimpse of the future….” (20)

The reality is in the objective measurements, not the grand pronouncements. Consider population rates, employment rates, growth rates, reforms being implemented, etc. (22) Companies do not perform better because of the rhetoric of their CEOs. (32)

“In business, politics, or private life, the gap between words and facts widen when personal pride is involved. Often it’s not the promises made but the problems hidden.” (24)

In politics, “…exaggerating problems without any real idea of the score of the game distorts society’s priorities and makes it hard for citizens and leaders to make the best decisions.” “Environmentalists routinely exaggerate problems so as to alarm people and get support for their agenda.” [He gives examples.] (28)

More people die from falling coconuts than from shark attacks [He gives statistics.] but did you ever hear about it happening on the news? (29)

“It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.” (31)

“If you have to be right, you put yourself in a hedged lane, but once you experience the power of not having to be right, you will feel like you are walking across open fields, the perspective wide and your feet free to take any turn.” (39)

“Sequence is the enemy of making connections.” “Look at the future as a puzzle.” Explore by trying to make connections between things that don’t seem, on the surface, to fit. (41) This is an intuitive process. Breakthroughs break old mindsets. Geniuses often connect details that others see but don’t connect. “42)

“…the daily challenge in business and politics lies not only in the fundamental skills of leadership but also in the necessity to stay within the field of vision of those you want to lead.” (53)

Regarding Change
“You don’t bend down unless something is worth picking up.”

“It is the responsibility of those who lead to communicate the benefits of change.” “It is not their responsibility ‘to get it.’ They are not the ones asking for change, and they will not support it unless they truly believe they will benefit.”

“Do not underestimate people. When they resist change—change you think they ought to readily embrace—you have either failed to make benefits transparent or there are good reasons to resist.” (62)

“Expectations always travel at higher speeds.” With inventions, we continually underestimate the time span required from idea to…realization.” “…almost all change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Things just take time—almost always more time than we expect.” (76)

“Windows of opportunity are often blown open and closed again like windows in a storm. You have to be ready to grasp them.” (82)

“Big companies with little flexibility are on the side of the losers.” (83)

“The problem of a declining market for a product can’t be fixed by improvements to an already obsolete technology.” (83)

“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they don’t find them, they create them.” (91, quoting George Bernard Shaw)

“Times of change are times of opportunity. When the relationships of people and things are shifting, new juxtapositions creating new needs and desires offer new possibilities. Keep your eye on those who grab openings and do something with them.” (92)

“In Australia short-term benefits (from introducing rabbits) were wiped out by long-term damage. What is true in nature applies to technology.” “…the accelerated rate of the technological change has been so great that the social accommodation to new technology has lagged further and further behind.” (101)

“…the consequences of our relationships with technology are not given much consideration. It is our most unexamined relationship. With the advent of a new technology, questions need to be asked:
What will be enhanced?
What will be diminished?
What will be replaced? (101)

“The cry for a computer in every classroom has been with us for a couple of decades. But have we examined what a computer is going to contribute to the real purpose of education?” “What is happening today in America is that most of the energy and money are going to the computer, many times at the expense of poetry, art, music, and the rest of the humanities.” (103)

“I say get rid of voice answering systems immediately. They are offending customers and putting them in telephone hell.” “I urge any CEO whose company has a voice answering system to call his company and see whether he can get through to himself.” (105)

“Technology is a great enabler, but only when in balance with needs and skills and our human nature.” (109)

Culture – A visual Culture is Taking Over the World
“It is an MTV world, a world where visual narrative is overwhelming literary narrative.” (113) “Our literacy, and with it our verbal and communication skills, are in decline.” (115) “As more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent minded. These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to loose [sic].” (117)

“If you can combine powerful technology with the fantasy of a six-year-old, you can create miracles.” (124)

“Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces….” (126)

“MTV has contributed mightily to the shift to a global visual culture.” (139)

“…video gaming has become the major cultural activity of the generation 30 or 35 and below, the way movies and literature were for earlier generations.” (140)

Economics – From Nation-States to Economic Domains
“The economic borderlines of our world will not be drawn between countries, but around Economic Domains.” (157) “Economics will continue to overwhelm politics in the running of the global economy, and the impact of the global economy on our lives if far greater than the rhetoric of politics.” (180)

“The winner is smart, small, flexible.” (168)

China – The Periphery is the Center
“There are no Communists in China anymore, and the evolution of a modern China will in time lead to political reforms.” (186)

“China has certainly become the ‘workshop of the world’….” “We will also see China developing technologies and creating new ones.” “China over time will become one of the design centers of the world….” (188)

“China’s newly revised 2004 per capita GDP still ranks lower than one hundredth in the world.” (188) “China continues to grow extraordinarily at almost 10 percent a year…. That means its economy is doubling every seven and a half years.” (190)

“China has 166 cities with populations of more than 1 million….” (191) “Almost all of these cities have been turned into vast construction zones.” (192) “Globalizing as much as decentralizing, they are escaping the control of the central government in Beijing.” (193)

Europe – Mutually Assured Decline
“Economically, Europe is on the path of mutually assured decline.” (213)

“Forming the European Union was a sea change, the greatest geopolitical change in the history of the world,” (214)

“Endless political discussions are not about how to exploit the new opportunities… but about how to maintain the welfare state that now yields slow growth and unemployment.” (215)

“The European Model…is not just an economic model. It’s a mindset, a way of life, a worldview….” (219)

“Europe’s birth rate is only 1.4…. It takes an average of 2.1 children just to sustain a population at a constant level. …in just two generations, Europe will have half the population it has today.” (221)

“…change comes when there is a confluence of changing values and economic necessity. The economic necessity seems clear in Europe, but Europe does not seem to change even when benefits are obvious.” (222)

“Only entrepreneurs, bottom-up, can create new companies and real jobs.” (222)

“It has become fashionable to say that America is a unilateralist, that America just does what it wants to do….” “Americans don’t like doing business by committee.” “And, as Robert Kagan says: ‘Those who cannot act unilaterally themselves naturally want to have a mechanism for controlling those who can… For Europeans, the U.N. Security Council is a substitute for the power they lack.’” (228)

“…to quote Kagan again, ‘Europeans simply enjoy the ‘free ride’ they have gotten under the American security umbrella over the past six decades. Given America’s willingness to spend so much money protecting them, Europeans would rather spend their own money on social welfare programs, long vacations, and shorter workweeks.’ So, Americans are cowboys, and Europeans are freeloaders.” (229)

The big hurdles for Europe: high taxes and big governments, less innovation, slow productivity growth, restrictive labor laws, and declining export market share and rising protectionism. (229-30) “It is Europeans and European politics that are shaping Europe’s future.” (231)

Our Evolutionary Era – Reservoir of Innovation
“The next half of this century will be an era of absorbing, extending, and perfecting those great breakthroughs [of the last years of the 20th].” The next Big Thing will not come anytime soon. (233) “The 1980s and 1990s were two great decades of revolutionary advancement.” (243)

“Germline engineering—where changes are made in the genetic codes that are passed on generation to generation—will overwhelm the importance of all previous technologies. But it will also include the danger of catapulting the human race into an undreamed future.” “Once the first step is made, we will be on a path of no return.” (248)

“What scientists will not have is the key to our souls, our spiritual nature, which we will therefore cling to and obsess about.” (248)

“Whatever the future holds, it will be worth nothing if there is no joy.” (249)

Doing the right thing ..

It is not always easy to do the right thing. Alan Bennett captured it well after declining an honor from Oxford University in protest of their accepting money from Rupert Murdoch for the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Language and Communication. He wrote; “I wish I could say that this refusal leaves me with a warm feeling of having done the right thing, but not a bit of it. I end up, as so often when I have tried to get it right, feeling I’ve slightly made a fool of myself, so that I wonder whether after more momentous refusals martyrs ever went to their deaths not in the strong confidence of virtue but just feeling that they had somehow muffed it" (Untold Stories p.241). I think what he is writing about at one level is the power of convention, of fitting in, of staying within the norm to get along in life. Christians at their best are brave. Seeking to maintain convention for its own sake and ours is not brave.

Another photo of St. Andrew's

City of churches
Originally uploaded by Handles

And the future of the Church is where?

A few blogs ago I mentioned a conversation with a person from a newly constructed church building and the kind of ‘attractional’ and ‘consumerist’ mentality this person had with respect to the future of the congregation that is there, and is hoped to come there.

Again I came into contact with the same person who now spoke to me of the ministry they were hoping to develop for ‘young people’ and the kind of enticements, things and persons, that are envisaged being used to bring about the attendance of that particular constituency. Now I’m not against attracting young people! I try all kinds of things to make worship & the life of the congregation where I serve address the yearnings, spiritual and otherwise, of young people. (We use Hillsong material and have a data projector to show slides, movies, etc.!) However when this persons spoke to me the language was peppered with “iPod”, band, singing group, movies, internet, coffee and so on. I found myself bombarded once again by that ubiquitous cultural mix of ideas, sounds, words, images that is a streaming torrent of all the advertising for that which is subsumed under the rubric of “emerging church”. The growing culture of narcissism that we are growing for our young in the church. It made me go back to George Orwell and his novel 1984. At one point near the end of novel the protagonist, Winston, is being tortured and Big Brother is reminding Winston that he’s old, part of the past and holding back the future that the young are open to with its myriad of the ‘new’. As hope flees from him Winston also sees fleeing his belief that the future lay in the young. Traditionally they have been seen as the symbol of hope. But Winston notes that they have already been indoctrinated and have sold out to a phenomenon that has been called Cultural Attention Deficit Disorder: the need to be constantly entertained, visually, mentally, aurally and orally. There is no future with the young who live in a muddied environment where distinctions between fact, fiction and advertising are not known.

So, if it is argued by others that we need to stop and realize that our needs are simple, materially and spiritually, then we might uncover, as Winston sought to do, that love and companionship is where we need to be.

Rather than this mad rush to ‘live for the now’, maybe the ‘now’ is what we really need, where, as I’ve said in my message on http://glenelg.unitingchurch.org.au that giving and receiving expressions of pure love, old and young, make us who we are as children of a loving God.