Lower your stress ..

One of the best ways to be able to slow down and lower your stress is to save yourself trouble, especially the kind that others so often cause you. And the best way to save yourself from that kind of trouble is to avoid causing trouble to others first. Really. You may want to believe that other people are natural a**holes (some, sadly, are), but most are behaving that way because they think they have to deal with an a**hole . . . you!

(from Slow Leadership)

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.. a very simple thing

“The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its element is a very simple thing. It asks for no elaborate organization, no large finances, no great numbers of paid missionaries. In its beginning it may be the work of one man and that of a man neither learned in the things of this world, nor rich in the wealth of this world. What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which uniting a man to Christ, sets him on fire” – Rolland Allen The Compulsion of the Spirit, 47-48.

You can learn more about me by seeing what's on my bookshelf than most other enquiries.

This quote led me to think about the idea of "what do the books on your bookshelf say about your world view?"

In my own case, I thought that my book shelf was a better indicator of my world view twenty years ago than it is today. And I believed that it would be an even less of an indicator in the future. That's because many of the ideas and images that I pick up today aren't from the pages of a book, but from the screens of my various digital appliances, especially via my computer and the Internet. It's difficult to display those in an easy-to-grasp way for the casual browser, unless I print out & display in some form thousands of pages, etc.

When I was younger, it gave me great comfort to see all of my books spread out on book shelves. I'd look at them and think, "So that's what I know!" (Don't laugh, I'm sure many of you have been there as well.) I also find it interesting to look at other people's books and their record collections.

As the years have gone on people close to me said that my philosophy would change and I would need to give a lot of my books away to friends and libraries, or to finish up leaving them at the 'local 'tip'. In a sense some of that is true. The interesting thing is that I am really loathe to give any books away, even if I'm no longer comfortable with them, or now think they are 'rubbish, and so on. I know that there is a core set of books that I go back to from time to time for inspiration. These are books and authors that every one I know (well of all the people I know no-one agrees with these books and authors - but there may be some-one I may meet who does) thinks are, to try and find a helpful phrase, no longer worth the read or consideration.

The fascinating(?) thing is that I seem to have regressed in that I now hold even stronger book, authors & the ideas, philosophies, strategies, etc. that I held passionately at the beginning of my ministry. This is not a form of 'fundamentalism' rather the views of the '60's that I held were called radical & revolutionary then. Nowadays they'd be considered to have fallen off the end of the left of the world.

So, look at the books on my shelves - they'll tell you much about me.

Wisdom of the Elders

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed down from generation to generation, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

In the Public Service,(** Probably can be applied to the Church too!) however, a whole range of far more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:


.. Change riders

.. Buy a stronger whip

.. Do nothing: "This is the way we have always ridden dead horses."

.. Visit other countries to see how they ride dead horses

.. Perform a productivity study to see if lighter riders improve the dead horse's performance

.. Hire a contractor to ride the dead horse

.. Harness several dead horses together in an attempt to increase the speed

.. Provide additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse's performance

.. Appoint a committee to study the horse and access how dead it actually is

.. Re-classify the dead horse as "living-impaired"

.. Develop a Strategic Plan for the management of dead horses

.. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for all horses

.. Modify existing standards to include dead horses

.. Declare that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overheads and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line than many other horses

.. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position

Learning from failure

Organizations fail because they rely more on repeating past successful behavior than risking failure by trying anything new. Individuals do the same. People are very poor at accepting the importance of chance and context in their lives. Focusing on your successes is a recipe for blindly repeating the past. Failures, however, always have a learning message and the potential for growth.