He gets us . .

Yes, Jesus certainly gets us, as the Super Bowl ad says. He knows us to our core and understands us. But that's not all He does. 

He gets us as we are . . and He doesn't leave us there.  He saves, transforms, cleanses, restores, forgives, heals, delivers, redeems, loves us. In short, #HeChangesUs

Rescue kids

Danger, tragedy, death are all happening in Ukraine.  But there's purpose-driven heroism as well.

Vlad Finn lived on the streets for two years as a small boy. A Ukrainian orphanage later became his home, then an American couple adopted him and his brother. At the age of fifteen, Vlad had new parents, family and country. Today his heart is touched for orphans who are still there.

Tyler Merritt is a U.S. veteran with tactical warrior experience, a special skill set. Together with a few other veterans in the Aerial Recovery Group, he's on the ground with refugees at the Ukraine-Poland border. 

ARG's mission: to save lives, eliminate confusion, maximize support and accelerate recovery.

Last week they took a window of  72 hours to walk across the border and rescue orphans. The veterans have the skills to get the job done, and Finn is there as a volunteer. Merritt says that they were moving a 30-passenger van of kids when Russians stopped them, pulled out two caregivers, and executed them. 

photo

from The Stream

It's personal

"Unwanted" is a label that Ryan Bomberger rejects. He was conceived by his white biological mother when was she raped by a black man; but, despite the violence, she chose to carry that child and give him life. Ryan was adopted into a multi-racial family that eventually numbered 15. His view of the world is counter-cultural.

His personal story leads him away from the materialism of our culture . . toward the conviction that life has purpose and meaning.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Free speech 7

 (cont'd from yesterday's post)

Lewis was a professor at Magdalen College in Oxford when someone else started the Socratic Club and asked him to be its first president in 1942. Its purpose was to apply the Socratic  principle to one specific matter: the pros and cons of Christianity.

They "scoured Who's Who" to invite well-qualified atheists to come and present their arguments. They wanted to listen - to hear not the weakest, but rather the best arguments that the other side had to offer. The case in favor of Christianity would also be heard.

Magdalen College, Oxford

Inaccurate misunderstandings may drive bitter division between the two sides, especially (Lewis said) in a "large and talkative community" like the university. This format would produce clarity. Some say that religion is too sacred to be debated publicly. Lewis said that it absolutely must be talked about.

In controversial issues, both sides think themselves right and the other side wrong. Let's not silence the other side, but hear and answer it. Civilly and respectfully.

We are spiritual beings. We want to know the truth.

from God in the Dock, pp 126-128

Platforms 1

Some people don't seem to take voting in a presidential election very seriously. 

How do you choose who to vote for? Do you follow an online resource, or have a favorite single issue, or choose the best looking, or vote for the party, or choose the most charming, or trust your feelings . . or are you guided by the campaign commercials?

Not so many years ago, speaking the truth was nearly a universal value among Americans. But then it became popular to deny the existence of truth and any obligation to stick to the truth. It may look like all politicians are lying. Who should you trust? Many just give up.

But there is solid help to make your voting decision. It's the party platform. Candidates will generally have to follow the platform of the political party which supports them. The party is paying for their campaign.

Candidates may be moral, or experienced, or truthful, or nice, or they may not. But, mostly, they're going to follow the party platform.

So go to this party platform and to the other party platform. You'll find out what they stand for. 

(to be cont'd)

1st Thanksgiving

Those pilgrims who famously shared a feast with 90 Indian neighbors back in 1621 considered their little community protected by God to be an instrument of purpose, not a recipient of privilege.

They also saw Squanto as God's special instrument of purpose. Coincidence or chance isn't good enough to explain his extraordinary story.

Social capital

Note: for reason/excuse why yesterday's post didn't come up, see Tuesday's post! Same thing, sorry.

Sometimes a young person looking for a toe-up in the job world feels inadequate or unqualified. There's advice offered in this article that could change things, because she/he has something to offer that goes beyond degrees or certificates. Here's how the author leveraged his value:

"I had met somebody . . with whom I kept in touch and I knew was building a company  . . I knew he had a ton of things to get done. He was busy launching a company while working at another company and taking care of his wife and kids.

"I offered to take some work – any work – off his plate.

You make deposits when you create surplus value for others that isn’t captured by cash money.

"In time, I learned new skills about writing copy, doing sales, and organizing content for the product and my role became more specialized, but I started with nothing to offer besides time and an extra set of hands.

In time, I was hired full-time and given equity in the company – something I could never have achieved in such a short time if I made my case based on “qualifications.”

"It is from this position that i've been able to publish a book, appear on major news networks, meet mentors and new business partners I would have never otherwise interacted with on my old track."

"Value-creation is the core of getting ahead. While your peers are busy racking up credentials, you can start racking up social capital."

Art & nursing

Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is stressful for nurses and physicians, not the best place for many. Tilda Shalof, ICU nurse, did it for 28 years. She knew they were making a difference.

She saw a lot of caps, lids, coverings, tabs, and connectors in her daily work. They came in all colors, and she began to collect them. They were colorful, and they reminded her of the lives that were saved in ICU.

Eventually she made, with a friend's help, a mural out of the thousands she collected, and it is stunning. She says it reminds her of the patients she cared for.

She brought beauty and meaning together.

photo: treehugger.com

(from article at https://www.thestar.com/life/2017/04/04/toronto-general-hospital-nurses-plastic-collection-transformed-into-mural.html}

Avoiding debt

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Millennials (age 18-34, roughly) seem to value financial independence for themselves, maybe more than their parents. At the same time, a sizable number of millennials live with their parents, probably because of heavy student loans and the high price of homes today.

But according to a recent study, some young women in their 20's and 30's are making good money decisions that will have them spending less than that horrific average of $600k (yesterday's post) on debt service over their lifetime.

photo: forbes.com

"Creating wealth is all about choosing correct habits now," common sense from a finance expert.

Those young women ranged in income from $30k to $150k and had these things in common:

1) they knew their income, what they had to work with
2) they knew their expenses and had worked out a budget
3) they set spending priorities
4) they used some device to save or invest money, like an automatic savings deposit

Crises

One of America's too frequent crises erupted last week. And again I've chosen to ignore it in this blog. I always do ignore them, and here's why.

First, the presses and the internet just blaze with rhetoric, red hot passions along with cool analysis.  There are lots of voices, so I'm confident that you can find what you want to read about every crisis without my input.

Instead, I feel called to bring your attention to some important things that are not currently in crisis mode, good articles and books that you might miss.

What's the value in that? I'd like us to think things through before issues turn into crises.

Intense

(cont'd)

Engineer Jeremy Hollman was already disappointed in his job at Boeing at the age of 23. When Elon Musk recruited him with his radical vision of change in the aerospace industry, he liked it: "I thought it was an opportunity I could not pass up."

Young and single, he was willing to "give up any semblance of having a life in favor of working at SpaceX non-stop." He worked with the top engineer to create a new rocket engine. Then he loaded it in onto a U-Haul trailer behind a Hummer and drove 4,000 lbs of gear from CA to Texas for intense trial and error testing.

A great job, but super consuming, with failure after failure. "I was really, really frustrated and just tired and mad." His glasses fell down a flame duct and he had no time to go to the optometrist. His safety glasses got scratched. He "vented about this in the factory one night." Musk was nearby and heard it all.

Two hours later, Musk's assistant appeared with a lasik eye surgery appointment. He paid for the surgery. Hollman says, "Elon can be very demanding, but he'll make sure the obstacles in your way are removed."

from Elon Musk: SpaceX, Tesla, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Start over

We all know Elon Musk somehow managed to really change both the space and car industries, and this while still in his 30's. He has super focus, drive, vision, and built a network of super talent around his goals.

He recruits fantastic people and inspires them, and then he makes fantastic work demands – which are also part of the legend. "Ulcer-inducing deadlines” and 100-hour work weeks make for some bad stories, but I'm going to share some good stories from that biography I'm reading . . 

After working so hard, sacrificing personal time, the employees of SpaceX had big investment of effort in their rockets. They were going where many had failed before and they wanted to succeed. 

"The failed launch [third rocket test] left many SpaceX exmployees shattered. "It was like the worst [blank] day ever.You don't usually see grown-ups weeping, but there they were. We were tired and broken emotionally." 

"Musk addressed the workers right away, and encouraged them to get back to work. He said, "Look. We are going to do this. It's going to be okay. Don't freak out."

SpaceX employee Singh says, "It was like magic.Everyone chilled out immediately and started to focus on figuring out what just happened and how to fix it. It went from despair to hope and focus."

from Elon Musk: SpaceX, Tesla, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

(cont'd tomorrow)

East LA kid

(first of three)

Rudy Carrasco grew up without his parents as "a displaced Mexican kid" in East Los Angeles. But he sees God's grace in his life, and he has a passionate heart for the urban poor.

Drawing on his experiences, he believes certain things can make a permanent difference in the lives of the poor - he'll explain it to you in this video.

As a ten-year-old in Sunday School, he had the revelation that God cares about cities. So he decided, "‘Okay. I want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of a God who loves me and cares about a place in order to transform it.’”

You voted

"[W]e as Christians, out of love for God and our neighbors, must stay involved in the political process."  If you are an American and you voted three days ago, then, well done.  As the late Chuck Colson said, it's part of your Christian duty to be a good citizen.

Chuck Colson photo: www.livenet.ch

It's part of that duty to speak up locally, to be "salt and light" on your community boards and commissions - "in other words, [among y]our neighbors! People we can relate to and care for and persuade."

"Poverty, prisoners, community brokenness, education problems—these things won’t be solved by another government program, but by Christians living redemptively in our own neighborhoods and our towns."

(From an excellent article by John Stonestreet at breakpoint.org)

Moral limits

I love the optimism of Peter Diamandis ( Tuesday's & Wednesday's posts).  We do have more abundance and more possibilities and more empowerment on earth than ever before, and not just a little more. If humanity were morally perfect,  I would be as confident in his great future vision as he is because today's technology is changing the world.

Technology explodes education.  It explodes communication.  It frees people from drudgery that used to imprison body and mind.

But technology also empowers evil.  Just a small number of people - or one - can do a lot of damage.  How many systems that we depend on are controlled by computers that could be controlled by someone with evil intent?

The corruptible nature of men and women is a major factor in our present and will be in our future.  As Christians we recognize our need for God, and that our ultimate destiny is with Him.

iPad team leader

Following Christ infuses meaning into all of life - your daily work too.  He does not leave you while you see to your job responsibilities.

Joshua Banko is a guy who seems to have no sacred-secular divide regarding his work.  At a conference last winter, "Joshua talked about how God is the first and the Greatest Creator. How He has endowed mankind—made in His image—with the capacity to create and innovate. This powerful gift enables us to imagine and craft entirely new things, whether music, poetry, furniture, houses, cars, or iPads.

Photo:  apple.com

"God is glorified as we use our creativity to fashion things that reflect His beauty and are beneficial to others in obedience to Christ’s command to love our neighbor. . .

"What makes Joshua’s story even more compelling is that his former workplace, Apple Computers, Inc., is in the heart of the highly secularized Silicon Valley, where he worked for many years leading the team that developed the iPad."

Aspiration

Here's what I think about my life:  there's probably nothing that I can't improve if I make the effort to practice it.  So, I can be optimistic about getting better at something that I really want to be better at.  Yes, the word is "better," not perfect.   "Better" is good enough to improve our lives.

What about fitness?  If you would welcome a kick to get yourself on track to better health,  this article might help:
 "New Year's Resolution Motivation From a Quadriplegic"
Wishing you a good new year!

"Work" is honorable

Work is a good thing in the Western worldview.  Christianity has made a distinct contribution to this view, as articulated by Chuck Colson in 2003:

"We are made in the image of God and as such we are made to work—to create, to shape, to bring order out of disorder."  This is what you do (as we all do) in your business or job.

"Christians have a special reason to celebrate Labor Day, which honors the fundamental dignity of workers, because we worship a God Who labored to make the world—and Who created human beings in His image  . . When God made Adam and Eve, He gave them work to do: cultivating and caring for the earth."

"In the ancient world, the Greeks and Romans looked upon manual work as a curse, something for lower classes and slaves. But Christianity changed all of that. Christians viewed work as a high calling—a calling to be co-workers with God in unfolding the rich potential of His creation."

We create - we shape - we organize our world to unfold its rich potential.  Inspiring!