Catalyst

Archive for the ‘life observations’ Category

I once counseled a couple whose marriage was collapsing. The husband had multiple extra-marital affairs. His wife was hurt, fed-up, and had turned cold.

As we sat there, the husband said, “I’ll do anything–counseling, moving, whatever it takes. I just need her to trust me.” I had to tell him, “That’s the one thing she can’t give you. You have to earn it.”

The problem with people who hurt others is track record. Hurt feelings don’t heal easily. As Mark Twain  observed, “The cat doesn’t walk across a hot stove twice. But neither does he walk across a cold stove.” It’s a matter of trust.

This was brought home to me lately in my home with my air conditioning. We endured an inferno-like summer with triple digits for weeks. My air conditioning was not working right, with the compressor coming on like a Howitzer cannon going off. It was a matter of time before it blew up. I slept with an ear cocked for the sound of disaster.

Finally, it was repaired. The gentle click sounds comforting. But that has yet to soothe my nerves. I still listen carefully when it clicks on. I check the thermostat and hold my hand up to a vent to make sure the air is cold. It will take a while to gain my trust.

When something breaks between people, it takes time to get things back to normal. You can apologize and vow to change (which is exactly what you need to do). But time is the only proof of change. It won’t happen in a few days or even weeks. It may take years before nerves relax and relational scars disappear.

If you mess up, change and prove the change with your life. It’s the price you must pay to regain trust lost.

When the calendar turned August in Dallas, nature’s thermostat got turned up–to over 100 degrees.

On top of that, our air conditioning is not working just right. It won’t cool down to the set point and I had to work through issues with contractors losing messages to get it repaired.

Society has not always had air conditioning. The closest we came was the “funeral home fan” in the hand of a semi-sleeping human being. As long as the rhythm continued, the breeze kept moving

But without air conditioning today….life skids to a halt.

The technician comes Tuesday so until then, all we can do is endure. I keep learning some things about endurance.

Endurance thrives on the “foreseen end.” The date on my calendar is written in sweat–Tuesday morning the technician comes. Once the hope of “this will be over soon” fades away, endurance turns to hopelessness.

Endurance is a day at a time experience. Right now, I know the day the technician is coming. All I want to do is get through this day. I’ll deal with tomorrow tomorrow. It’s the only way to keep on.

Endurance is not resignation. Is there something you can do about your plight? We turned out lights, ate sandwiches (requiring no heat), and stayed still when sitting. Anything we could do to make it easier, we did.

No one enjoys the “endurance” experience but life puts us in many waiting rooms. Just remember, this too shall pass.

My wife and I are in the middle of what we considered an impossible project.

Friday comes every seven days–and that’s a good thing.

Fridays are the end of the work week for most. (If it not yours, please adjust this post to fit your situation.) It launches us into rest, relaxation, and family time.

But not everyone likes Fridays. The specter of anxiety hangs as a pall over many Fridays. Jobs are not complete. Tasks procrastinated all week smell like dead fish. So some fill a briefcase and see if they can get to it over the weekend.

One of my goals each week is to get to Friday “clean.” It doesn’t always happen as I get last minute things on Thursday night or Friday. But the goal is to “clear the decks” so I can indeed re-create over Saturday.

I have learned that to have a great Friday afternoon experience, I have to do several things.

I have to plan my week. I need a blueprint of what is coming toward me. What’s on my calendar that needs attention? Is my task list reasonable? What tasks do I do on which day? These questions (usually on Sunday night or Monday morning) are my compass and sextant for the week’s journey. In a sense, Friday starts on Monday.

I work diligently to get work done in a timely manner. Procrastination is like a neck massage. It feels better to let it woo you into the sense of “it will get done. Just relax.” Yet tasks postponed muscle themselves into the times I really don’t want to work. My aim is to have it done by Friday morning. I cannot do a week’s worth of work in 4 hours. It takes a week.

I do a quick sweep on Friday. Friday morning is time for last minute checks. If I’ve done my work through the week, Friday becomes a calm day. I make a few last phone calls that have come in, clean up my email inbox, empty my voicemail on my phone. I feel confident that nothing is left hanging.

I enjoy Saturday. While I have plenty of household tasks to do on Saturday, they are enjoyable because my mind doesn’t flit toward the unfinished. I can let things “settle to earth.”

Friday afternoon should feel like Atlas taking your world onto his shoulders. If it’s not like that for you, examine your life and time. Where’s the leak? No one should come to Friday dreading the end of the week.

Enjoy the Friday afternoon experience.

The class of 2010 has now sat through hours of names read listening for their own. Students sweated bullets over finals (and sometimes standardized tests). Textbooks were closed, accounted for, and stored in the sauna of a dust-disturbed storeroom.

The moving of the tassel on the mortarboard signals the completion of school. It says, “you’re through, finished, completed. School (with its accompanying learning) is over.

Perhaps you need to rethink the tassel and just not bother because it’s a false alarm. Learning of a different kind is just beginning.

Mark Twain observed, “If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” It’s a different kind–and longer–education.

The Greeks practices “praxis,” a philosophy that called for taking what you know and putting into action. How do we find the “praxis” of our lives today?

Find mentors. We grow when we have someone bigger, faster, smarter, and wiser than we are. The tragedy of young lives is they surround themselves with friends with the same level of ignorance and disdain the sage counsel of experience. Make sure your circle includes someone who can teach you something new.

Ask questions of others. Ask them other others. Too many times, we want to appear smart, so we nod in agreement when our mind is nothing more than a fuzzball. Stop and ask, “tell me more about that. I’m not sure I completely understand.”

Reflect on experience. Ask three critical questions to  improve anything.

• What happened?
• Why did it happen? (What did leader, speaker, teacher do to get the result that took place?)
• What would I have done differently?

Keep learning in the right tense. As a minister, I hear people say, “I already learned that in the Bible.” They think learning is a past-tense experience. Once you read it, know it, can feed it back, you don’t need to learn it again. Learning is really a present-tense experience. When you read the Bible, it’s not what you learned but what you are learning.

Let the schoolbooks back in storage. Take your mind out of storage and learn something. The great failure of many lives is that they live by what they learned rather than by what they are learning.

What’s on your “to do” list for today?

I like to listen to comedy. A favorite comic is a woman named Jeanne Robertson. She has a wonderful skit on the “to do” list. On her to-do list is a daily, repeated item that reads “Find the Humor.” She refuses to check it off as complete until she has found something humorous.

She relates an instance when looking for laughing made a difference. While waiting in an airport line, she had her humor radar scanning in high gear. People in the line were agitated, irritated, and surly. Then it dawned on her. She was so intent on finding the humor that she had forgotten to get mad.

Every circumstance has hidden giggles, chuckles,  and snickers. If you can find them, life takes on the joy it was intended to have.

How do you find the humor in life?

Hang about humorous people. They have an outlook on life that will rub off as you spend time with them. I have friends whose stories make me turn life on its head so I can see a different perspective.

Laugh at yourself. Someone has noticed, “you might as well laugh at yourself since others are doing it secretly.” One of the lessons of maturity is not to take life too seriously.

Reflect humorously. Recently, I fell out of the shower door (while taking a shower). While I won’t go into all the details, I wasn’t hurt. The only thing that was damage was my ego. (For self-protection, I won’t go into any further detail.) But my wife’s sides hurt from laughing all day long. The more I think about it, the funnier the scene gets.

Take Jeanne Robertson’s advice. Make sure you put “find the humor” on your to-do list today.

A seer warned Julius Caesar to “beware the Ides of March.” On March 15th, he was assassinated. For Americans, it is adapted to “beware April 15th.” That’s the day tax returns are due.

The tax season is also a favorite scamming season for cyber-criminals.

Emails, purportedly from the Internal Revenue Service, advise you to click on a link to claim a tax refund due to you. When you click the link, it takes you to a website asking for social security numbers, names, home addresses, and bank account numbers (so the money can be deposited in the account). It probably also has an IRS logo to make it look genuine. The email address even reads “irs.gov.”

Don’t click on this link.

The IRS does not use email. They do not contact you electronically or even over the phone. All communication from the IRS will come through the Postal Service. (Misuse of the postal service is the federal offense of mail fraud.)

This scam is especially aimed at the trusting, the electronic novice, and those who are older. What should you do if you receive such an email?

First, don’t click on any links. That opens the trap door to your private information vault.

Second, contact the Internal Revenue Service. If you think money is due you, call them (1-800-829-1040) and talk to someone directly. In addition, forward the email to the email fraud division of the IRS. They will investigate.

Pay what is due the government, use what is yours to use, but do not let the criminals continue their electronic crime spree.

Life is a collision of urgencies grabbing you by the collar demanding your attention. After a while, in boxes are stuffed and to-do lists that resemble a train derailment leave your nerves on their last fray.

It’s time to get some rest.

Recently, I took some time off to see my daughter and son-in-law in North Carolina. We could fly but chose to drive. The mountain scenery is a break from the flat-land terrain of Dallas, Texas. More important, it provides me and my wife time to talk without interruption.

In Genesis 1, it said that on the seventh day of creation, God rested. The strange word in Hebrew means “to settle to earth.” Like the leaf that has expended its energy of summer, fall brings a time to snap free of a branch and fall to earth. The tree then regenerates for the next season.

Too many times, we don’t take the time to let is all “settle.” Rest and vacations allows us to see what remains and if it is important.

What does it take to let is all “settle?”

Get unplugged. In a digital society, the smart phone is our short leash. Just because it rings or because a text message comes in does not mean it is urgent. While I do check email and provide 1 minute answers once a day on breaks, I don’t indulge the nag of technology. Whatever happens (outside of a family emergency) can wait or can be handled by my assistant.

Have fun. One thing vacations do for me is gives me a chance to read books that tend to get shuffled to the bottom of my deck. I read biographies, novels, and magazines. Your fun my be white-water rafting or playing cards. Whatever it is, take time just to let the muscles of your face flip into smile.

Have adventures. Different things recharge the mind when drained by the daily drill. On this last trip we had to take a different route due to a rock slide in the mountains. It meant we had to pay attention to routes and look at different places that I never knew existed. Go to museums, baseball games, and out of the way places. The diversion shakes loose the cobwebs.

Get perspective. The adage about the forest and the trees is true. We get caught up in the immediate that we don’t see the important. Rest times provide the time to examine what’s most important, what can be jettisoned, and what should be treasured. Without the time, we get spiritual myopia.

Someone has said that what makes music enjoyable is not the notes, but the pauses between the notes. Take time to listen to the pauses.

What do you need to do to let life settle?

Twenty-five years ago, computers turned my world upside down. The possibilities for easier, more efficient work were endless. Spreadsheets crunched numbers. Desktop publishers (as they were called) made preparing newsletters and flyers a snap (and fun). Word processors allowed words to flow and let me change on a fly. One of my great joys was writing a macro that would compress as many keystrokes into one as possible.

I keep a task list on an IPhone synced to the web so it is available on a laptop, a business center computer, or my desktop. I’m very efficient.

Then why, when you go to my desk, do you find a paper time log? It’s all about the purpose.

While some professions use time logging to determine billable hours for various clients, my use is more mundane–to find out I use my time. I could use a spreadsheet where categories are color-coded and a macro could produce an automated report. It would be easy, efficient . . . and irrelevant.

In my church, our elders want to see a monthly report. It helps them see my work better. It’s an accountability tool.

For that process, I use paper. A few times a day, I take a paper week-at-a-glance planner, enter what I did in the appropriate time block, and repeat as needed. It’s done with a cheap ink pen on paper. On the first day of the month I take a legal pad, write down all the things I did in various categories and then transfer the information to a pre-designed report in my word processor.

Why not let a computer do that? It’s because of what I would lose. They key to using time logs effectively is not the historical archiving of dozens of daily tasks. It’s reflecting on what’s happening in your life.

If I let the computer do the work, I get a pretty report that won’t change my thinking. I need the mental processing, the seeing of tasks, the “ouch” of bad time use.

Imagine the learning lost if I did not have to confront questions such as:

•    Where did I use my time? Was it on important things or did I squander it?
•    What did I neglect?
•    What needs to be eliminated or delegated?
•    What time-wasters grab me by my mental lapels and demand attention?

Einstein observed, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” When you take reflection out of life, you learn nothing.

I still use my computer for so many things. But I don’t want it to do my thinking for me.

Are you reflecting on your time? What does it tell you about your life?

People waiting for medical treatment at mobile clinic

What does hot, cold, and rewarding have in common?

They are the ingredients of a recent medical mission trip to Nicaragua. For three days, a team of over 20 doctors, pharmacists, nurses and volunteers associated with Health Talents International brought medical attention to the poverty-ridden people of Managua.

The needs were great. Conditions such as parasites, infections and malnutrition drove almost 1200 people to wait in lines for 8 hours a day.

The weather was hot. The showers were cold. With winds whipping over a barren parcel of land at what seemed like the ends of the earth, dirt coated everything.

Why would anyone spend a week of their life in such conditions? For me, I found three benefits.

It elevates my vision. In a culture the massages the message of “it’s all about you” into the soul, a trip like this forces you to look beyond yourself. You see needs more clearly, blessings more thankfully, and others more compassionately. As a pampered American, I need to become less spiritually nearsighted.

It sharpens my wits. The enemy of mental sharpness is the dullness of routine. I, like most people, follow a mindless regimen. Seldom do I get jarred out of my mental lethargy. I just don’t have to think. Nicaragua forces a different diet, enduring cold showers, and long days of doing something besides working in an office behind a computer. The long days of helping people who are hurting shifts my mind into high gear. I come back able to think expansively and with clarity.

It enlarges my circle. Everyone who goes on the trip is a volunteer. The take vacations to give to others. Eating together, working together, praying together, and talking together provides something most people lose–perspective. When I return from Nicaragua, I have had the pleasure of getting to know people whose heart makes my heart purer.

As the team was breaking up on the trip home, we all expressed a similar thought. The trip was not fun (in the way a vacation is) but it is rewarding. That is what gives purpose to the difficulties.

I am grateful to those who went and for the changes I experience.