21Apr, 2011

If you attended The Storyline Conference last year, you’ll remember Lori Ventola, our essay-contest winner who thought she’d only won a trip to Portland to attend the conference but who ended up getting a bigger surprise. Lori wrote an essay about wanting to start a tutoring program helping homeless families get their children caught up and back in school. She’d done this sort of work before, but the organization she worked with had shut down. We read through her essay and asked her to create a business plan, detailing all her needs to get the program started. We flew her out, and she was excited, hoping to learn something from the conference. At the end of the conference, though, we passed out her business plan to all the attendees and gave them each a white index card, asking them to write their name and phone number along with their profession and any other expertise Lori might be able to call them about to move forward. We also gave Lori a small check that allowed her to leave her job and start living a different story. And she’s done very well. In under a year working in Denver, she’s partnering with friends [...]

20Apr, 2011

Yesterday I blogged about a doctor who does amazing work around the world, work many would call a sacrifice, yet he referred to the work as “fun.” I also mentioned that because he did this work for fun and not out of guilt, he called himself the “opposite of an evangelical.” I think he was on to something, though. I think he looked at evangelicals and realized they weren’t joyful people, they were people motivated by shame and guilt. It’s a generalization, for sure, but it’s a generalization based on some accurate perceptions. I recommend making some changes, then. What I’m getting at is a shift that could add a lot of joy to your life.  What I am about to say is going to sound arrogant and lacking in heart. But I’d love for you to consider a few ideas: I did an interview today and was asked about how I make decisions regarding helping others. I told the interviewer if I encounter somebody in need but don’t feel like helping them, I usually don’t. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But I explained the reason I don’t is because there are plenty of people I actually do feel like [...]

19Apr, 2011

I was having lunch with an accomplished surgeon recently who told me the two words that will kill the heart fastest are the words “ought to.” The reason I was having lunch with the surgeon was because I was interviewing him for a potential book. He’s a head surgeon at a nationally renowned hospital and does an enormous amount of charity work, even advising the American military on how their hospital ships can be more efficient while being used in disaster relief. If the average doctor saves hundreds of lives in the span of their career, this guy has likely saved hundreds of thousands. When I asked why he desires to help so many people, his answer surprised me. He said “because it’s fun.” And then he went on to say “I like helping people because I enjoy it, I’m the opposite of an evangelical.” I don’t know if he knew I was a Christian, but the comment came like a curveball and I had nothing to say. I was so accustomed to the passive guilt complex so many of us hear week after week and in book after book that I knew he’d have no shortage of evidence that [...]

14Apr, 2011

To Love or be Liked?

A group of friends and I met a couple weeks ago to go through Michael Hyatt’s Life Plan E-book. We will continue to meet until each of us has created our life plan, and I’d recommend this process to any team of people, family, couple, or even individuals who want to better understand how they are wired and get some clarity on how they’d like to spend their time. My guess is I will be blogging about this process a bit more in the coming weeks. The first question we asked each other was designed to manifest our values, and to “start with the end in mind.” The question was simple: What will your funeral look like? Each of my friends is remarkably accomplished, even though they are younger than I am. And our ambitions showed in how we answered the question. We wanted people at our funerals to know we loved them, to say we were kind and gracious and our lives were about helping them. But I found something interesting amongst us, that we wanted different numbers of people to be at our funerals. I was surprised to realize I only wanted 20 or 25 people at mine. [...]

01Apr, 2011

My Review of Love Wins

I confess I read this book because of all the hoopla on the internet. John Piper hates it, Mark Driscoll wants to say how much he hates it but is tired of launching his enemies onto the New York Times bestsellers list so he talks about it without talking about it. People everywhere are talking about it. Man, I’m a sucker for controversy so I placed my order. Surprisingly, the book has been out of print for a while and I could only get this used, battered copy, and it cost me more than the sale price from twenty years ago. Two words: WORTH IT! Love Wins is a romance novel by Barbara Cartland (who knew John Piper read this stuff? So few men talk about it even though we ALL read them ALL the time! John Piper and I are SO BESTIES NOW!) Love Wins: Caught in a fierce love triangle, Joan June is torn between her dentist and her chiropractor. The dentist has more money, obviously, but is less open to the spiritual ideas and natural practices of the chiropractor. One gives her security and the other pops her back for free and introduces her to the ancient [...]