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Each work morning I read a bit of the Bible. I don’t study it, I just read it. It’s my morning coffee and conversation with a power greater than myself. It centers me and without it I think I’d be distracted at work, distracted by a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter. This morning I was reading through Psalm 7. There’s a humble thought in the Psalm where David asks God to “trample his life to the ground and lay his soul in the dust” if he has ever screwed over a friend or an ally. David was a dramatic guy. He was a passionate leader, or at least a passionate writer (something tells me he was a bit more sober in person as passion inspires but leadership needs to be measured). Regardless, the thought occurred to me that we often need to pray against ourselves. I was taking communion a few weeks ago in Nashville, at one of my favorite churches. My friend Jim Chaffee happened to be delivering communion that day and as I stood in line to go forward, I prayed about what to pray. Literally, I asked God what He wanted me to say to Him [...]

I make a lot of decisions using intuition, which researchers are beginning to understand as more reliable, and less mystical than previously thought. Intuition is really about pattern recognition, about subconsciously picking up on conflicting patterns in a situation. One of the more discussed examples of intuitive decision making has to do with a fire chief who, shortly after entering a burning house, commanded all his men leave the house immediately without really understanding why. He said the decision came from his gut, that “something wasn’t right” and he wanted his men out of the house. That decision saved the lives of his men, as seconds after exiting the house the floor collapsed. If they’d have stayed in the house, everybody would have been killed. When interviewed about his decision, the fire chief couldn’t explain his decision logically. Some of the men under his command attributed the command to a higher force, a sort of guardian angel. But guardian angel or not, by design our brains work to protect us from making mistakes, and often we have no explanation as to why. On further investigation, several things were happening in that fire that worked to inform the fire chief’s subconscious. [...]