This is the second post in a series called Commercialism and Faith, in which I will explore the relationship between the language of our culture (commercialism) and how we view and relate to God. Advertisers often play on something psychologists call Loss Aversion. Loss Aversion is an aspect of Prospect Theory, a theory that seeks to determine why people make certain decisions. Loss Aversion suggests people are more motivated to avoid losing something than they are to acquire something new. For instance, in a study done on a street in Las Vegas, passers by were given a twenty-dollar bill and then given the opportunity to double their money by betting on a single card. They could walk away with the twenty, or double their money. Most participants chose to walk away from the game, keeping the twenty-dollar bill they had just been given. But when the game was changed and the participants were given forty dollars, only to have twenty taken back a moment later and then given a chance to win back the twenty taken from them, nearly all participants decided to take the same risk and get back what they had lost. In other words, when they had something and [...]

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This is the first post in a series called Commercialism and Faith, in which I will explore the relationship between the language of our culture (commercialism) and how we view and relate to God. This series is not a knock against commercialism as much as it is an exploration of the effects of the cultural language on how we think about the world and specifically how we think about God. Commercials are simply an exchange of information about the availability of products and services. The idea of a commercial is, in my opinion, morally neutral. That said, I think you will be surprised at how much your thinking, and even your emotional well-being, is affected by advertising. The average American encounters 3000 commercial messages each day. Whether this is a radio commercial, a magazine ad, a logo on the side of a coffee cup or a billboard we pass on the highway, these images and messages are designed to cause to you think of your life as incomplete, and desire the product they are selling to make your life complete again. A standard formula used in many commercials is twofold: 1. To illicit a thought in the viewer that theirlife is not satisfactory and then 2. To convince the viewer their life could [...]

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14Feb, 2010

Last week I had the privilege of talking with Max Lucado. I was trying to make some career decisions and asked Max if I could run some things by him. He was waiting to get a root canal and for some reason was still willing (and even happy) to talk to me. I can’t imagine. Nevertheless, we talked, and I’m glad we did. One of the decisions I was in the middle of making regarded walking away from a great career opportunity because it just didn’t feel like it fit my personality. I felt like I needed to stay home and write books and not do a whole lot more. The opportunity I was declining was remarkable and it would offer me a larger platform. Max told me he’d made a similar decision years before, to stop doing a radio show because, even though it was a very good project, it just wasn’t his sweet spot. He needed to stay home and write books. It would be hard to argue he made a bad business decision. Even though he’s let go of perhaps many opportunities to expand his platform he’s remained focussed on what God has gifted him to do, [...]

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01Feb, 2010

A friend left her copy of Scientific American Mind at the house last night, and this months issue is about, well, love. Being February and all the eggheads at S/A wanted to put love under a microscope. The articles contain all sorts of data about what it takes to fall in love and maintain love. Turns out eye contact is important, for instance, and something called secret swapping and unified breathing experiments (which explains why I have a crush on everybody in my yoga class). But most interesting to me was the article on the characteristics of married couples who stay together long-term. What’s the main characteristic? It’s positivity. I spoke this past weekend at a mens conference with Bill Perkins. After the conference, Bill introduced me to his wife of some twenty years. Dr. John Sowers was there and asked what the secret to a happy marriage was, and Bill confessed that when they got married they were fairly naive, but he did say that the dominant thing he wanted in a mate was a positive attitude. Actually, the way Bill said it was “I didn’t want to be married to a melancholic” (I thought he meant a girl [...]

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Tell Your Story in 90 Seconds and win a Thousand Bucks. If you’ve read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and you (and/or your friends) have decided to tell an interesting story with your lives, make a film about it and you might win a thousand bucks. And more than that, you might just inspire others to live a better story, too. The Million Miles Short-Film Contest is based on the New-York Times bestselling book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller The Million Miles Short-Film Contest is your chance to tell a great story, or rather, your chance to tell the world about a story you or a friend told with their lives. To create a short-film, just tell us about a character that wanted something and overcame conflict to get it. Feel free to tell us about a group of characters, too. For example: I wanted to run a marathon, I trained, and I ran it. (That’s a story) A more sophisticated example: My neighbor wanted to adopt a child and went to Africa and met a child in an orphanage. They worked for two years to bring her home, and now she lives [...]

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