Too Busy–Give Time Away

I am really overwhelmed at this point.  I run effectively two businesses now, teach two classes, am on this years class of Leadership Cleveland, am part of a small group men’s bible study, am part of the advisory group of Christian Business Owners Fellowship, and mentor couples about to be married with my wife.  It just seems like I don’t have time to breathe.  Wah, Wah!

A few weeks back a friend from the small group men’s study asked for help in his new home.  Usual guy stuff – move furniture around, paint walls, etc.  To compound things, this guy lives a good half-hour away.  I couldn’t just drop by.  I said no, I just couldn’t.  He fortunately got help from our group as other guys stepped up.  He then asked for help again several weeks later and I said no I couldn’t then either.  Again, other guys stepped up.  Finally, we were doing a group project at a local ministry and again I said I couldn’t. 

You know if we have so little margin for other people we are probably overcommitted and I probably am.  I am going to have to make some changes to give margin.  The other thing is that I need to view service from a different perspective.  Of all things Harvard Business Review had the following podcast which I have uploaded to Soundcloud and is embedded below.  The premise if you can’t listen to it is that studies have shown that if you help people, by some miracle you have more time or seemingly more time.  How could that be?

315 Pressed for Time Give Some of Yours Away by DQuigg

Don’t each of us have 24 hours in a day?  I don’t get any more because I am special.  Yet, if we give away some of our time, we have more to get.  That is what this secular author is saying.  Yet it makes all the biblical sense in the world.  It is all about serving and helping people and somehow when that happens you have more time to spend.  God has wired us this way and when we get buried in our own agenda, we are missing out on what he wants best for us. 

I have to be reminded that I need to make time to be with and serve others.  If that happens, I believe the refreshment that comes from that will make me a better, more well rounded person.  Maybe even my work will get done regardless. 

Political Correctness - Those Were the Days

Sometimes I am just overwhelmed by the amount of political correctness that occurs today.  In the world of Twitter, Facebook, etc., the amount of conversation has increased dramatically, but so has the hyper-sensitivity.  As every word is recorded, so is it scrutinized.  It really makes people overly sanitize their statements making doubly and triply sure they have not offended anyone.

Consider GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin’s recent comments on rape.  Stupid, yes.  Misinformed, yes.  But no one truly believes that Akin believes rape is ok.  His comments were taken out of context and “gotcha politics” were quick to capitalize on his dumb statement.  I make dumb statements all the time and certainly knowing that they might be taken out of context makes me think twice.  However, is this kind of sanitization of speech what we want?  When it comes to potentially offending someone, we are hyper-sensitive. 

Do you remember this guy?

What happens when you have two outspoken racists at a party?  You get quite a show.  We cringed watching Archie Bunker, but for whatever it was worth, you got at least the words out.  It exposed him for what he was.  I think that is probably better in the long run than our PC culture sometimes today.  Do you yearn for the Harry Truman “tell it like it is” kind of guy.  I know I sometimes do.

A Game That Tests Failure

Just completed another season playing baseball.  It is still a kick playing the game that I have loved since my youth.  I got started playing baseball as an adult when Debsue sent me to Indians Fantasy Camp for my 40th birthday.  I had been playing in some pretty competitive softball leagues in the NE Ohio area.  But once I stepped foot on the hardball diamond and started playing that game again, I was hooked.  That was twelve years ago.

I play with the Kent Mudhens in the Roy Hobbs 47 and over league.  I have kind of made my way along starting in the 38 and over and then retiring from that an moving up an age group.  I also play in a 38 and over Cleveland baseball league as a part-time player for the Bay Bisons.  We play from early May through August.  We also play in late October, early November in Florida for a week. 

Baseball is a tough sport.  Kind of like golf, it tests your ability to accept failure.  By way of illustration, about three weeks ago, I had a great game on a Sunday afternoon where I hit three doubles in a game in addition to a single and a walk.  The sound of a solid hit just kind of sticks with you and I had three solid doubles in that game.  My daydreams rehearsed those hits over and over again.  Unit Tuesday that is when I played for the Bisons on Tuesday night.  They hit me cleanup and I promptly went 0 for 5 with two double plays and striking out with the bases loaded.  As if that wasn’t enough, I lost a fly ball in the lights in left field.  A truly humbling experience.

Fast forward a week to that team when we played a much better team in the playoffs.  We were tied 2-2 going into the top of the eighth (we were visitors).  We got men on 2nd and 3rd with two out and our number three hitter up (I hit cleanup again – I guess they didn’t learn enough from the previous game).  They intentionally walk our guy to face me with the bases loaded.  The drama is further enhanced because the opposing pitcher and I played as teammates for eight years.  He gets to one ball and two strikes and my instincts are just to put the ball in play, but he grooves one and I line it into the gap driving in all three runners and then I score also as the ball gets by the catcher.  So now we are up 6-2 going into the ninth.  Unfortunately, we could not hold the lead and lost 7-6.  My teammates called me the “would-be hero”. 

The following Sunday, our Mudhens team got absolutely clobbered 23-2 by a fairly mediocre team.  I had never seen us so poor.  We normally are a good team.  I crowned my performance with a 1 for 5 hitting.  My last at-bat was an embarrassing strikeout captured by my wife below.  You can hear my little groan as I miss the last pitch.

Dan strikeout from Dan Quigg on Vimeo.

I have a hard time accepting failure.  In baseball, I would fling my bat, utter a profanity here and there.  Most times my teammates didn’t hear my response, but they certainly could see my reaction.  Baseball like life tests the crucible of our inner fabric.  We all fail, but it is how we learn and respond that tests who we really are.  After a major business failure a few years back, I find I am a better person.  I am much more aware of who I am.  I also find that failure means that we take success much more in stride.  I am not in any way saying that we shouldn’t strive for success.  However, failure is really what makes us what we are. 

I found that my failure makes me more pliable, more useful to God, and more sympathetic to others.  God doesn’t shield Christ followers from failure.  He uses failure to make us better people.  Even the great hitters experience some failure.  Winners of batting titles fail 2 out of 3 times.  The game makes us good at striving for success but able to use failure to make us better.

Forty Years of Friendship

My in-laws posted this picture at their annual lobster fest.  They host this annual feast at their cottage in Northwest Indiana.  They have been friends with this group for forty years.  Through thick and thin.  Hard to get my head around that long a time.  In our transient culture, developing longstanding deep relationships is tough.  We are now in the sound bite generation.  Yet “social media” has reopened a number of relationships.  I have reconnected with my former Valparaiso fraternity big brother after many years through Facebook.  I have also reconnected with old family friends from our growing up years.

Relationships mean a lot to God.  God has wired us for this type of deep, personal relationships.  We have a group that we get together with for fellowship and bible study that we have known for nearly twenty years.  We know there is no burden that we can’t share.  The ladies get together for breakfast once a month and share each other burdens.  We know we don’t have to impress them.  They accept us as we are. 

Then there is my CLC group which has been meeting faithfully every week (14 of us men) for over a year and a half.  I love those guys.  We have ages ranging from mid 20’s to early 80’s.  When I was in my twenties and thirties, relationships really didn’t matter much to me (except immediate family relationships).  But friendships really matter to me now that I am in my mid fifties.  My kids are out of the house and while I have a great marital relationship, the extension of good friends is so important. 

Each of us has to have those kinds of friendships.  Friends that you can be truly transparent with.  Friends to bear burdens with.  We can’t be all that God intended for us to be without friends like that.

The Way of Wisdom

Our pastor Joe is teaching a series on wisdom.  This is the second of the series.  Like many of Pastor Joe’s sermons, it is incredibly insightful.  This morning’s title was the Way of Wisdom.  The four points were:

1) Know God – find a way daily to remind yourself of how great God is and how much He has done for you.  Every morning we wake up hungry looking for value.  If we don’t seek God as the source of that value, we will look for it elsewhere.  If you don’t seek that value, you will do foolish things in your own wisdom.

2) Know Yourself – Proverbs 3:5 says to “trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding”..  Every day you need to deflate yourself and not think too much of yourself.  I can never think too much of myself when the God of the universe had to sacrifice His son to save me.  Yet God thought so much of me that He did just that.  Pastor Joe made reference to this clip from Toy Story which is perfect for this point.

3) Know God’s Word – God provides the handbook, the “database of best practices” that we can use to discover Him and wisdom.

4) Trust God’s Way – Dive into God’s love knowing that He desires the absolute best for you.  Recognize that pain will be an implicit part of the process.  Pain is never thought by our children as positive but they are able to look back and see the benefit it brings.  Pain is part of the process of learning wisdom.

It’s Not Somebody Else’s Fault

In the wake of the massacre of Aurora, Colorado, people have had a chance to reflect on one of the biggest mass shootings in history.  There are stories of heroism.  Three men gave their lives while protecting their girlfriends. 
Twenty-five-year-old Jon Blunk was sitting next to his girlfriend, Jansen Young, at the midnight premiere of "The Dark Knight Rises" when the gunman opened fire in the dark theater. Blunk instinctively pushed his girlfriend to the ground and threw his body on top of hers. Blunk, a security guard, served five years in the Navy and was in the process of re-enlisting in hopes of becoming a Navy SEAL, family and friends said. He was killed in the gunfire; his girlfriend survived.  Twenty-four-year-old Alex Teves dived on top of his girlfriend, Amanda Lindgren, when the gunfire erupted. Covering her body, he took the bullets so they did not harm her. She survived the massacre; he did not.  Matt McQuinn, 27 years old, threw his body in front of his girlfriend, Samantha Yowler, as the shooting continued. Yowler survived with a gunshot wound to the knee; McQuinn's body absorbed the fatal shots. Or this 13 year old girl who tried to save the 6 year old girl she babysat for.

The thing that is bothersome to us though is the people who look to lay blame for this.  For example, the lawyer who filed an immediate lawsuit on behalf, not of one of the victims or even one of those hurt.  He blames the theater, the doctors, and Warner Bros for the shooting.  Give me a break!  I searched the web and found a preponderance of ads looking to “help” victims of the shooting.  Where there is senseless evil, there always seems to be somebody looking to profit from it.  Tragedies like this bring out the best and the worst of us.  James Holmes was troubled individual who acted ALONE!  There is a cost to the lawyers who want to “help”.

It seems that we want to always look for blame to others when we sin.  The point is that we all sin and no amount of blame can make up for that fact.  No amount of security, no amount of preventative medicine, no amount of litigation.  Our litigious society has now added a cost to the blame game that continues to cripple our country.  Do we really think that these lawyers do this out of the goodness of their heart.  I am not sure which is worse, James Holmes or the lawyers that seek to profit.  A deranged man is just that, a deranged man.  How can we protect a culture from a deranged man?  From most accounts, he acted fairly rationally and gave little clues this was going to happen.  It simmered seemingly just below the surface.  

To some level, we all are just as potentially dangerous as James Holmes.  It does not take much to act like him.  We live in a fallen, depraved world where Satan would love to have an army of James Holmes.  And it would not take much for each of us to act in similar ways.  It is not a big gap between the anger we feel and express and the anger that caused a man to shoot up a movie theatre.  That is what Jesus was saying when he says that those who insult our brother are as guilty as a murderer.

On the contrary, there are the heroes, the rays of hope who stand as evidence that there is also good that can come out of even the worst of situations.  These heroes are symbols of the ultimate sacrifice Jesus paid as he entered our fallen world. 

God is Good No Matter What

It is very easy to look at things from a human lens.  I guess that is because we are human.  Several weeks ago while we were in church, we received a distress call from our daughter who was on her way home and had a major accident on the highway near Chicago.  I won’t repeat the story – you can find it on Debbie’s blog here.  The bottom line is that our daughter by all rights based on what happened should have been killed or severely injured, but she wasn’t.  She walked away from an accident that any other time of the day or week would have been far worse.  She did not hit any other car or hurt any other person.  The car spun 360 degrees on the highway and struck the median as shown below. 

It was an act of grace.  Bethany was not hurt.  We might even say she was spared.  But we have godly friends who lost a son due to a freak accident.  Are we any more spiritual than they are?  Hardly so.  For some reason, God did not take Bethany home that night.  It was grace.  Our friends had to take years of heartache and dig deep down into their relationship with Christ to even persevere.  Their son’s faith encouraged many to come to faith likewise and the parents have also been used of God to tell their story.

I am reminded of two simple truths.  First, we live in a fallen world and as a result, Christians endure pain and suffering as much as non Christians.  In fact, Christians endure more pain because they name the name of Christ.  Secondly,  God gives grace.  He gives grace to each of us to enter into a relationship with Him through Jesus Christ.  That relationship overshadows the trouble of this life.  When God takes a Christian out of this life, there is reason to celebrate because they are home.  He also provides the grace in this life to persevere in the loss of loved ones.  Paul says whether we live or die, we are the Lords.

We can love a God who is so infinite and loving despite the circumstances of this life.  My God is not a genie in a bottle.  He is a loving Father that I can trust fully no matter what.