Today’s quote from John Quincy Adams…
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
Category: General (page 11 of 121)
I forgot to mention this in the last post. One of these days, real soon, I’m going to be trying to clean out some of the clutter and revamp the blog. May move it, may keep it here, who knows yet?
Today has been a “clean out the clutter” day…in more than one way!
I got up this morning and went to the office to wait for a meeting, and while I was there, I just started throwing out junk that has accumulated over the last while. Just that little bit of cleaning out freed up some space in my office and made it a bit neater and more usable.
When my day started today, I had 338 feeds on Google Reader! 338! Now, I love this whole blogging thing, but I’ve come to realize lately that the value in blogging (at least for me) is actually blogging. Writing. Contributing. Not the sometimes mindless monitoring of over 300 blog feeds. Don’t get me wrong: I do find quite a bit of information that makes me go “hmmmm!” and “a-ha!” But I discovered (admitted?) that I really have gotten caught up in the whole echo chamber thing. So I cleaned out my feeds. For now, at least, I’ve pared it down to 197. That’s still a lot, and the potential for wasted time is great. But it’s manageable. The Turk may strike again before it’s over.
Finally, tonight, back at the office, I had a good, long time of praying, reading, thinking, reflecting, etc. And I got to clean out some clutter from my mind and my soul. Funny how cleaning out the clutter in one area often leads to more of the same in others.
Taking a little break from the Christmas music tonight. Got a little Camille Saint-Saëns going on, for one reason: the grandiose organ part in the final movement of the Third Symphony!
OK, make it two reasons: The organ part in the Third Symphony and the Danse bacchanale from Samson and Delilah!
Just a random collection of stuff I’m thinking about…
- My French press and Starbucks Verona make a pretty darn good combination!
- I’m speaking here Sunday. And I’m looking here for some images for my talk. Oh, and I’m real nervous about it. For a lot of reasons.
- This quote from More Space…There’s nothing so broken that it can’t be fixed.
- Trans-Siberian Orchestra Christmas.
- My buddy Gary’s “offensive” Christmas mailer.
- Tonight’s full moon. Did you know that the orbital path of tonight’s full moon will be an exact replica (or is that mirror?) of the sun on the longest day of the year?
- Linus dropped his blanket. And didn’t care. For one brief moment. Remember? (Hint: You don’t really need a security blanket when an angel tells you not to be afraid.)
- Why hospital business offices don’t get it right.
- Leadership means taking initiative.
- Rotten fish
- It’s never too early to look ahead.
- Three treasures you need to leave behind…Your library, your pictures, and your journals.
OK, that’s enough for one night. What’s occupying your thoughts tonight?
The pound cake turned out really, really good! That’s the first “real” cake I’ve ever made! A Southern Living recipe and some Alton Brown know-how…makes for good cake!
Anyway, now my favorite Christmas music of all is playing, and the Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Bars are in the oven!
The rain has stopped, the lovely and gracious “Mrs. Just Charlie” will be home in a bit, and we’re probably going to hit the early bird special for dinner!
Yes!
Featured today on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac…
C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland (1898). He said of his childhood, “I am a product …[of] books. There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloak room, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves.”
Lewis’s parents were Anglicans and took him to church as a boy, but he found religion cold and boring. He preferred pagan mythology: Irish, Norse, and Greek myths he read in storybooks. He created an imaginary country called ‘Boxen’ and wrote stories about it. He said, ‘My early stories were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures — ‘dressed animals’ and ‘knights in armour.’ As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats.’
He began teaching philosophy at Oxford, where he met J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien was a devout Christian and Lewis was an atheist, but they shared a love for mythology. They took a long walks around the Oxford grounds, debating the existence of God. Tolkien tried to persuade Lewis that the story of Jesus was a myth but that it had also actually happened.
The morning after one of those walks, Lewis went with his brother to the zoo. He said, ‘When we set out [for the zoo] I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion.’ He became the most prominent Christian apologist in the world. He recorded a series of lectures for radio, which were broadcast in England during World War II, and many people gathered around their radios to take comfort from his ideas in the midst of bombing raids. The lectures were collected into his book Mere Christianity (1952).
But he is best remembered for the seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia, which he started publishing in 1950. Lewis decided to write for children, even though he never had any children himself and had never had any strong relationships with children. He wanted to give children what he had gotten himself from fairytales when he was a child.
C.S. Lewis said, ‘You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.'”
That’s what Mississippi pastor Tony Lambert said haunts too many of our churches and leaders today.
Wow!
Lambert was speaking at THE Seminary’s Layne Lecture Series. Check this great quote…
It has never been God’s will for ministry to ever become a snapshot. No, God wants it to be a continuing, streaming video.
And this one, about leaders leading by example…
If the leader is not leading by example, then, I’m telling you, there’s going to be trouble all through the organization, whatever it is.
And that’s how my day started…what kind of day have you had?
Let me fill you in on the details…
I went to sleep on the sofa last night watching Prison Break. (What happened at the road block in Albuquerque?)
Anyway, I woke up at 4:20 a.m. today, and I noticed that I hadn’t turned off the Christmas lights on the front porch, so I opened the front door and turned off the lights. As I did, I noticed there was some guy standing in the street down at the end of our driveway. I thought it was a bit weird that somebody would be on the street at that time, but I just chalked it up to the fact that he probably had a good reason to be out and about.
I stood there and watched as he slung some sort of bag over his shoulder, got on an old bike, and pedaled noisily, but nonchalantly off down the street. I went back into the house, and since it was time to get up anyway, I went ahead and got started on my day.
The lovely and gracious “Mrs. Just Charlie” got up, got ready, and headed off to work. I didn’t even mention the guy to her, figuring it was no big deal.
An hour or so later, I started to head out for the YMCA, and when I got into my truck, I noticed the laptop bag that had been in the passenger floorboard was no longer in the passenger floorboard.
And that’s when it hit me: More than likely, it was my laptop bag the guy on the squeaky old bike had slung over his shoulder as he rode off down my street!
So, I called Cherokee County’s finest, and the officer showed up, wrote out a report, and all that jazz. (Right in the middle of writing the report, he got a call about somebody’s burglar alarm going off in our neighborhood.)
Apart from that whole “feeling violated on my own property” thing, “Mr. Squeaky Bicycle Guy” got the raw end of the deal. As I told somebody later, that computer is about two or three notches below “Piece of Crap” on the scale of notebook computers. But still, it’s a sickening and deflating feeling to start your day off with a robbery.
So that was my early morning. Hope your day has been better than that!