God is Calling!

Calling is how God reveals God’s self to people.  Calling is a Divine invitation to go on a journey to know God; to learn God’s will and to joy in God’s trustworthiness.  Calling is that urge you feel to respond to God in belief, worship and action.  When you move in the direction of your calling there is an overwhelming and mostly inexplicable sense of rightness. When we answer God’s call we become our most genuine self.  Following God’s calling on our life moves us toward truth and fulfillment like nothing else.  Before we get to our individual Callings, our first Calling is to bring glory to God’s name and  seek after God in study and service to others.  Calling is a form of God’s grace.  Calling is how God rescues us from meaningless.  In God’s Calling we get direction, healing, redemption and a Godly destiny. God is a calling God and God is calling you!

Happy Birthday Rev. King

Happy birthday Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Thank you for caring about Sanitation Workers even though you met with Presidents and received a Nobel Prize.  Thank you Dr. King for sharing God’s Dream with us when you knew all too well the nightmare of “Racism, Militarism and Poverty.”  Thank you Dr. King for preaching a Jesus big enough to include all people: Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Gentiles, young and old.  Thank you Dr. King for reminding the Church it is supposed to be a “thermostat in the world, not merely a thermometer.”   Above all Thank You Dr. King for your faith in us…that we can be better.  Happy Birthday Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Rest in Peace.

Shhhh…Be Quiet!

One of the ways we manifest our anxiety as leaders is through incessant talking.  Truth is, sometimes, we keep talking even when we’ve run out of something to say.  Maturing leadership, understands that just like in music, rests and notes are both equally important.  Notes break the silence at precisely the right time and rests divide sound into parts that are useful and beautiful.  We have to communicate.  We need to clearly articulate our expectations.  Yet, we must grow in appreciation for the growth that results from a creative, confident use of quiet.

The led leader!

To lead we must be crystal clear about what it is to follow.  To follow is to have met someone in the now or some figure of the past through whom you have better met yourself, your neighbor, God, life and the world.  I am the intellectual and spiritual child of too many leaders to name.  But, in each of them, men and women, dead or alive, I met someone so alive, so honest, so clear, so animated, so human that it gave me a star to follow.  I find as I follow those stars, I contribute to the cosmos of others.  Leadership then becomes equally as much about who I am leading as who I am following.  Leadership then becomes equally as much about bold action as it does the humility of learning.

Christmas

If Heaven has pearly gates, then Heaven is a gated community. And, if Heaven is a gated community then the world is a ghetto.  Soul Brother James Brown had to plead with Santa Claus, “Santa Claus go straight to the ghetto… fill every stocking you find.”  No one had to plead with Jesus to go straight to the ghetto.  God planted Christmas in the middle of nowhere and announced it to nobodies.  Christmas is about the downward mobility of God, for the upward mobility of the human soul. “Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till he appeared and the soul felt its worth; a thrill of hope a weary world rejoicing for yonder breaks a new glorious morn.” (from O Holy Night)

A little leaven lifts the whole lump! Galatians 5:9

A little God ordained and God inspired leadership goes a long way.  It still transforms institutions, situations and circumstances.

We need inspiration

Information is not our problem as leaders, we have more data than we’ll ever need. (Read Ed Friedman’s, Failure of Nerve)  What we need is to be inspired so that we can be inspiring.  You can’t fake inspiration.  A helicopter can’t fake flight.  People can look you in the eyes and know if you know.  In this age of information, that’s all the church can really offer people.  As we lead, as we teach, as we preach…to look people in the eye and commend a God that we have actually met.  That is what it is to lead for God.