A Few Thoughts...

The meeting was boring.  Another attempt by management to rearrange something that would only make us less productive as we spent time on their pet project instead of focussed on our customers.  Did I mention that I was bored out of my mind.  Braking the monotony, I was thrilled as a friend shot me a text on an old Zaurus.  It was 1999 and texting was not very popular yet.  Email had just really caught on and the web was just becoming ubiquitous.  I loved the digital age and was glad to be distracted by this text. But, to my horror, the screen read “OMG DWHTGTTA!!!” What?  Did I miss something?  My first thought was that the message was garbled.  The technology was new and sometimes when email traffic passed through different servers a message could be garbled, maybe texts had a similar issues.  I did not know what to do, so I waited until the break and asked my colleague.  He condescendingly explained that the text was not garbled....

The game had gone horribly wrong.  For that matter, the whole season had been a struggle.  My nine year old daughter Kate’s soccer team were woefully bad.  They were so consistently out played by their opponents that the other teams would try to change up their formations and pass the ball so as to not run up the score (at least the classy ones would).  Her coaches were nice people doing the best they could and I appreciated their dedication to my daughter and our team, but they were not really soccer people.  Losing a soccer game is not the end of the world, but consistently watching girls you care about be beaten ten plus to zero because on goal kicks your team kicks the ball to the center and not the outside is heart wrenching to someone who is a soccer person. However, losing was not the most difficult thing.  Watching Kate become demoralized was the worst part.  In our family, we have a rule that you try and give your best... always.  It is o...

Bishop Huie is inspiring we United Methodists of the Texas Annual Conference to explore our “Why?”  Why is the United Methodist Church, the Texas Annual Conference, and our local church useful to the people of Texas and the world?  I am thrilled that we are asking what I consider to be the right question.  Bishop Huie’s compelling aspiration shares the marketing strategy of Simon Sinek.  Sinek’s insights can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA in a thought provoking TED talk that I recommend also.  This exploration of “why” can potentially be very fruitful within the church.  Answering the why question is not a new innovation in the Christian faith.   Bishop Huie is joining the great chorus of saints asking the why question of the Christian faith in each generation.   Why was essential to the formation of the early church found in the biblical witness.   As protestantism and United Methodism struggle with statist...