Ministry Leaders

What creates meaning in our lives? On an even higher plane, what is the meaning of life?

Well, I’m not prepared to answer the latter question, but I am prepared to contemplate the process that creates meaning for us on a human level. Clearly our vertical connection with God and our horizontal connection with our fellow man provide the context for all meaning. After all, in the big picture, it is relationships that create and define the keys to a meaningful life. But what about the smaller picture?

How do individual moments in our lives combine to create overall meaning?

Pain shows up in many different ways. Most of us try to avoid it. Some of us learn from it. We all experience it. Pain is as much a part of reality as joy and hope. How we chose to deal with pain impacts not only our lives, but those around us. We express a certain type of reality with the phrase, “What a pain”. We also express our displeasure with a not so delicate phrase indicating where the pain is coming from, as in “What a pain in the…..”

An answer to a question without context is not only useless, but dangerous.

One of our key staff at Envoy, Dave McHenry, reminded me the other day of a maxim I’d shared with him some time ago, “An answer without context is useless.”

Failure To Engage
Part Two

So many Christian workers ignore the money component of their lives. Why is that? The general topic has concerned me for a long time. When you add the “future” issue to the dialogue, the problem becomes even more pronounced.

So I ask you, should Christians care about the future?

Small walls, big problem.

In my last blog I was lamenting the fact that so many people worry about not having “enough” for or in retirement, yet do nothing about it. It appears that there are barriers, walls to problem solution here. Let’s examine some of them.

Nobody cares? Nobody listens? The sky is falling and no one is doing anything about it. Well, perhaps this is a little histrionic, yet there is some truth. Most adults are doing little or nothing about retirement yet they worry about it. Strange. You would think that if something were bothering you, at some point you’d take some action and actually engage retirement planning.

She was sitting next to me on a flight to San Francisco. We talked about kids and education. Then I asked her this question, “What is the single thing we could do to improve our education system in the U.S.?” Her answer surprised me.

He sat straight up as I looked in on him. His black hair, tanned face and pointed beard were framed by the lid and sides of the green dumpster at the side of my office building. An 8-foot dumpster tucked into the slot between the side fence and the air conditioner unit.

How much pain do we have to endure before we connect with what is true? I’ve noticed that we humans have a way of ignoring what is true until something happens. Something happens that really gets our attention. As a matter of fact, that attention getting is often reflected in a growing sense of apprehension or fear.

I’m in Pakse, Laos. Perhaps you have never heard of it? Perhaps you heard of it recently when a Lao Airline plane crashed into the Mekong River killing a 44 people aboard.