Facebook users shared 2,460,000 pieces of content, YouTube users uploaded 72 hours of new video, and Yelp users posted 26,380 reviews. These statistics are not per week or even per day — they are per minute.
John 1:14. So the Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have see his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son.
One of my best friends died last week. He was only 44. With his death, a piece of me will forever be gone. We knew each other for nearly 30 years. We shared life together in all that it is and all that it isn’t. We wrestled through many things and both agreed and disagreed about a lot, but we never questioned our friendship, our bond. My daughters even call him Uncle Tony. What I cherish the most about our friendship is that we made a “home in each other’s life.” We shared the mundane, the joys, and the travails in all the pits and peaks of living. I could trust his advice and criticism, and l leaned on his insight about my family, my job, and my person. He was a friend and a brother.
A few years ago, I remember surfing in Hawaii on the island of Maui. One day on that trip, I rode some of the biggest waves I’ve ever surfed. The faces were 12-16 feet with an occasional 17-18. I was not expecting the size or mass that came at me that day. Initially, the waves were powerful but not daunting. However, as the morning session progressed the waters began to churn and the line-up of waves quickly began to peak on the outside and rear their heads like giants. Several times that day as I paddled to position, flipped around with board in tow, and rode down the face of some pretty big waves, my heart raced and my body became enveloped in the pursuit and focus of the ride. It became one of the days of my years of surfing that I will never forget.
As I remember my friend and brother Tony and that day of powerful, mesmerizing surf, I am transfixed by the reality of utter engagement in the experience. Unless you knew Tony or experienced that type of surf in Maui, these stories although possibly intriguing, might just be stories on a page. Likewise, if Jesus were only to preach a message that you are loved and that he understands you but yet he never “became human and made his [literal] home among us,” I suspect it might be near impossible to believe that he can fathom your life, your feelings, your joys, your hurt. However, what I love about this verse that makes this such a mysterious and tangible draw is he did become human and journeyed just like we do. Therefore, he understands my deep anguish of my loss of Tony as well as the “stoke” I get when I surf.
Dear Lord, help us to grasp the reality that you lived on this earth with us and wrestled with this “stuff” like we did so that we can come honestly and constantly to you.
Awwww… the stuff of life. The physical draw of the tangible. The illustrious pull of the image. The lure of the secret, scandalous message. All of those are so powerful and gripping in the world of the here and now. I hate their weight and I hate how they can call like the sirens deep at sea until their song and screech pulls me in from the tip of my toes and lulls me to their hollow call. Knowing this I still dance to the hum and sway of its intoxicating rhythm; it’s a mystery to my existence. I have so much beyond all of this that wields such elegant grace and yet I tend to clamor to the noise and the clutch of rust and waste. Lead me on and beyond this while I am yet still alive and in it.
We scour books on strategy and wisdom. We plunder the streets for the latest trends and innovations that are making headlines. We pillage our brains trying to be the next guy or gal to invent that thing that everyone needs. We are all at some level looking for impact. We want to leave our mark that signifies our distinct and unique signature. We want our lives to matter.
I think the only way to leave behind an indentation that lasts, instead of that hand in a bucket of water feeling, is to be about people. If you get people to give you consent to lead them and then change them, your mark will last forever. They will tell your story until it goes viral. They will see that you understand…It’s people….It’s always people.
In an era of hyper change and hyper competition, where webbed networks level all points of control, and today’s participants abhor centralization, work and life demand a new way, a more natural way.
We must choose our path, our road and bear what we must on our own. There is no one else to bear the road taken but the one who chose it. -Abe from the movie Lincoln.
There is resolve in this. Firm, resolute resolve that puts the burden of proof and difficulty of choice on our own plate and beneath our own feet. And yet, our nature is to point fingers, lay blame, claim “victim,” or run for the hills when the travail supersedes the end, and yet we are the ones that ultimately choose what that end looks like. We bear the burden of the road. We are the ones that carve the path with our fingers and our toil and our choices that then tell the details of our story. Where we are in this sea is in large part a result of the interconnectivity of our choices along side of those of others and their place we let them play in our story. Sure we all have been dealt to some degree or another a raw deal and/or a bad hand, but what shape does it take? Do we sit back and bask in the alleged calamity or forge forward to find new fields?
What makes us all the same is that we get to mesh together the random meanderings of our circumstances and the capacity of our souls with the hope to find resolve within this freedom. We are determined to find the end, but the distinction resides in the choice and then the strength to bear what we chose.
Envy seems effortless. As we look at the “success” of our neighbor, our co-worker, best friend, cousin, parent, stranger, icon, etc. whether it be their car, house, title, “circle of friends,” or vocation, why do we so wish we were them or anybody but who or what we are? Why do we so easily slip out of our shoes on a whim and put ourselves into what we perceive their idealistic reality to be? We look over the fence and gaze, at times longingly at what they have, do, wear, drive, profess, or think only to wish we had it, or at least could have had it. Is our daily reality so heavy and arduous that it is our conundrum and therefore have our dreams become so Peter Pan like that they have morphed into our reality? Which one do we live the most in? Which one takes most of our time and imagination to make more real so that we can sup in the glory of possibility. It seems so easy to get lost in tomorrow and miss the now as we tumble through this life. Do we live like that? Do we lead like that? Are we always wishing for what is “becoming” or transpiring or “should be” so much so that we find what we do to be mundane and irrelevant? It becomes a swirling black hole when our dreams seem noble and good because they stem from our hard wire, our DNA only to find them potentially irrelevant or worse impossible because we have so discounted our daily lives.
I think life is the toil and sweat of pressing forward to our dreams while envy is a quick and easy way out. We can’t see that to find the other side of the fence we have to cross a large, barren field, scale a treacherous ravine and then meander through an uncharted valley floor before we can simply climb over the fence to the place where the grass is greener. Rather, I think the dream becomes real as we hold close to the anguish of learning and living so that we can not just see but understand what it takes to make our dreams real. Wanting what your neighbor or friend has is just a quick mental escape from the likely rough road you yourself need to define.
Putting the heart, hand and the mind together is difficult for most but natural for the artist. Actually, it’s a must. It keeps their heart beating and their soul panting and thirsting for more. An artist can see the anomaly of a vision in detail, ponder its connection to reality and then put hands to plow and make it so. It’s their core construction to do so. It’s a natural ability to plow through the doldrums of life’s barriers and banalities and create beauty within application. For the rest of us, it makes the world spin delicately and beautifully forward instead of sticking like black, murky mold to the dark, dry walls of mere results and tasks. Their idealism, their pure visioning for better things in a better world actually makes the rest of us see certain things that only the eyes of a child behold.
We live in a world that needs the artist to thrive and believe so the rest can reap the rewards of the imagination and the song of soulful struggle against the dank and heavy drudgery of living. I don’t just mean let the painters paint so we can view “things” in a gallery. Although that is rich and full of breathless endeavors, we need to see the world as our gallery full of breathless endeavors- business, non-profits, churches, school, start-ups, etc. Look at kiva.org, Tom’s Shoes, Semco, William L. Gore, Whole Foods and all the others starting things or building on things that stem from the beauty of the mind and heart with the end game to make this all better. With stories created from the apparent shackles of constraints and restrictions, they thrive in and birth innovations from being able to see around or through impossible places that the rest just see as “stop points.”The artist can rescue through creating dreams and making them real so our soulful struggle keeps spinning positively forward.
Are you “the artist” or the one that waits for “the artist” to create? Do we have to chose or are we all created equal enough to reach deep inside our well and draw out the Picasso that sits and waits for a nudge, a prod of inspiration to then go out and push through the thought of the impossible and produce a gallery for the rest to see?
I wonder why I want to do more and be more. Why do I want so much more out of life than what I have. I think in part, like Godin said, its what makes me feel alive. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/03/im-making-money-why-do-more.html.
I wrestle like hell like Jacob did with not letting go until I find the root of my design, my true hard wire. What am I here for? Why am I here? You know the questions that make you get up in the morning, keep you driving throughout the day, and then wake you up only do it all over again. I guess I “charge” it or press the edges to try and figure it out. I want to feel alive. I don’t want to lose in a world that is fervently pressing the edges of change and advancing the human soul to new peaks. We live in a world marked by the fringe and I want to make sure that I am in the front of that fringe, or at least in pace with its current flux. I want to feel alive and I think the only way to do it is to fight forward and deny the innate latency that beckons us to fail.
Leadership and the Art of Surfing 