I read an article today about how the juniors and freshman at ACU all received
new iPhone4′s at the start of the semester and how the juniors were excited about that because the original iPhones they had received 2 years ago was considered ancient technology.

Here is my thought. (did I mention that I am getting used to typing on an onscreen digital keyboard?) I remember when my family first bought our first computer. It was a big black Acer computer that could barely run a text editing application, rather play a streaming video online. And now, I’m using a screen the size of a notebook that has 100x the capability of that computer. It hasn’t even been 10 years and we consider a 2 year old device ancient technology.

If you want to comment, I’d appreciate your thoughts in what you think the future holds. Where do you think we will be in the next 5 years? Remember, finger-touch technology (iPhones, iPads, HTC EVO, etc) wasn’t available 5 years ago.

Get ready for the next 5 years, let alone the next 10 or 15, they are going to blow your mind.

Good leaders deliberately seek out and find potential leaders. Great leaders not only find them, but also equip them to be great leaders.

- John C. Maxwell

Stage One: Position Gives You a Platform

Adding value is the essence of equipping others, and you can add value in any direction: to your superiors, peers, or followers. Obviously, you have the most authority when you’re the boss. However, even if you aren’t in charge, you have immense capacity to equip others through the ideas and resources you share. When it comes to equipping, proximity matters just as much hierarchy. You’ll naturally influence those closest to you: whether you’re above or below them on the organizational chart.

Stage Two: Respect Gives You Permission

People naturally follow leaders stronger than themselves. That’s the Law of Respect. Consequently, people will dismiss your attempts to equip them until they’re able to assess whether or not they respect you. Respect is earned over time by demonstrating integrity with people and effectiveness in delivering results.

Integrity with people involves a harmony of beliefs, values, and actions. As others observe you to be hard-working, honest, and consistent, they begin to appreciate your strength of character. While they may not like you or have a connection to you at this point, at least they respect you.

Your reputation for delivering results develops daily as you carry out the assignments that come your way. If your performance is uneven-you do some tasks well, but others poorly-then others will lose respect for you. However, if you repeatedly work with excellence then your co-workers and managers will take note and begin looking to you for leadership.

Stage Three: Likeability Gives You Persuasiveness

All good equipping relationships are founded on a personal relationship. As your people get to know and like you, their desire to follow your direction grows. If they dislike you, they will not want to learn from you, and the equipping process can slow down or even stop.

To gain the goodwill your coworkers, show genuine concern for their wellbeing. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Be intentional about taking an active interest in those around you at work, and add value to them in whatever ways you can. Focus on their needs and their aspirations before seeking to advance your own interests.

One of the best ways to get to know people is to see them outside of the world where you lead them. People are usually on their guard at work. They try to be what others want them to be. By getting to know them in other settings, you can get a glimpse of who they really are. Ask questions about their life story and try to discern what motivates them. If you connect with someone’s heart, they’ll be glad to offer you their hand.

http://www.giantimpact.com/iphone/article_read/the_three_stages_of_equipping/

“For all the time we’d spent together, for all the kindness and patience Morrie had shown me when I was young, I should have dropped the phone and jumped from the car, run and held him and kissed him on the forehead hello.

Instead, I killed the engine and sunk down off the seat, as if I were looking for something.

I did what I had become best at doing: I tended to my work, even while my professor waited on his front lawn. I am not proud of this, but this is what I did.”

Sometimes in life we know the things we should do, but many of the times we do not follow through. It’s a sad ordeal and can leave one with a regretful life. Follow through with what you know and feel.

He coughed, and then regained his smile. “I’m on the last great journey here – and people want me to tell them what to pack.”

“Dying,” Morrie suddenly said, “is only one thing to be sad over, Mitch. Living unhappily is something else. So many of the people who come to visit are unhappy.” Why? “Well for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own. Most people can’t do it. They’re unhappier than me – even in my current condition.”

 

“I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving caring souls. How many people can say that?”

“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

“But it’s hard to explain, Mitch. Now that I’m suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer than I ever did before.”

View Rob Bell, Drops Like Stars on suffering.

“Silence. Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?”

“Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too – even when you’re in the dark. Even when you’re falling.”

“Everyone knows they are going to die, but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things much differently.”

“To know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That’s better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living.”

“The truth is Mitch, once you’ve learned how to die, you learn how to live.”

And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. – Luke 9:23

“Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live, but there’s one thing. The things you spend so much time on – all the work you do – might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some spiritual things. You hate that word don’t you? ‘Spiritual.’ You think it’s touchy feely stuff.”

 

“The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. It’s become quite clear to me, as I’ve been sick. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish.’”

“This is part of what family is about, not just love, but letting others know there’s someone who is watching out for them. It’s what I missed so much when my mother died – what I call your ‘spiritual security’ – knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame.”

 

“Detach yourself. Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it.”

“But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is you know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, ‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.’”

“It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”

“Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven’t found meaning. Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can’t wait until sixty-five.”

“It’s impossible for the old not to envy the young. But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that. This is your time to be in your times. I had my time to be in my thirties, and now it is time to be seventy-eight.”

“Do kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won’t be dissatisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things. On the contrary, you’ll be overwhelmed with what comes back.”

“People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running.”

“I’ve learned this much about marriage. You get tested. You find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don’t.”

“Still, there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.”

“Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. But if your surrounded by people who say ‘I want mine now,’ you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.”

“The problem is Mitch, we don’t believe we are as much alike as we are. Whites and blacks. Catholics and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.”

“Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.”

“In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive right? And the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right? But here’s the secret: in between, we need others as well.”

“Don’t let go too soon, but don’t hang on too long.”

“Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.”

“There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. These things I so regret in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do?”

 

“As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on – in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

“You no longer have what you have with that person. You want them back. You never want them to stop. But that’s part of being human. Stop, renew, stop, renew.”

 

“None of us can undo what we’ve done, or relive a life already recorded. But if Professor Morris Schwartz taught me anything at all, it was this: there is no such thing as ‘too late’ in life. He was changing until the day he said goodbye.”

I lay myself at Your feet
Asking You won’t You meet
Won’t You meet me
I cannot do it on my own
I cannot do it all alone
Here I am, oh, tonight
With my arms open wide
Won’t You come inside
Won’t You come inside, God
Come and fill this heart of mine
I’m in need of You
Of Your touch, of Your
life, of Your love
I need You
I need You

When God places a call on our lives to something, there are three different responses we can choose to make.

1. Outright rejection. Self-explanatory, you deny that there is any such call on your life and can try to run or hide from it.
2. Postponement. The last thing we usually want to declare is that there is something that is calling us to change or do something different that no one else is doing.
3. Immediate reaction, yes.

In Acts 9, starting in verse 17, it talks about Saul on his journey and mission to Demsacus to outright kill Christians and how the Lord called him to do something.

So Ananias departed and entered the house, and after laying his hands on him said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road by which you were coming, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

And immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he regained his sight, and he got up and was baptized; and he took food and was  strengthened. Now for several days he was with the disciples who were at Damascus, and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.”

All those hearing him continued to be amazed, and were saying, “Is this not he who in Jerusalem destroyed those who called on this name, and who had come here for the purpose of bringing them bound before the chief priests?”

There must be a response. When we respond, there is an effect on those around us. And when we respond to what God is calling us to, everything changes. We cannot go backwards and we cannot move forward until we respond.

So, I think the question we need to ask ourselves is that, do we see the greater picture of God’s purpose in our own lives? Do we understand the magnitude of this question and the effect it may have not only on our life journey but possibly someone else as well. And by asking this question, we can only help but ask what’s next?

The mission of 2 Pillars Church is to reach the unreached for Christ and transform the city of Lincoln by loving God and loving people. This video helps cast the vision for this new gospel-centered, missionally-focused church in the downtown heart of Lincoln, Nebraska.

If you live in Lincoln, Nebraska, I want to encourage you to get in contact with Todd Bumgarner. E-mail him at toddbumgarner AT gmail DOT com  AND checkout their blog as well: project2pillars.com.

Jesus is standing in front of the temple in Jerusalem
the massive gleaming brick and stone and gold house of God
and he says destroy this temple
and I’ll rebuild it in three days
the people listening to him said how are you going to do that?
it took 46 years to build this temple!
but he wasn’t talking about that temple
he’s t…alking about himself
he essentially says, listen
I’m going to be killed
that’s where this is headed
because you don’t confront corrupt systems of power
without paying for it
sometimes with your own blood
and so he’s headed to his execution
if you had witnessed this divine life extinguished on a cross
how would you not be overwhelmed with despair?
is the world ultimately a cold, hard, dead place?
does death have the last word?
is it truly, honestly, actually dark
and so whatever light we do see
whatever good we do stumble upon
are those just blips on the radar?
momentary interruptions in an otherwise meaningless existence?
because if that’s the case then despair is the
only reasonable response
it’s easy to be cynical
but Jesus says destroy this temple and I’ll rebuild it
he insists that his execution would not be the end
he’s talking about something new and unexpected
happening after his death
he’s talking about resurrection
resurrection announces that God has not given up on the world
because this world matters
this world that we call home
dirt and blood and sweat and skin and light and water
this world that God is redeeming and restoring and renewing
greed and violence and abuse they are not right
and they cannot last
they belong to death and death does not belong
resurrection says that what we do with our lives matters
in this body
the one that we inhabit right now
every act of compassion matters
every work of art that celebrates the good and the true matters
every fair and honest act of business and trade
every kind word
they all belong and they will all go on in God’s good world
nothing will be forgotten
nothing will be wasted
it all has it’s place
everybody believes something
everybody believes somebody
Jesus invites us to trust resurrection
that every glimmer of good
every hint of hope
every impulse that elevates the soul
is a sign, a taste, a glimpse
of how things actually are
and how things will ultimately be
resurrection affirms this life and the next
as a seamless reality
embraced
graced
and saved by God
there is an unexpected mysterious presence
who meets each of us in our lowest moments
when we have no strength when we have nothing left
and we can’t go on we hear the voice that speaks those
words
destroy this temple and I’ll rebuild it
do you believe this?
that’s the question Jesus asked then
and that’s the question he asks now
Jesus’ friends arrive at his tomb and they’re told
he isn’t here
you didn’t see that coming, did you?
he’s isn’t here
there is nothing to fear
and nothing can ever be the same again
we are living in a world in the midst of rescue
with endless unexpected possibilities
they will take my life and I will die Jesus says
but that will not be the end
and when you find yourself assuming that it’s over
when it’s lost, gone, broken and it could never be
put back together again,
when it’s been destroyed and you swear that it could never
be rebuilt
hold on a minute
because in that moment
things will in fact have just begun

We’ve Heard It All Before