Strip Mining, Environmental Abuse and what you're doing to your Self

Take all the connotations that come with the term "strip mining" (and if none come to you, let me offer mine: caustic, unsustainable, polluting, careless, reckless, ruthless, inelegant, crude, unrestrained, etc...) Anyway, take all the connotations that I just asked you to adopt and consider the way we EXPLOIT ourSELVES - which is, after all, a resource in it's own right.

It's easy to go at yourself, your future and your potential in a way that is far too ruthless, far too "linear". After all, a strip mine is too straight a line between A and B. A - we need resources, B - they're in the ground so let's rip everything and anything to shreds that stands in the way. In comes the heavy machinery, the earth is cleaved open with no regard for the havoc it wreaks in the mean time. Bare, scarred landscapes of waste. Ecosystems destroyed. Rivers poisoned. The system of local life itself spent beyond a tipping point. The resources weren't extracted, they were bludgeoned into availability.

There are sustainable and unsustainable practices of extracting your personality resources. Some of us need to pull back from the very edge of who we are and live in a more sustainable zone. Have you cleaved open new pools of energy to be ripped from your core? Are you replacing resources at a rate greater than what your obligations drain? Are you bleeding unwanted side effects to tint everything a shade darker? Are you more fully alive today than last year - and will that trend continue? What are your sources of joy? Or is there only obligation, duty, deficit, running to fall behind and the relentless pursuit of "more". If it doesn't work for the systems of life around a strip mine, why would it work for the system of life around you?

A Strategy to Matter and our Ideas about our Self

I was talking with someone, yesterday, about having a strategy to matter. Think about that. Some think it’s enough just to want to matter – that it is noble enough, in itself, to be willing to take opportunities as they come. But it takes a deeper level of intention to say, “I’m going to make opportunities” or “I’m going to structure my life to make opportunities more likely”.

What could make the deepest difference in our world? I think it has something to do with how we think. One of my most insistent prayers as always been, “God: I want to mean it – really, really mean it.” Serving for the sake of serving. Loving for the sake of loving. Actually listening, period.

Take the Jesus foot washing thing, as an example. It can be easy to do it today as an opportunity to say and think to yourself, “Hey, look at me – I’m washing feet.” It “ennobles” you. It can be easy to do it for the sake of what it allows you to think about yourself.

But (and this is speculation) perhaps Jesus didn’t do it because of what it said about Him. Maybe He did it because of what it said about feet and dirt and need (they simply needed to be washed).

Remember Philippians: “He did not consider equality (with God) something to be grasped.” Which means He simply didn’t think in those terms. Wow. I wish (not that I think myself equal with God!)

Maybe the most important part of the leadership journey is when we give up our ideas of our self – maybe we get bored with them - and in their absence, we serve for the sake of serving. We replace our ideas about our self with ideas about need. Maybe, we finally, simply mean it.