Falling Back Through Ourselves

Office Space is one of those deeply gratifying stories where the main character lives out all the things you’ve felt but are afraid to act on. He quits his job without leaving it, and makes a whole movie out of breaking all his own rules with reckless abandon. I think it speaks to the frustration we all feel as we not only ‘run to stand still’ but seemingly ‘run to fall behind slowly’. Is there another way?

The words of Jesus echo from the past with his talk of an inside out, upside down and backward way of doing things. The greatest must become the least, the first will be last and you must live to give instead of get. All His teachings in that direction feel poetic but do any of us really think you can climb further up by letting yourself fall backwards?

Pan’s Labrynth is the story of a lost princess who’s only way home is by proving she still is the princess she once was. It’s an interesting statement – that you don’t prove you are a princess by sitting on a throne but by deserving to. She’s given three challenges as a test of her virtue – not so that she can pass the three challenges, but to see if she will choose to fail them for the right reasons. At the climax of the story she’s forced to choose between her way home and the harming of an innocent. Only after she gives up on her only hope for herself does she realize she has passed the true test. Only a princess would rather die than harm an innocent.

I think we face a similar challenge. Born to wealth and privilege (in global terms), we are the princes and princesses of planet earth. We live in palace North America. A whole planet dreams of the opportunities we don’t even notice any more. Just consider all the things you thought you’d do if you suddenly became fabulously wealthy. Now turn around and realize that compared to the vast majority of everyone else alive, you already are. Will you now do what you always thought you would?

Will you do as Pan’s princess did? Will you fall backward through wealth and privilege and give it up for the benefit of someone else? Or will you continue to claw your way forward in the never ending quest for more?

According to Jesus, one of the greatest lifestyle challenges is that you grow to the place where you put a towel around your waist and willingly touch the dirtiest part of someone else’s life in the posture of a servant. It’s what Jesus did when He washed His disciples' feet. Stunning. God washing feet. What a radical view of royalty.

My career has put me in contact with all kinds of market place leaders, thinkers, influencers and those in prominent positions. The most compelling examples are always those who could wrap themselves in privilege but choose not to. The most compelling examples are always those who have status but are not conscious of it. They fall backwards through privilege and land in the place of sacrifice. They’ve given me a more compelling thing to aim at and I aim at it every day.
Before you ever see the throne which awaits you, the God of endless love and wonder wants to give you a chance to deserve some part of it. It’s His hope that your life will tell His story. Not one of sloppy grace where you just ‘got lucky’. But a more difficult grace which allows you to get up and start to make great choices for yourself and discover your true identity through courage and sacrifice. Try it. Lean back a bit – away from the normal direction of privilege, go past the point of balance and let yourself fall through it so that you land on your knees serving someone else. Who knows? It may just surprise you.

I hope you have a great week,
Chris

NASA and You

When NASA wants to send one of it’s ‘things’ into deep space (and by deep space I mean out past a few other planets or even past the edge of our own solar system), they don’t pick a straight path or even the shortest distance. Instead, they choose a path that sends their little space craft into the strong forces of gravity that surround other planets. The result is a “sling shot” effect as the satellite is pulled into orbit on one side of a planet and then fired out the other side at a much faster rate. All of this allows us to cover much more ground much more quickly because we can’t build rockets that can do the job all by themselves. I think here’s a powerful principle in there somewhere.

I think the same thing is also true of you and I as we move through our own life journey. As you read different parts of Proverbs (11:14, “There is wisdom in the counsel of many”) and Ephesians (4:15, “When we speak the truth in love” it leads to an unshakeable state), there is this sense that by listening to each other, we can create pockets of ‘strong forces’ that ‘fire’ us out the other side at an accelerated rate.

When we listen to each other, we can get pulled into a pocket of deep wisdom by building ideas that are too big for one or a few of us to figure out. When we listen to each other, we can be propelled by more than just one person’s worth of insight and that allows us to travel at an accelerated rate.

These are the ideas behind a project we launched on January 26th. A little more than 100 people came together to tell their story, sift through their collective insight and build a set of ideas about maturity that are deeper and richer than anything that could have come from just one or a few of us. The results are listed below in the form of 20 unique statements about maturity.

There are two ways you can participate in the next step. You can go through each of the 20 statements below and rank them as part of our survey. We will tabulate the results and us them to develop a 12 week teaching series which starts on March 9th. You can also interact with the material posted on our blog (http://www.uneditedspirituality.ca/wisdomlab/) if you’d like to take the process in a whole new direction. It would be great if you could do both. We’re hoping to capture the voice of a thousand people people along the way.

The New Testament is written as though something very special happens when you and I mix stories and do the work of taking each other seriously. It’s my hope that we can end up with 6 pockets of deep wisdom which pull us into an accelerated rate of living. So participate, be heard, and more importantly – be surprised at the outcome.

The following is a synthesis of the unique statements developed around the concept of maturity. From these 20 statements we hope to select 6 that will become the basis for 6 conversations on maturity.

That's where you come in. There are two questions, each containing ten of the Maturity Statements. Please read through the list, rate each statement and post your thoughts.

Click here to complete the survey.

Have a great week,

Chris

The One Thing

When you play “Mexican Train” you’re always looking for a way to arrange your dominos so that it makes the longest chain possible. It really means you’re looking for the one domino at the start which unpacks the greatest possibilities. The same is true of Scrabble: how do I build words that use as many of my letters as possible. Again, you’re looking for the starting point – which letter do I start with in order to involve as many other letters as possible?

I find myself wondering about the life equivalent of that same challenge: what one life decision do I start with in order to trigger the greatest change throughout the rest of my life. Where’s the ‘trigger’ that starts a chain reaction?

It says in Matthew 6:33 that it starts with Him (Jesus) and His ‘Kingdom’. Great. An infinite good inside an infinite personality as expressed in a Kingdom that never ends. That’s quite a first step. I need something more targeted within just ‘Him’ and His ‘Kingdom’ because either of those are big enough to consume a whole life time of thought. I need the first step toward the first step.

Here’s what I came up with based on an entry in my journal from late January 2005. It’s a single sentence I’ve been using to try to keep my thoughts focused on that first step toward the first step: “I want to find the whisper of His voice in the hurricane of my own selfishness.” Imagine. Before we change, we need to know how and what. With his voice in our ear, there’s nothing we can’t do. Just imagine. Every day, I try to make that my first step toward the first step.

Have a great week,

Chris