Eight-year-old Dika twists around in his wheel chair, trying to hold his head up enough to get a good look at us. He smiles. By the look of the bumpy roads our team traveled to get to his house, I don’t think his wheelchair ever leaves the front porch. He pretty much stays put …
I straddle my motorcycle and give the “parkir” a 1,000 Indonesia Rupiah bill, worth about a dime in U.S. currency. A parkir’s job is to guard my motorcycle while I’m inside the store he stands in front of, and I have to pay him afterwards whether I requested his services or not. When I leave …
David McCullough’s masterful biography John Adams gives us a raw look into the relationships between the founding fathers of America.[i] John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were united in their fight to establish the new nation and were the most responsible for crafting the Declaration of Independence together. However, the two intellectual giants soon became bitter …
In my last few blog posts we’ve been looking at how vibrant community comes when members are willing to risk vulnerability and engage in healthy conflict. Last week we looked at conflict’s out-of-bounds areas, and now we’ll focus on the rules of the playing field. When to have conflict? The short answer is when …
Continue reading ‘Authentic Community: How to Have Conflict’ »
In his insighhtful book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team [i], Patrick Lencioniso outlines what causes teams to breakdown and finally either implode or explode. The first time I read this book I was in a team leader role and was discouraged to discover that we had all five dysfunctions down pretty well! Lencioniso’s thesis is the foundation for …
Continue reading ‘Authentic Community: When Not to Have Conflict’ »
What keeps our communities as deep as a casual chat in the church foyer? The problem, as my friend Mark Buckner explains, is that we have competing needs: the need to be loved and the need to be respected. It feels like I have to choose one or the other. If people really know me, …
Continue reading ‘Authentic Community: From Chit Chat to Transparency’ »
I was a bored and fidgeting six-year-old, attending a special program at our local Baptist church. My older sister sat on my left and our neighborhood friend Russell Brooks sat on my right. We stared ahead at the churchy proceedings and I asked Russell what the tank of water was in back of the stage. …
By Mike O’Quin
Facebook is so new that my spellcheck doesn’t even recognize it. Every time I type in the word “facebook,” Microsoft Word underlines it with a red squiggly to let me know it isn’t a real word. Ironically, MS Word doesn’t recognize the word “spellcheck” either, which also gets a squiggly—I guess it’s technically two words though with time I bet it will grammatically merge into one.
I’m sure newer versions of spellcheck won’t dare leave Facebook out. This social media site is so ubiquitous in our world it’s hard to imagine how we twittered our time away without it. Or is that tweeted away our time? John Piper said of these social medial phenomenons, “One of the great uses of Twitter and Facebook will be to prove at the Last Day that prayerlessness was not from lack of time.” Ouch.
There is a much older version of Facebook. The ancient Scriptures liken themselves to a mirror that a man holds up to his face. The apostle James uses this analogy.
When I was in my pre-teens, the pop group Air Supply was burning up the American charts with their string of love ballads. I remember listening to their albums (the black vinyl kind, before CD’s) in my big sister’s room and I thought she was so lucky to get to go to their concert when they came to town. She went with her boyfriend and they probably waved a lighter in the air along with thousands of fans while the Australian duo sang “All Out of Love” and “Here I Am (just when I thought I was over you).” I didn’t get to go. I was too young.
I’m not too young now. I turn 40 today. And on this monumental day