Nineteen: Desmond Tutu on “Hope in troubled times”

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.  If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”  – Desmond Tutu

If you could have a conversation with any one person on our planet today, who would it be?  What would you ask them?  I would have a conversation with Desmond Tutu.  To merely share the same room with him would be a dream come true.  I think I would ask him about love, faith, peace and hope.  Below he offers words of hope as only Desmond Tutu can.  It’s just over 2 minutes long.

 

Two: What to do with a good idea

“…when one looks at innovation in nature and in culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments.  Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine.  They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders.  They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete.”

- Steven Johnson “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation” page 22

Let’s say an idea hits you in the face so hard that it knocks your socks off and makes you cry for your mom.  What do you do with it?

Do you try to ignore it? 

Do you love it, keep it as your pet, put it in a box somewhere where nobody can find it?

Do you share it, put it out there across twittersephere, facebook, the church foyer, around the office, or in a conversation at a coffee shop or pub?

Instead of hiding your idea, share it!  Collaborate with others, and get different perspectives from different contexts.  Gather up and connect thoughts on your idea from friends and family, seek out those who’ve done similar things in different places and spaces and understand the process as much as you look at the results of an idea.  

Even better still, connect your idea with other ideas.

Try it.  Your good idea will no longer then dependant upon you, rather it becomes dependant upon the community of people with whom you have surrounded yourself and your idea.  It is a testiment to the importance of community and points to the brillance of collaboration.  This is where innovation begins and creativity is empowered.  As I reflect on this, it begs the question; 

Is your faith community a place in which you feel empowered to share your ideas? 

(for a compelling TED talk on this topic by Steven Johnson click here)

being a pastor: “scribbles and brokenness”

It’s one of the worst feelings!  Turning off my lapel mic, taking my seat, and realizing deep down in the depths of my gut that the sermon I just preached sucked.  I hate that it feels like a cloud of failure is meandering over my head.

I don’t know.  Sometimes it’s due to a lack of energy that sucks the jam out of the preaching event.  On some occasions it was due to sheer procrastination during the absolutely vital prep time.  Other times I just didn’t have enough prep time to “bring it” the way that I intended. 

Here was a space and place for someone to encounter a divine ‘nitty gritty’ love that was ultimately contrived by an incompetent messenger.  It’s like a missed opportunity.  That is the worst part.

“Move on” a voice whispers in my head.  The problem is that the voice full of doubt which questions if “moving on” is even possible.

Look.  I get the thing about brokenness, and how the failures of a pastor are just inevitable because pastors are people too.  I get that.  I get that God uses broken stuff and even though I may have screwed up royally in bringing a lackluster sermon, there are still ways in which God can use that kind of stuff. 

Sometimes I feel like the works I do for God are like a picture created by a toddler.  When my son was 16 months old he grabbed a few markers, his mom (my wife, just for clarity sake) took off the caps, and he proceeded to scribble on a piece of paper.  His mom gave it to me, and it was one of the most beautiful works of art I have ever seen.  So I hung it on my bulletin board in my office.  Let’s be honest, without any emotional or genealogical tie to my son the few scribbles on a piece of paper are quite insignificant and even ugly.

In my head I like to think of God taking our works, as miniscule and lackluster and broken and incomplete as they are and hanging them on a divine bulletin board beside other such works.  I am sure some surely look like Picasso, and some,  like mine look like the scribbles of a toddler.  Even though I am all the active synonyms of brokenness, I like to think that God participates with me in my works like the mother of a toddler who works with the kid who doesn’t know that he needs to take off the caps of his markers.  I like to think that God takes a look at what I do like I would look at the picture my son made.  That it is beautiful.  In a way, that is what makes failure so difficult. 

I am a pastor and I am broken.