leadership

I have had leadership on the brain recently.

That, in combination with an addiction to Band of Brothers, courtesy of my husband, has me contemplating what makes a good leader. Really.

"The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function."
- Lieutenant Spiers

In war, the good leaders are easy to find. For the most part, they're the ones who aren't getting themselves and their men killed. In the church, death is less obvious. We're living, breathing, praying, preaching but are we on the offense or are we on the defense? Have we lost our vision? Do we know what we're fighting? Or why we're fighting?

Or who?

Are we, each of us alone, digging foxholes with our bare hands out of fear, unaware that we've torn off all our fingernails?

President Roosevelt, who faced an America similar to President Obama's, stated:
"Without leadership alert and sensitive to change we are bogged up or lose our way." (from here)

To be alert and sensitive to change requires me to look beyond my own circumstances long enough to realize someone else's. It requires me to look beyond my present long enough to realize the future. It requires me to live beyond myself. Leadership is an end to me.

"To save a life, you must take responsibility for it." - Defiance

gotham

Jo: "It seems like the city just pisses you off."
Michah: "Nah, I love the city. I hate the city but I love the city."
- Medicine for Melencholy

Bruce Wayne: "Gotham isn't beyond saving."
- Batman Begins

"Hello city,
You've found an enemy in me
Hello city, hello city."
- Barenaked Ladies, Hello City

I dig my toes into the cool sand of Chuam Beach, South Korea. It is my birthday. I am 25 years old. I took this weekend trip, by myself, because I felt, at 25, there was no one on the planet that could celebrate my quarter-century milestone better than myself. And Jesus. I packed, took a train, to a bus, hailed a taxi, and rented a minbok by the shore.

The pre-summer weather isn't conducive to sunbathing but, then, I'm not here for a tan. I'm looking for a sign. While my year teaching ESL has been marked with singlehood, footloose and fancy freedom, I'm digging into the future with as much focus as my toes dig the sand.

A Korean family - uppa, umma, harboji, halmoni*, and the prescribed two children - dawdle along the shoreline in front of where I sit. The father and mother snap multiple digital photos. The grandma helps one of the children find and collect shells. The other child runs in front of the pack marking a crazed path of small footprints.

"Don't you want a home?" Jesus, my birthday buddy, asks me. "Don't you want to know the people, the streets, the weather, the language? Don't you want to raise your children next to your parents?"

And right then, in June 2005, I knew I did. I went home to virtually nothing. No assets, no romantic prospects, and hardly any friendships that had sustained my global wanderlust. I went home because, "it's not good to go far from your native village; then you you forget who you are". (A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry)

* "father, mother, grandpa, grandma"

is love alive?

My handsome husband posted this recently - a beautiful poem written for President Obama's inauguration.

This January has so much to hope for. Hope for a revived economy, hope for a new presidency, hope for spring, hope for change. In past Januarys, I've written about this feeling of change but there hasn't been a January where I've felt such a need for love.

When our bank accounts are scant, when the weather reaches -25 with the windchill, when there are few roadsigns directing us into February, March, 2010, the rest of our lives... We need love, "love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance."

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.
(1 John 4:16)

Learning to live loved.
- William P. Young, The Shack

"Have you loved well?"
- Chris Dupré

This is my winter song to you
The storm is coming soon
It rolls in from the sea

My voice, a beacon in the night
My words will be your light
To carry you to me

Is love alive?
Is love alive?
Is love...

They say that things just cannot grow
Beneath the winter snow
Or so I have been told

They say we're buried far
Just like a distant star
I simply cannot hold

Is love alive?
Is love alive?
Is love alive?

This is my winter song
December never felt so wrong
'Cause you're not where you belong
Inside my arms

I still believe in summer days
The seasons always change
And life will find a way

I'll be your harvester of light
And send it out tonight
So we can start again

Is love alive?
Is love alive?
Is love alive?

This is my winter song
December never felt so wrong
'Cause you're not where you belong
Inside my arms

This is my winter song to you
The storm is coming soon
It rolls in from the sea

My love, a beacon in the night
My words will be your light
To carry you to me

Is love alive?

betty

An email sent from my brother, Simeon, to follow up a text he sent at 4:46 a.m., Saturday morning:

For those of you who have come to know and love Betty,
I'd like to send news of her passing, at 4:30 a.m.
She burnt to the f***ing ground.

Poetic, no?

__________________________________

For all those who have come to know and love Betty, my 23-year old Volvo, I am sending along word of her passing on Saturday, January 24, 4:30am. She will be greatly missed by all in Kingston and Toronto... nay, there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth over the entire world today as we mourn the passing of a legendary vehicle.

For those who have known Betty over the last year, you’ll have known the stories of her turbo blowing up north of Montreal, her oil pan leaking all over Kingston, her burnt hood in Tremblant, her colliding with several snowbanks, and lastly, her burning to the ground in my very own backyard. I was woken up by someone shouting, “YOUR CAR IS ON FIRE!!” and I knew at that moment, it was my Betty.

Pictures are attached of her last moments, and her final resting place. There are also several pictures of her glory days.

RIP Betty.

Sim

therefore

"There are times when I'm clueless.

I can not figure out what He's doing.

Now, I'll be honest with you: I haven't been in that predicament for a number of years, but it's fresh enough in my mind that I remember what it was like when I did not have a clue what He was doing.

But I could always, by choice, feed myself on what he had done.

Because I do have a brain and it does have a memory. I am able to call to mind the things that the Lord has done.

Sometimes it's a disciplined act of recalling to mind - in fact, Jeremiah in the book of Lamentations says, 'This I recall to my mind, THEREFORE have I hope.'

Bringing certain things to mind as a deliberate act is a part of the ongoing strengthening process of the people of God, no matter what happens."

- Bill Johnson, Bethel

"Hope has two beautiful daughters;
their names are Anger and Courage.
Anger at the way things are,
and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are."
– St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.)

boost, part 2

For those of you in the know...

Shameless plug for Boost and for the company I work for, Yield, who came out with this spot:

charity

Webster's Dictionary* defines charity as:

1. Benevolent goodwill toward or love of humanity.
2. a) Generosity and helpfulness especially toward the needy or suffering; also: aid given to those in need, b) An institution engaged in relief of the poor, c) Public provision for the relief of the needy.
3. a) A gift for public benevolent purposes, b) An institution (as a hospital) founded by such gift.
4. Linient judgment of others.
   

Other than a vague association with Charity Churchmouse (from the 80's "Psalty, The Singing Songbook"...anyone? anyone?), I haven't often run into this word. It seems archaic. Cheesy, even. Charity. Wasn't the art of charity lost around the turn of the coloured television?

Even so, I'd have to say that I find myself regularly practicing #1, #2 (a, b, and, indirectly, c), and #3 in its entirety. #4 is still something that I'm working on...forgive me... But isn't charity more than just "benevolent goodwill"?

In the same way that I dislike the term "hiking" and prefer "a long, meandering walk in the woods with no particular destination in mind", I wonder if I'd take to using the word "charity" if it sounded more like this:


"That's the problem with charity: you have to mean things. You have to mean things to help people. Like the time I volunteered to help out at a soup kitchen...and very nearly made it."
- Will, About a Boy

* Andrew looooves it when people quote from Webster's. Shout out to you, La!