Leadership/Followership

January 31, 2019

Year 4, Day 31 | No Comments

Section of The Last Supper, Leonardo Da Vinci

Considerable attention has been given to the nature and function of leadership, but relatively little to followership. At the end of the story, each leader is evaluated on the effectiveness of his or her follower individuals or groups. Asked to write a book on Christian leadership, I soon felt that no adequate treatment could be given to the subject without some attention to those persons being led. Followers have a mysterious relationship to leaders that make something of leaders in the followers. This makes an excellent secular study in the leadership of Washington and Lincoln, or Eisenhower whose effectiveness in the European/African theater of World War II, with the followership/leadership of some of his Generals and other officers in the… Read more

Bubbles and Bumps

January 30, 2019

Year 4, Day 30 | No Comments

Section of The Taking of Christ, Caravaggio, 1602

Scripture treats the economics of business like it treats other institutions formed by mankind, important but secondary to the personal development of the individual. Society is important, even vital, to world community, but also secondary to the development of the individual. Freedom and liberty belong to the consideration if the individual means to take responsibility for self to self, to society, and to God. This is so important that God permits his own human creation to make decision for or against the creator. There is something of mystery in it. We may not have quite grasped the importance of the self to the self, so we may make ill-advised decisions, waste our limited time span, violate our space and parents… Read more

God’s Family

January 29, 2019

Year 4, Day 29 | No Comments

We return to the consideration of the family of God. God’s children are found in both creation (physical) in the world to earth’s citizenship context which closes in death, and by adoption (spiritual) in heaven’s citizenship context opening to immortality into God’s kingdom. (Galatians 4:5) All his children maintaining eternal fellowship with him must pass through both gates, physical and spiritual. The physical ends in death, but for the spiritual there is immortality that is partly characterized by presence. That God creates is perfect, and remains perfect, unless by some factor it is betrayed, in which situation it can be redeemed by the creator. Whatever he does is not dissolved or lost, unless that created, capable of losing legacy, is… Read more

Individuality

January 28, 2019

Year 4, Day 28 | No Comments

I am unable to let go of last year’s emphasis on the one and the many. There is an individual plan for every person that includes God in earthly life, and that plan carries over into the social life of the person. I belong to the one individual (personal) with God, and I belong to the many (social) with God. I am guided by the context of intimacy with God that is not to be interpreted as a part of society, although it has much to do with my conduct and attitudes in society. Persons may lose themselves in the intimate role – aloneness with God. They may seek a life context in the earthly sojourn to nourish the effort… Read more

Awesome Wonder

January 27, 2019

Year 4, Day 27 | No Comments

Section of The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435

In several other Pages in this lengthy series, covering four college years of personal conversations between the reader and me, I have referred to sublimity, sometimes reverie that may become special for devout persons. To acknowledge that one has experienced it is to make the person open to an accusation of a kind of senility or fantasy that he or she wants to avoid, so as not to be written off in areas in which the person wants to make contribution. It is worth dealing with in this series, principally for those, perhaps few or many in number, who experience spiritual sublimity, or hear about it from the witness of another. I mention elsewhere that for a space of about… Read more

Two Graces

January 26, 2019

Year 4, Day 26 | No Comments

Section of Adoration of the Magi, artist unknown

Anyone following my oral and written rhetoric becomes aware that I believe firmly in both common and divine grace. One of the duties of Christians is to integrate the two in order to achieve holistic context for mortality and immortality, right and wrong, success and failure, truth and falsity, peace and conflict, love and hate – for one life in all matters. The factors of thought, faith and life may be extended, finding their ends in conduct that identifies the person somewhere along the double lined continuum until death, after which all meaning is in the grace of God. All this is measured somewhere in the attributes of God’s nature, beginning with the love of God for all of his… Read more

Experience In Imperfection

January 25, 2019

Year 4, Day 25 | No Comments

At this writing I am away from my home for a week, at the home of my younger daughter and her husband who are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their ministry in Coronado, California. Their schedules are extensive. I am graciously released from being entertained, so to be permitted to do what I like best to do – write to young men and women, faithful students searching life meaning in a specific value orientation that I believe to be in faithful biblical context. Another benefit of these days is that I browse through the library my hosts have built, so to revel in the ideas, ancient and modern, that have impacted (or ought to have impacted) persons as individuals and… Read more

Elderly Elders

January 24, 2019

Year 4, Day 24 | No Comments

Section of Christ and the Woman of Samaria, Benedetto Luti, 1715-20

The accent of Scripture to the world is the declaration of the redemptive story of God to mankind. This is done in a rather lengthy book we call the Bible. In declaring that story, sometimes in scenes of quiet verbal exchange, or in massive meetings to interested persons as well as concentrations to prophets and disciples, the context of that message is cast in a pattern of historical reporting. It captures life first in the personal boundaries of individuals, then with families, and finally with large society. The reader can sense the authors’ interest in birth and the individual, forward to children, youth, adults, management of life (with or without faith) in personal belief and conduct, for marriage and the… Read more

Ending Is Beginning

January 23, 2019

Year 4, Day 23 | No Comments

I was born – on this date in 1923, in Akron, Ohio. Much has happened in the intervening years, and the range of experience has been extensive. My childhood was fairly good, despite poverty, in that I had the health and energy to do things, and to be interested in relationships, physical work and formal education in seeking maturity. My father is remembered only in one event of seeing him on a day a year before he died, in 1929, of killer tuberculosis. I married in 1943, and grew in that intimate relationship for the next 57 years, enjoying my wife, our four children, and their developing families. I moved along professionally in the vocational environments of the church and… Read more

Holistic Life

January 22, 2019

Year 4, Day 22 | No Comments

Prayer may not be fully understood even by those who engage it well and often. It is best engaged when the spirit of prayer prompts the Christian. The formation of the Christian relates to an intensity of focus in meaning that identifies with the developing devotional nature of the person, a process that relates to the meaning to Nicodemus when Jesus said: Ye must be born again. It is, when in full process of orientation, a compound in the Christian’s nature that is made up of faith, righteousness, love, learning, peace, service, relationship, prayer and immortality. In that orientation, each factor is related to the others and the compound (integration) of the Christian life is cultivated in the nature of… Read more

Monthly Archives: January 2019