Foresight: Embracing Future Change for Bold Transformation
Hindsight brings insight which produces foresight. Strategic foresight professionals tell us the best predictor of the future is the past. In other words, past and present trends will continue unless something causes them to change. Humans are the perfect example: we’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing and we’ll keep getting what we’ve always gotten unless something changes. What causes us to change? It isn’t actually seeing something we want more. Psychologists tell us people change when the pain of change is diminished by the pain of staying the same. Change always feels uncomfortable, even painful. But we’ll do it when it looks preferable to what we’ve been doing…
Insight: From Disembodied Scrambling to Walking in Wisdom
Hindsight brings insight which produces foresight. Last week, we looked at how hindsight and reflection bring us important data about experiences we’ve had. Today, we’ll look at the next piece of the formula – insight – and how we can use that data to find God at work in our experiences and ourselves. When my youngest son was a teenager, our family traveled seven or eight months out of every year. Much of that time was spent hosting conferences, empowering Christians to become ready to speak. At one of these events, I walked into the staff room. As I looked around, about to comment on things that…
Hindsight: Backward Glances, Forward Progress
There was a huge, divisive problem among the first century Christians. They were arguing about how to do church. And what it meant to be a Christian. I know. Hard to believe, isn’t it? In Acts 15, gospel author Luke gives us a peek into one of the most momentous meetings of that generation’s followers of The Way (aka Christians before they were called Christians). Paul and Barnabas are sent to Jerusalem to meet with prominent leaders of the early Jesus movement gathered to solve a really serious issue – what to do about Gentiles who wanted to join The Way. Paul and Barnabas’s first instinct is one…
Advent: Reminders of Love for All
If you have attended church for any amount of time, you are familiar with John 3:16. It reminds us that God loved us so much that he sent Jesus. Not to condemn us. To save us. From sin, darkness, death, and evil. I find that tremendously reassuring this Christmas season. I especially appreciate this passage in The Message: “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely…
Reflections on Reflections
Last month, our property flooded…. again. I’d been here before. The skies open up over middle Tennessee in a deluge that simply saturates the land around our home, creating a lake out of our yard and a river over our driveway. I took immediate action. I knew from experience the devastation that comes when floodwater reaches our house and seeps into the downstairs bedrooms. As we piled sandbags creating a flood barrier, the murky sea that was lush green lawn just two days prior creeped toward us, right to the corner of the house – ugly, sludgy, dismal brown. That water filled me with dread and anxiety. A few days…
