My fractured foot and the cold weather has provided me with plenty of time to do some things I have been wanting to do. Over the years I have made it my routine to journal quotes, quips, thoughts during sermons or lessons. As I read over my entries for 2011, I was impressed by the quality of the content. It seemed a shame to just write stuff down and never share it. So I created a new blog to post my notes. I am calling it “Pew Notes”. You can see it HERE.
Solitude and Leadership
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
By William Deresiewicz
From a lecture delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009.
We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.
What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.
Came across this in an iMonk post by Chaplain Mike earlier this year. In the past few years this has become very evident to me.
That is one of the best and truest sentences I’ve ever read: “Preaching is proclamation, God’s word revealed in Jesus, but only when it gets embedded in conversation, in a listening ear and responding tongue, does it become gospel.”
A pastor cannot do his/her job unless his/her words and actions are “embedded in conversation.” What happens on Sunday is of a piece with what happens during the week. A romantic dinner with my wife is connected organically to the life we live together when we are relating to each other as we act out our normal routines day by day—fixing, eating and cleaning up after meals, going to work, keeping house, paying bills, doing chores, relating to our children, planning our family calendar, watching television. The special occasion celebrates, fortifies, and enhances the relationship that is built in the everyday.
Without the daily work of marriage, that romantic dinner might as well be a blind date.
Unfortunately, this is how many ministers operate. They want to stand before the crowds on Sundays without walking through the neighborhoods and making visits on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There is proclamation but little conversation. They are not conversant with the lives, families, work environments, daily pressures, relational situations, and personal questions of those who hear them speak each Sunday. They may be knowledgeable about books, ideas, and overseeing programs, but how much do they know about you and me? As speakers, teachers, visionaries and motivators, they may be very good at what they do, but they cannot rightly be called pastors. “I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me…” (John 10:14).
I really delight in reading the comic strip Pickles. Very often I identify with Earl and his interactions with Opal. But today’s strip is just too close to home.
Ann and I are in Abilene for Thanksgiving. We stopped in Atoka to visit with Scott and Allison and Neyland and Turner. We also visited with Carter and Lori in Dallas. They moved there recently. We got to see their new home that is located in downtown Dallas. They are now urban dwellers.
While here in Abilene I have had some computer time and added a picture album for 2009 to this site. If you want to see 200+ pics you can click HERE.
