Thursday Three For All
It’s Thursday, kiddies: the day when I roll out a few things I’ve been reading over the past week. Three of ‘em, to be exact. Enjoy. (Remember: click on the bold print to read the entire article.)
Into Iraq #2: What the News Isn’t Telling You & Why We Can’t Pretend It’s Not Happening. (via @AnnVoskamp) This may indeed be one of the most disturbing, heart wrenching, hard things I’ve ever read. But I needed to. And so do you. I don’t know exactly where we go from here, but I do know we can’t just sit.
It begins to end when the world lives what we actually are: We are sisters. We are a sisterhood. We belong to each other. We belong to the women who can’t read, we belong to the women who have been stripped of every hope, who are being sold in slave markets, whose daughters are coming back to them with ripped apart virginity. ISIS doesn’t own these women — they belong to us. They belong to the sisterhood of the world. When we live like we all belong to each other, we answer much of the longing in the world.
When we understand that we are all made in the Image of God, the Imago Dei, we stand with each other and for each other and about each other. What ends the apathy and the trafficking and the racism and the fighting everywhere — is when we start seeing the Imago Dei in everyone.
Marking Milestones. (via @robertvadams) My good friend Bob is a few years further down the road than I am, but I find myself identifying with this post in a big way. With one son finishing up his freshman year of college, another graduating from high school next week, another heading into his final year of middle school, and the princess graduating from preschool today, I’ve got a lot of feelings swirling.
When we started our parenting journey in 1981, we didn’t set out to achieve these milestones. We didn’t know what was in store for us. Milestones are reached with small, consistent achievements that, when added up over a 29-year span, equal something big.
Now fast-forward to May 23, 2015. Our youngest son, now 22, will be graduating from college. In between were another son (now 30 and married with a 2 daughters) and a daughter (married), who graduated from divinity school last year. Add it all together and you have consistent work along the way and before you know it – a milestone.
Build Great Teams By Finding Leaders Not Doers. (via @TimAStevens) My name is Danny, and I’m a doer. It took me a long time (and I’m still very much in progress) to move from doer to leader. Tim gives some great insight on why doers don’t necessarily make leaders.
I’m not saying leaders are more valuable than doers. It is not about value; it is about role. When you have limited dollars, you need every penny to count. If you hire a staff member to do something, you get forty-five to fifty hours of productive ministry done every week. But if you hire people who can multiply themselves through recruiting volunteers and building teams, you might get two hundred, four hundred, or a thousand hours of productive work done every week.
