Beyond the blog

I have been blogging for about three years now. I have had some ups and downs but have kept posting but unfortunately I have not been able to sustain the time needed to look at other blogs around.  In the meantime, a lot has happened.   I try to stay up with facebook and am barely on twitter.  Nice picture above despair.com. Well, tonight, thanks to Brian Solis I have been exposed to an entire new world out there.

Brian has created the conversation prism, a graphic display of what is happening out there and how it might be utilized.   Here is a link to a clickable version in which you can see what is actually said. Someone else explains, Each category around the “wheel” represents a different type of conversation.

Although Brian’s objective seems focused on the economic importance of understanding what is happening in the social media, there are many things he is saying to which we as Christians need to pay attention! Here are a few gems, I gleaned from some of Brian’s posts.  Bold print is my own.

From one post

Perhaps most importantly, the process of listening and observing will reveal the cultures of the very communities you may wish to engage.

This is about creating and cultivating relationships with people, online and in the real world, and these relationships are defined by mutual value and benefits.

In the social economy, relationships are the new currency.

And another

Conversations are slowly migrating away from blogs and moving to micro social networks such as Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, FriendFeed, and now, Shyftr

Furthermore, new micro networks and content aggregators are allowing for comments directly in the aggregated flow or stream, which don’t make it back to the original post. And, that’s exactly where we need innovation. New tools and services that connect those comments back to the source will help create a manageable universe where people orbit the point of origin instead of creating a series of disparate galaxies of conversations around the same idea. But, I guess that’s the evolution that we need to acknowledge, the point of origin is relative to the reader and where they discover the content, not necessarily where we publish it.

And finally

As Social Media evolves, the value of online conversations is becoming distributed and decentralized. As the host of any given conversation, it is almost impossible to expect your community to discover or congregate around your content in any one given place, especially the point of origin. It’s both the challenge and the promise of micromedia and social networks. The comments section of your blog, for example may not truly represent the community response or reaction because it may thrive across other disparate networks and communities, whether you’re aware of it or not.

Indeed, conversations are no longer relegated to blogs. Nor are they limited to any one community. Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, et al, are not only online neighborhoods (or trendy tools), but they are also forums where your contacts may choose to share their reaction and thoughts directly with you instead of immortalizing those thoughts in the comments section of your blog. Conversations are not only adding layers to the original topic, they’re also more visible and influential than ever before.

Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: in to the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is most social

The best conversationalists are also the best listeners. Conversations are distributed and the tools for finding them are available and increase in functionality every week. It requires a proactive approach to find them, for they may not necessarily find you.

On being different

Here is a fun slideshow

Parents as sculptors of our children’s brains

Several of our speakers last week tried to help us understand what is happening in the brain during various emotional interactions.  One part of the brain, the amygdala was called “fear central,” I suppose since that is the part that regulates emotions.  Another described how anger takes over during “amygdala hijacking.”  Just read an article in which a less than fully functioning amygdala led to poor impulse control.

The interesting point–there may be a link between a less developed amygdala and those who do not have two care givers in the home.  Love actually makes a difference in our neurological development!  I am sure this will not go well in some circles!  The problem–tests were done on small rodents called degus.    The article quotes the scientests,

Of course, the frontal cortex—where thinking and decision-making take place—is more complex in humans than it is in other animals. Thus, says Dr. Braun, it is important to be “really careful” about extrapolating the recent findings to human populations.

“The minute you get into stuff with extensive social and environmental components, the social differences between humans and animals are massive,” says Simon Chapple, a senior economist in the social policy division of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the 30-country grouping of the world’s largest economies.

It remains an “open verdict” whether single parenthood causes these bad outcomes, or is merely associated with them, says Dr. Chapple.

But the bottom line

“The bottom line, says Dr. Braun, is that parents need to fuel their children’s brains with talk, touch and sensitive stimulation that involves give and take.”

Parents, she says, “are the sculptors of their children’s brains.”

Living in the presence of one another

As Typhoon Santi is soon to make landfall in the Philippines coast on this all-saints weekend, our staff have headed home early to beat the weather and traffic.   The ferries (to Mindoro) have stopped running as of this 6 a.m. morning due to a signal two (out of four) being in effect although there were no winds yet blowing.   Pray for our team members previously affected by Typhoon Ondoy back a month ago–before most of us never thought too much about typhoons coming but now, we are paying attention.  Hopefully, there will not be a re-traumatizing of many in the city on this weekend when the cemeteries are full of people grieving and remembering their loved ones.  Here is a little about the day of the dead and a video link as well if you are interested

A friend pointed me to the following reflection by Dr. Melba Maggay on her experience during Ondoy.  Following is an excerpt from which I picked the title of this post.  Ate Melba speaks with a prophetic voice to the issues of our day and when she speaks or writes, I listen.  I think you will enjoy (and perhaps squirm a little?) as you read her full comments.

“I asked God what all this means for me. So far, the one thing clear is that I am being asked to share in the ‘fellowship of his suffering’, in that great mystery of solidarity where the sorrow and degradation of one human being is the sorrow and degradation of all. Whether we are aware of it or not, we live in the presence of one another. The presence of the vast poor among us says as much about the rest of us as the kind of government we live under.

In a small way, I now know what it must be like for those who are swept to the margins, forced to live precariously in cities with no thought nor place for them, squatting dangerously along esteros, river banks and other waterways. Comfortable people tend to see them as obstructions, clogging our life systems. The truth is that it is a horrendous scandal that so many have nowhere else to go.”

Grieving the pain of our losses

Not sure exactly what Andre Agassi was thinking when he was working on his autobiography, Open, but I wonder if there is not a grieving of his past pain going on there.  Rick Reilly writes about the new book and asks, why would a guy write about his dark (and secret) past–a sad relationship with his dad and later drug usage.

As Dr. Jenny Pak said at our counseling and member care conference last week, “It takes a lot of energy to repress our pain.”  I am grateful for the God-given insight about some personal pain I have been repressing and for which I need to grieve. During our conference, I learned that it is necessary for us to grieve when we have lost people (or things) to which we were attached.  I guess the idea is that the pain has to go somewhere!

If I heard correctly, in grief work, we sit with the pain of our losses (feeling abandoned or rejected , not being loved the way we wanted or needed etc.) and after a period of time, we are able to let go.   To quote Dr. Pak again, “Emotions are a package—dampening the ability to grieve will prevent us from fully experiencing the other emotions.”

Of course, most of us don’t need to write books to grieve our losses like Andre (if indeed that is what he is doing) or post blogs about our losses (??) but it does seem that we will likely need others to walk with us on this grief journey. I know I think I do!

Theological Ignorance

When I see things like this, I feel shame that I might be connected with them and anger at their ignorance!  What foolishness. Thanks to Michael Hyatts blog.

Almost as bad as the sermon about why men should stand to pee!

Why we need humility in leadership

Fascinating post by Michael Hyatt about a lecture he heard from Malcolm Gladwell, titled, “The Mistakes Experts Make.”   Hyatt says that Gladwell used the battle of Chancelorsville in the American Civil War, as his illustration of how overconfidence (and a corresponding lack of humility) can bring about devastating consequences.  The picture above is of the battlefield. I assume from the same lecture of Gladwell, that Hyatt shares the following three ways leaders can avoid becoming overly confident

1. Listen to those around us. We cannot afford to create a culture that is not safe for dissent. Our people need to feel the freedom to disagree with us and tell us the truth.
2. Plan for contingencies. We might be right. We might be wrong. We need to accept this and create a plan A and a plan B. We can’t afford to assume that our plans are infallible.
3. Enlist the help of our team. . . . When the organization gets bigger than about 150 people (according to Gladwell) our leadership has to change. It must become a more collective, collaborative effort.

Final question from Michael Hyatt: What specific actions are you taking to remain humble as a leader?

Narcissistic Leaders

Mark Steyn writes about the narcissism of President Obama and the aftermath of his UN speech in which he preceded another President. Wonder what he wrote after Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize?

Looking forward to a lecture and discussion on narcissistic leaders later in the week.  Will write more then!

Flying in Thailand

Today and tomorrow are much needed breaks from our conference.  Here are a few pics of us flying with the gibbon in the rain forest canopy.

Counseling and member care: Days 5 and 6

Here are a few statements or notes from these days that made an impact on me.  Quite a range of topics!  This does not include our two hour group time and then the two hours I met with a counselor each evening.

1. God legitimizes the defenses for man by providing the skins in the garden instead of the fig leaves.  We need defenses to survive.
2. Jesus picture of repentance (in Luke 15) is deeply emotional and psychological.
3. Repentance in the way of Jesus: The awareness of being lost is the acceptance of being found.
4. We don’t need to fear the awareness how lost we are. Acceptance of being found flows into gratitude.
5. We all are who we are becoming.
6. The past was alive in the present.
7. “You must be like God.  You don’t compromise but you are so kind.” Quote made to a counselor
8. “I’d be happy to answer that if it would be helpful but I think it would be more helpful for you to answer.”
9. You can only change emotion with emotion.

10.  By bringing people into contact with emotions they have avoided—we are asking people to touch their pain

11.  People may want to avoid their emotional pain but relationships will bring it out sooner or later.

12.  You can’t mourn the loss unless you have experienced the pain of the loss.

13.  We are wired to be sad when there is a loss and if we do st to inhibit that sadness, problems are created.

14.  Hostile anger—upsets our plans, wants others to suffer, seeks revenge, expressed in disgust or contempt.

15.  We tend to deny anger when there is sin involved and/or we feel unsafe to express anger.

16.  Unexpressed or unresolved anger can be expressed as self-loathing.

17.  If you can own anger, then there is a place for compassion. Empathy and responsiveness allow you to be with someone you may not particularly like.

18.  Endurance means community, recognizing the pain of loss and that my story is not over.

19.  Top trauma reported from a group of MKs meeting on re-entry physical/sexual/verbal abuse.

20.  Be careful to not minimize trauma of others.

21.  Children are good observers but not good interpreters of trauma.

22.  Don’t know the cause and effect between biological and emotional components of depression but we do know they are inter-related.

23.  Depression alters the way we see and think about the world—there is a negative view of the self, a negative evaluation of experience and a negative view of the future.

24.  Unprocessed trauma and emotion (coming from divorce, abuse, suicide etc.) becomes like the gopher popping up game.  You have no control when it is going to pop up.  Unprocessed emotion is UNSTABLE!

Member Care and Counseling: Days 3 and 4

Attending this conference with about 50 other missionary types, all of us involved to some degree in missionary member care along with staff and friends from the Narramore Foundation.  Thanks Bruce for making this happen.  A few key points from days 3 and 4

Jenny Pak gave a powerful testimony on generational transference at the cultural level

1. She talked about her journey of being a female in a male world of being a minority in a white world (she is a 1.5 Korean American). Her book: Korean American Women: Stories of Acculturation and Changing Selves (Studies in Asian Americans : Reconceptualizing Culture, History, Politics) by Jenny Hyun Pak
2. Her model of sanctification is one in which Christ brings a greater fullness of the self rather than the pressure of a gradual erasure of the self which she felt from her cultural background
3. Quoting John 15 and “Apart from me you can do nothing”, she said sanctification is all about utter dependence!

Bruce Narramore challenged us in a lecture about the emotional life of Jesus

1. He noted that the most frequent emotion of Jesus was compassion which should free us since, “our capacity to love may be limited but we are able to have compassion to those we don’t know.”
2. To become more like Christ means experiencing emotions like Jesus.
3. Grief and mourning are two of the most ignored or avoided emotions by Christians. We may try to fix things for people because we are uncomfortable with their pain. Remember, Jesus was the “Man of Sorrows.”
4. Emotional healthy people have a range of emotions, a flexible emotional life, are in touch with their emotions and don’t get stuck in certain emotions
5. You don’t get closer to God by avoiding a specific sin.
6. We have a tendency to depend on grace for salvation but on law for sanctification,

John and Becky Leverington gave a sobering message on child protection

10.  “The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.” Bonhoeffer

11.  Children’s safety is everyone’s responsibility

12.  We can decrease risk of child abuse by avoiding isolation, ensuring accountability and balancing power and control.

13.  Jenny Pak led us through a fun exercise in which we pictorialized our emotions using a cut and paste exercise using the following colors: Red for angry; yellow for happy; blue for sad; green for shame; white for fear.  Revealing!

Bruce Narramore provided some solid teaching on basic counseling skills

14.  In supportive counseling we are trying to reduce symptoms not deal with causes.  He gave us a number of practical ways to do this since this is the type of care that most of us will be giving.

15.  Re-educative counseling is designed to promote an increased insight and understanding; change patterns of thinking and feeling.  A key tool to be used here is mirroring—to help people feel connected without using words or giving advice.  A quote he gave us from? “I just hope my patients hear beneath my words.”

16.  It is better to be quiet and though a fool rather than speak up and confirm all doubt

17.  Some images to help with skills: safe professional friend; window-opener; fig leaves; Hound of Heaven; emotional waste basket

More from Jenny Pak on East vs West

18.  Biculturalism is like being in a no-mans land—two values that are clashing all the time.

19.  We are motivated in the west by whatever gets me going–my passions, my internal needs and feelings and so we are likely to be vocal about what we want to do. In contrast, in the  east, they are taught to be restrained and to focus on what the family or organization needs; to make decisions on what will bring security for family.

Member Care and Counseling:Lessons learned from Days 1 and 2

Attending a Counseling and Member Care workshop here in Chiang Mai sponsored by the Narramore Foundation.  Just went through my notes from our half day yesterday and today and here are some lessons that stand out for me.   This afternoon, we talked about our Taylor Johnson profile and I think there are some things that come out of that for me over the next 10+ days.  Statements/quotes are from various lectures, stories and comments:

1. Member Care is the nervous system of an organization
2. A suggested training model—to build community: Get to know Jesus as good as you can. Get to know yourself as well as you can. Get to know someone else who can help you do both.
3. Leaders have higher responsibility and less support.
4. Member care givers are bi-cultural brokers—bridging missionary and church cultures
5. When you face what is unknown, dangerous, or uncomfortable, how does your faith help?
6. Work out Rom 12:12  Be joyful in hope, Patient in Suffering, Persevering in Prayer
7. What are our assumptions about human nature?
8. The debate is not between bible and psychology but betw two competing theologies—do we  believe that general revelation is valuable
9. God is creator and sustainer of all; He uses natural and supernatural events; uses a process and crisis events; is relational and feeling; is holy and just but also longsuffering and forgiving
10. Member care is always a rear-guard action in missions
11. Sin is much more complex than we make it; we tend to treat sin as superficial rather than seeing sin as “ingrained in the fabric of life”. We are both sinful and live with sinful people. We sin and are sinned against; both need to be dealt with.
12. We find ways to cope and manage pain but these coping ways can cause more problems later.
13. “Neurotic suffering is a substitute for real pain.” Jung
14. All defense mechanisms deny, distort or avoid reality and yet the truth will set us free!
15. Fear or shame underly defense mechanisms.
16. The degree to which the environment is safe is the degree to which we release our defenses.
17. We should be safe enough so that people will feel they are able to put their defenses down and we can have a dialogue
18. Emotion is the language of relationship
19. What more likely derails missionaries is not what they know but their emotional competence.
20. “The only way out is through”
21. Emotions help you survive. They provide us with information about what we need. Emotions give us feedback, in how we are doing and what we need to do.
22. Emotions are not always to be acted upon but always need to be attended.
23. The primary dynamic in abusive males is shame.
24. Empathy—capacity to discern feelings is composed of: Knowing–attending; Feeling–attunement; Responding compassionately or responding
25. It takes humility to receive care.
26. Attachments are based on safety, security, availability, responsiveness.
27. Rejection is the most fundamental emotion—often comes from fear of abandonment
28. Sanctification comes in relationships of love over time
29. Law of the farm—you can’t hurry up the harvest.
30. Books to read: Addictive Organization by Schaef  to learn about how to bring support to leader; How do talk so kids will listen and how to listen so kids will talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
31. Questions I need to answer: What behaviors did I/do I use to cope with fears? How did I deal with the pain? With whom do I share my insecurities and fears? Which defense strategies or coping mechanisms do I use to deal with pain?

How do underdogs win?

An underdog is a “participant in a fight, conflict, or game who is not expected to win”

If you like sports, history, technology and Bible stories, you might want to read the fascinating article, How David Beats Goliath, in the New Yorker on May 11, 2009. Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point and Outliers fame) explains how it is possible that underdogs can win against overwhelming odds.

The key is that underdogs must acknowledge their weakness and choose an unconventional strategy. Gladwell cited the research by Arreguin-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2005) with the following comment, “When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.” Underdogs must “challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought.”

In a review of Arreguin-Toft’s book, Michael A. Jensen in International Studies Review (2006) provides one conclusion from Arreguin-Toft about the use of indirect versus direct strategies.  “Indirect strategies seek to destroy an opponent’s will to continue fighting through tactics such as barbarism (the systematic targeting of noncombatants), guerilla warfare, terrorism, conciliation, or nonviolence.”

Gladwell weaves throughout his article, the story of how an inexperienced girl’s basketball team with an inexperienced coach ends up in the final championship game of their league.  How did they do it?  They decided that their team “would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time.”

In a similar way, you learn how David beat Goliath by using an unconventional strategy.

I wonder if there is something here for those of us in cross-cultural or counter-cultural ministry?

Keep on asking those questions!

Here is an article that encourages my inquisitive side!!

From How Do Innovators Think in Harvard Business Review, September 28, 2009, by Bronwyn Fryer in an interview with Professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of Insead.  Found this in Kruse Kronicles.

The following are the top five most discovery skills that creative executives possess:

1. “associating.” It’s a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas.
2. questioning — an ability to ask “what if”, “why”, and “why not” questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture.
3. ability to closely observe details, particularly the details of people’s behavior.
4. ability to experiment — the people we studied are always trying on new experiences and exploring new worlds.
5. good at networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn.

Most important?

Questioning turbo-charges observing, experimenting, and networking, but questioning on its own doesn’t have a direct effect without the others. Overall, associating is the key skill because new ideas aren’t created without connecting problems or ideas in ways that they haven’t been connected before. The other behaviors are inputs that trigger associating — so they are a means of getting to a creative end.

Summary

You might summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in one word: “inquisitiveness.”

Athiesm on the rise?

I knew that the loosely defined “spirituality” was on the rise but apparently, so is athiesm. Several interesting quotes. Here is one:

“When people are ethically and financially stable, it prevents them from exploring religious options and they tend to focus on themselves and others,” he said.

Could this be the selfish gene at work?

Economics and the Christian life

First of a number of posts by Michael Kruse on how enconomics touches the Christian life. Posted on Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed.