Meditation Quote

I'm working on a non-fiction book, right now the section on Meditation, and I ran across this quote once again. It's one of my favorites. 

“It is not the bee’s touching of the flower that gathers honey, but her abiding for a time upon the flower that draws out the sweet. It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most, that will prove the choicest, sweetest, wisest and strongest Christian.”

~Thomas Brooks (1608-1680) Non-Conformist preacher-Congregational principles

God Sings

I received a little book for Christmas from a Catholic retreat center. Running with Expanding Heart, by Mary Reuter, USB, encourages us to notice things and people around us and to be aware that they are God's revelation of Himself to us. They may be divine encounters in which God will use us in someone's life, or they may be small revelations of His character and glory in His creation.

"God sings out God's love, magnificence, and extravagance through the created universe. Those who see, hear, touch, smell and taste well get to notice. They get to marvel. They get to be grateful. Wonders await us; the first violet in spring, the tiny hands and feet of a newborn baby, the ravines on the aged face of an uncle, a cool breeze at the end of a hot day . . . such gifts help us come to know by experience that the loving presence of god permeates the universe." (page9)

This morning I notice the bright sun shining through my window. It's been out for well over an hour now, the days are already getting longer. My heart leaps at the sight of it and the thought that although it's cold outside, God is faithful every day, every month, every season. His promises are true and though the darkness lasts for a night, joy comes in the morning. And Spring is just ahead.

Healing, Fermented Tea!

I'm trying something new, making kombucha tea. It's a fermented tea drink that is said to have all kinds of healing effects. We have to wait a week before taking our first taste. I can't wait.

I've studied the healing properties of fermented foods such as yogurt, keifer, miso, tofu, even saurkraut. (see my blog about the benefits of fermented foods in the archives) but this year I just started to hear about kombucha.

Here's a fun site about how to make kombucha. There are videos at the bottom.

Do you know anything about it? Have you ever tried it? Please leave a comment. I'd love to hear what you know.

Transcendence Comes to Us

This week I've been reading The Knowledge of the Holy, by A.W. Tozer, the chapter on Divine Transcendence.

Tozer says, "When we speak of God as transcendent we mean of course that He is exalted far above the created universe, so far above that human thought cannot imagine it. To think accurately about this, however, we must keep in mind that 'far above' does not here refer to physical distance from the earth but to the quality of being."

A few paragraphs later he says, "Forever God stands apart, in light unapproachable. He is as high above an archangel as above a caterpillar, for the gulf that separates the archangel from the caterpillar is  but finite, while the gulf between God and the archangel is infinite. The caterpillar and the archangel, though far removed from each other in the scale of created things, are nevertheless one in that they are alike created. They both belong in the category of that-which-is-not-God and are separated from God by infinitude itself."

What an incredible thought. This is why it's so difficult to get our minds around God, and most often we don't try. But we must try, in order to get a more right perspective. When we realize the God we're dealing with, we hesitate to approach Him . . . and we should. It should make us pause, even tremble.

"In olden days," continues Tozer, "men of faith were said to 'walk in the fear of God' and to 'serve the Lord with fear.' However intimate their communion with God, however bold their prayers, at the base of their religious life was the conception of God as awesome and dreadful. . . This fear of God was more than a natural apprehension of danger; it was a nonrational dread, an acute feeling of personal insufficiency in the presence of God the Almighty."

"Yet we console ourselves with the knowledge that it is God Himself who puts it in our hearts to seek Him and makes is possible in some measure to know Him, and He is pleased with even the feeblest effort to make Him known."

For this purpose Jesus came to earth in the lowliest human form--a baby, completely helpless, dependent on others for survival. He came to make Himself known and to become the atoning sacrifice, thus making a way for men (women and children) to commune with their Creator.

Let's take a few moments today to ponder this incredible event.

Merry Christmas! 

Dancing with the Obvious-Accidental Creative

  Today I'm borrowing a blog from Accidental Creative. Todd makes some great points and I think you'll enjoy it.

 

Accidental Creative

 

 

DANCING WITH THE OBVIOUS

Eliminating the confusion between complexity and value.

I love spending time with diverse teams of creative people because I get a bird's eye view of what's happening across the creative workplace. One thing I'm increasingly concerned about is the rising level of cynicism in creative circles (including in myself). On one hand, a healthy critical mindset can help us improve our work and learn from the mistakes of others. On the other, cynicism causes us to forfeit our sense of wonder and, perhaps worse, to worry that our work will become the target of someone else's ire. 

 

Because of this, I see many creatives struggling to avoid creating anything that seems on the surface to be too simple or obvious. In the effort to prove how accomplished they are, they over-complicate their work and include too many fringe and loosely beneficial elements. It seems to be a kind of sub-conscious effort to prove the value of their work. 

 

But we too easily confuse value with complexity. These are two exclusive concepts that are not necessarily related. The result is that we waste time and valuable creative energy spinning round and round over-complicating what should be very simple. In the end, we produce a lot of workplace dissonance.

 

Why do we do this? Why do we over-complicate our work and its deliverables? 

 

One reason is that we increasingly believe - as a culture - that what is obvious inherently lacks value. We dismiss quick insights and familiar-seeming ideas because we assume that they can't possibly be useful. Our paranoid self worries about what others will think of us if we execute such an obvious idea. Our cynical side knows exactly what we might say about someone else if they executed such an obvious idea. We worry about everything except for the value we're creating for our clients or audience, which is the very thing that we should be focusing on.
 

A second reason why I believe we ignore immediate ideas and hunches is pride. We have to prove to everyone how difficult our job is. We feel like we have to show that we are valuable by searching for that needle in the creative haystack. Deep down, we want to emerge triumphant and have others proclaim how uniquely gifted we are and how nothing would be the same without us. In our search for recognition we end up over-complicating the work and creating more work for our collaborators. Creativity requires humble curiosity, and that means - on occasion - embracing that some of the best and most creative solutions might be the most obvious.

 

Finally, I think we're loathe to embrace the obvious because it reminds us of what we already know but aren't doing. This especially relates to best practices, advice and the how of our work. When we hear advice that we've heard before, we cringe because it seems "obvious". We forget, however, that it's not what we know, it's what we do about it that matters. 

 

We can't allow the curse of familiarity - or the sense that an idea is too obvious - to rob us of potentially brilliantly simple insights. We must grasp and execute the best idea, and we need to be careful not to confuse complexity with value. (At least that's my goal in 2012. I hope you'll join me.)

My best,
Todd Henry
Accidental Creative
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Science vs Religion

"Science observes how the power of God operates, discovers a regular pattern somewhere and fixes it as a 'law.' The uniformity of god's activities in His creation enables the scientist to predict the course of natural phenomena. The trustworthiness of God's behavior in His world is the foundation of all scientific truth. Upon it the scientist rests his faith and from there he goes on to achieve great and useful things in such fields as those of navigation, chemistry, agriculture, and the medical arts.

Religion, on the other hand, goes back of nature to God. It is concerned not with the footprints of God along the paths of creation, but with the One who treads those paths. Religion is interested primarily in the One who is the source of all things, the master of every phenomenon." ~A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (chapter 12, Omnipotence).

What more is there to say?

Raise Your Expectations

To accomplish anything for God's kingdom, we must set out to do something bigger than ourselves.

Raise your expectations!

Pursue the impossible!

"Grant that we may learn to lay hold on the working of the mighty power which wrought in Christ when Thou didst raise Him from the dead and set Him at Thine own right hand in the heavenly places. Amen." ~A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, (chapter 12, Omnipotence).