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Larry and the chocolate eclair

9/26/2017

Larry Crabb was on a flight from Detroit to Ft Lauderdale. He’d finished the uninspiring main meal and was looking longingly at the chocolate éclair in the corner of his meal tray. But he had a dilemma. He preferred to enjoy his sweets with coffee and the coffee trolley was still at the other end of the plane.

He had a choice. Eat the eclair and enjoy it in the moment or double the enjoyment by waiting a further 10 minutes for coffee. He chose to wait.

But, "I was chargrined to notice my hand grasping the fork and moving steadily towards the eclair." In fact Larry was two thirds of the way through his eclair when the coffee arrived, but the last third tasted amazing with a sip of coffee before and after!

Life is full of choices. There are the obvious ones … which university … what career path … who will I marry … should we take the redundancy? They are the ones that shape the direction of our life.

Then there are the choices we make everyday without much thought … Woolworths or Aldi … sourdough or five grain … mow the lawn today or leave it until tomorrow. One way or another they probably make little difference but they need to be made.

Many people are satisfied to live a comfortable life like that, choosing or not choosing, as life demands ... reacting to life rather than proactively engaging. But my choices are my responsibility. I have the opportunity to respond rather than react in my relationships and mostly those choices take courage. They are the deliberate choices of the heart.

Compassion rather than indifference … kindness and thoughtfulness instead of self-centredness … forgiveness in place of retaliation … vulnerability rather than safety.

These are the inner choices, the ones that shape my character. They are costly. They require sacrifice, and my willingness to choose the good of another over my own agenda. It is the choice to love and move towards you rather than withdrawing ... that can be scary but it's the path to deeper intimacy and richer, more honest relating.

I often hear people say, "I didn't have a choice", but there is always a choice. Not choosing is a choice and prevarication comes at a cost to you and to those around you, sometime a high price. All our choices have consequences.

Choices are an integral part of every facet of my life. They have the power to change my life and greatly impact others. I can choose to be grateful and positive about life or to have a victim mentality .... to choose an abundance mindset or the mentality of scarcity ... to choose my attitude every day.

Holocaust survivor, Viktor E. Frankl, said, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances".

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The curious thing about curiosity

9/19/2017

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I was born with an insatiable curiosity. Even now one of my favourite things is ‘not knowing’, it's the road to discovery. The best books are the books I haven’t read … the best places, the ones I’ve never visited and the maybe the best people are those I’ve yet to meet.

We are all born with the gift of curiosity. It’s the way children learn and explore their world, but somewhere along the line, through the rebuke of an adult, fear of failure or an education system that values knowledge and answers over questions and inquisitive thought, many of us stop asking.

It’s interesting that while Australia has the world’s longest period of compulsory education (11years), we are fast falling behind many countries in the world in our student’s academic abilities. Finland takes the prize for consistently topping the international ranking for education systems and students only attend school for approximately 20 hours per week. Children are encouraged to explore, discover, play and learn from their natural curiosity. Finland has a mandatory 15-minute outdoor free-play break every hour of every day.

One parent asked his son what he did for gym that day. "They sent us into the woods with a map and compass and we had to find our way out," he said. Finns put into practice the mantra, "The work of a child is to play”.

Children dare to see possibilities and wonder where we have "learned" to see limits. What we know so often blinds us to what we don’t know. Curiosity opens the door to possibilities and innovation … it sees beyond what already exists.

Curiosity led men to discover new lands, explore space, make major scientific discoveries and create life-changing inventions. Albert Einstein believed that curiosity is more important than knowledge. He insisted he had no special talent, he was only passionately curious.

Here are three things I love about genuine curiosity:

Curiosity lives with humility. It doesn’t have all the answers. It asks good questions … questions that come from a true desire to understand not to interrogate. It’s anxious to learn. It recognises that every person and every situation has something to teach. It lives comfortably with not knowing and is open to the ideas and perspectives of others. It can embrace paradox and stay open to anomaly. The best leaders are curious.

Curiosity holds the power of understanding. It’s the ultimate tool in conflict resolution, the alternative to telling, blaming, judging and shaming. It opens the door to hear the other person’s perspective … it’s respectful … it’s accepting and inclusive … it leads to collaboration in sorting out the issue.

But curiosity requires courage. The opposite of certainty isn’t uncertainty but curiosity, always willing to explore the unknown. While there is comfort in certainty, I feel most alive when I step outside of certainty. It can be risky to admit you don’t know but there are no limits to an open mind.

The good news is we don’t have to learn to be curious, it is a gift we were born with, we just need to reignite it. “The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably deal with.” ~Tony Robbins

Curiosity was given to us for a purpose. We need to nurture it in our children and rekindle in ourselves the passionate curiosity of our childhood.

Maybe a good place to start is to ask more questions … good questions … questions that deepen relationships and help people feel valued and heard. I recently read about a family who took turns in answering three questions at dinner each evening, “What was the sparkle in your day?” “Where did you have an opportunity to show kindness?” “What was one thing you we grateful for today?”
Learn something new every day
Read books you wouldn’t normally read
Visit places you’ve never been
Determine to meet a new person every week
Be alert to the ‘yet-to-be-discovered’ all around you every day

“ We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn". Mary Catherine Bateson

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A masterpiece of nature

9/12/2017

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Nature paints a masterpiece as fine as anything exhibited in the great galleries of the world.

This morning I awoke to a Monet sunrise ... a multiplicity of pinks and apricot brushed across a soft turquoise sky ... exquisitely beautiful, and fleeting. But unlike the sunrise or the crimson and white spotted toadstool that appears seemingly out of nowhere overnight and disappears just as quickly, many of natures masterpieces take many years to perfect.

Their colour and texture is laid down over months and years, like a Michelangelo ceiling.

I stood in the Sistine Chapel one day, mesmerised by the beauty of the ceiling ... the light and shade ... the colour and meticulous detail. But as I stood in awe of what floated above me, I couldn't help but wonder how Michelangelo felt as he climbed down from the scaffold at the end of each day. How must his neck and shoulders have felt after painting all day above his head?

Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the ceiling, he was a sculptor, not a painter and knew nothing about painting frescos, but the Pope insisted so he had little choice but to reluctantly agree. How hard it must have been day after day climbing that wooden scaffold and continuing the back-breaking work for which he had no passion.

It took him four years or fifty-four months to complete. The work permanently damaged his eyesight. In fact the painting took such a toll on his body he's recorded as saying, my “stomach’s squashed under my chin,” my “face makes a fine floor for droppings,” and my “spine’s all knotted from folding myself over.”

His masterpiece came at a huge personal cost.

And that's what I think when I come across a masterpiece of nature, like these wonderful bark canvases. Bark, like our skin, protects the vital living parts of the tree. Through the battering of wind and storm, attacks by insects, birds and mammals and the intrusion of fungi and epiphytes, the bark bears the brunt.

Over years ... the tree bleeds sap ... the bark weathers and sheds ... the insect makes itself at home, branches break, wounds heal ... and a thing of beauty emerges.

I love that the bark of every tree is unique? The fine smooth bar of Beech makes it almost impossible for insects to get a foothold. The thick rugged bark of Oak is scaly with deep grooves and ridges and susceptible to insect damage. The Angophora sheds its bark every Spring and reveals a glorious new red bark that's been silently growing underneath.

Each of us is unique and so are the storms and gales that have battered and bruised us. We bleed and weep and through it all God is creating a masterpiece underneath the rough outer coating of our everyday lives.

For we are God's masterpiece, created in the Messiah Jesus to perform good actions that God prepared long ago to be our way of life. Eph 2:10

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The mystery of joy

9/5/2017

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I was the eldest child in my family, but second born.

My parent’s first child was born after a long and difficult labour but they were excited to have a daughter. One afternoon as my father was leaving the hospital after visiting hours, Matron passed him in the corridor. Almost as an afterthought she said, “Oh by the way Mr Rowlands, your baby died”. He watched her disappear into the distance, her stiff, starched uniform somehow a picture of her cold, hard, heart.

He was left alone, reeling, groping for reality, desperately trying to come to terms with the words that moments before had ripped through his heart. I guess in that inconceivable moment he understood, as never before, his mother’s grief at the loss of both her daughters, one at 10 days and one at 10 weeks.

He stumbled out into the fresh air, fighting back the tears stinging his eyes. He struggled to hold himself together and work out a way to tell my mother before she heard it the way he had.

My mother told me that the ensuing weeks and months were some of the most difficult of her life. Prams and strollers in the street, mothers and their babies in shops and even nappies on washing lines brought her to tears and heightened the reality of her loss.

Her second pregnancy brought with it significant fear and trepidation. The nine months seemed like an eternity but then I was born, small but healthy. Their joy was overwhelming. Though they had chosen a singe name for me they decided to give me the middle name ‘Joy’ because of the joy I had brought into their lives.

What a precious reminder over the years that I was valued and loved. But joy has always been rather a mysterious emotion for me. Generations of writers and thinkers, theologians and poets have tried to wrestle with the essence of joy.

So what is this difficult to describe emotion we call joy and what makes it so indescribable?

CS Lewis, one of the greatest thinkers of our time, spent much of his life trying to answer that question. It began when he was a small boy and his brother made him a garden in the lid of a biscuit tin. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis talks about the way that garden touched him, a taste of beauty and the experience of an emotion he'd never felt before.

Three times in his youth he experienced this inexplicable emotion and he spend a large part of his life longing for another taste of it and searching to discover just what it was. In fact it became a theme of his life.

Finally Lewis came to realise that joy ultimately has a greater purpose, it points towards its author. When he came to know Christ personally; he came to understand that joy is a signpost pointing to its source. Unlike happiness and pleasure which are emotions for the here and now, joy is a gift of the Spirit that deepens our longings ... a taste of eternity ... a looking forward to the banquet table and the celebration.

Julian of Norwich said, "The fullness of joy is to see God in everything". Joy, despite the chaos and disintegration of morality, rumours of war and man's inhumanity to man. Joy amidst the times or wonder and beauty as well as the times of trials and suffering, because we know the author and realise this is only a chapter in the story he is writing.

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.” Pierre Teihard de Chardin

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What is more important than knowledge

9/5/2017

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I was born with an insatiable curiosity. Even now one of my favourite things is ‘not knowing’, it's pregnant with growth and possibilities. The best books are the books I haven’t read … the best places, the ones I’ve never visited and just maybe the best people are those I’ve yet to meet.

We are all born with the gift of curiosity. It’s the way children learn and explore their world, but somewhere along the line, through the rebuke of an adult, fear of failure or an education system that values knowledge and answers over questions and inquisitive thought, many of us stop asking.

It’s interesting that while Australia has the world’s longest period of compulsory education (11years), we are fast falling behind many countries in the world in our student’s academic abilities. Finland takes the prize for consistently topping the international ranking for education systems and students attend school for approximately 20 hours per week. Children are encouraged to explore, discover, play and learn from their natural curiosity. Finland has a mandatory 15-minute outdoor free-play break every hour of every day.

One parent asked his son what he did for gym that day. "They sent us into the woods with a map and compass and we had to find our way out," he said. Finns put into practice, "The work of a child is to play”.

Children dare to see possibilities and wonder where we have "learned" to see limits. What we know so often blinds us to what we don’t know. Curiosity opens the door to innovation … it sees beyond what already exists.

It led men to discover new lands, explore space, make major scientific discoveries and create life-changing inventions. Albert Einstein said he had no special talent, he was only passionately curious.

Here are three things I love about genuine curiosity:

Curiosity lives with humility. It doesn’t presume to have all the answers. It asks good questions … questions that come from a true desire to understand not to interrogate. It’s anxious to learn. It recognises that every person and every situation has something to teach. It lives comfortably with not knowing and is open to the ideas and perspectives of others. It can embrace paradox and stay open to anomaly. Curiosity is a common trait of most great leaders.

Curiosity holds the power of understanding. It’s the ultimate tool in conflict resolution, the alternative to telling, blaming, judging and shaming. It opens the door to hearing and valuing the other person’s perspective … it’s respectful … it’s accepting and inclusive … it leads to collaboration in sorting out the issue.

But curiosity requires courage. The opposite of certainty isn’t uncertainty but curiosity, always willing to explore the unknown. While there is comfort in certainty, I feel most alive when I step outside of certainty. It can be risky to admit I don’t know but there are no limits to an open mind. “The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably deal with.” ~Tony Robbins

Curiosity was given to us for a purpose. Perhaps we need to rediscover the passionate curiosity of our childhood ... to become more childlike.

Start asking more questions … good questions … questions that deepen relationships and help people feel valued and heard. I recently read about a family who took turns in answering 3 questions at dinner each evening, “What was the sparkle in your day?” “Where did you have an opportunity to show kindness?” “What was one thing you were grateful for today?”
Read books that you wouldn't normally read
Visit places you've never been
Try some food you've never eaten before
Make a point of meeting and getting to know a new person each week
Learn something new every day
Stay actively alert to the yet-to-be-discovered all around you every day
Learn to value and be comfortable with not knowing

Albert Einstein said, "Curiosity is more important than knowledge or as Mary Catherine Bateson says, “We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.”

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Larry and the chocolate eclair

The curious thing about curiosity

A masterpiece of nature

The mystery of joy

What is more important than knowledge

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