Sleeping

You can only observe how you were sleeping once you are awake.

This thought comes from C.S Lewis and was passed to me from a friend during a conversation.  The real question that this begs then is, are we asleep or awake?  I recently watched the Matrix movies again and the beauty of this pervading idea plus a bunch of awesome kung-fu is worth the six hour trilogy.

We must be willing to sacrifice everything to wake up.

"Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange." Inception

Dying for trash

Seeing is the first step.

As we drove through the trash, it continuously smoked and there were cows that only ate trash.  The teenage girls were dis-attached, as if the windows were television screens.  But when the door opens and you smell it then the show ends and you actually see it.

Impact = Feeling

That was the first note I made in my little red notebook that rode around that trip with me.  I knew that the impact was heavy and even devastating, but how do you change that impact into action and not let it die as a flame up of feelings?

We walked around the dump for a little while, the rolling hills of trash dotted with people picking through it and the cows.  The dump is the other side of consumption.

We met the kids.  They smiled, laughed, drew pictures for us.  One drew a picture for me, I remember sitting there with my arm around him watching him draw and he gave me the picture as a gift.  I still have it.  As of right now I couldn't tell you whats on the picture even though I've looked at it a dozen times, it has green marker.  I'm not sure what the drawings are but I know the dark smudge of dirty residue left on the page on the bottom right where he had rested his body.  That residue from the dump, getting on a plane, flying back thousands of miles, driving on highways stuffed with expensive cars, sitting in my house, my house, under my roof.  That smudge now lives in perpetuity between sixty eight and seventy two degrees.

A woman who escaped the dump said every day she hoped to find a treasure in the trash, something so big it would solve all of her problems and she could leave and live in luxury.  She was born in the trash, they think it's five generations now but they don't keep great records at the dump.  Generations move quickly when you have kids at twelve and die at thirty.

The week I got back I went to a corporate meeting on the top floor with catering.  There were seventy five of us, filling up our lives meeting with each other so we could call it work.  The speaker talked about how he went on a normal sales call and ended up closing a deal that he pulled six figures from, a single deal!  For years in my life I had been hoping to find that treasure in the trash.  I did it in a suite and silk tie over expensive lunches and afternoon drinks.  Some of us still die at thirty because it's stressful, I only got an ulcer.

That woman escaped, and lives in a luxury she did not even know existed, freedom from the dump.  Sometimes release is the only thing we really need to allow us to receive.

Impact = feelings, but how do we turn those feelings into actions that mean something.  Harness the power to come back.  I've left much of the treasure hunting behind but one thing I have not left behind is the impact of that day and the promise to be back.

5 Reasons The Pope is Communist

I would not consider myself to be the biggest Catholic (in the sense that I'm not a catholic at all), but much like we all become when the Olympics roll around and curling lights up our televisions, every four years we all become experts.

To that point, I think this new pope is a communist.  I've been reading up on Jorge and honestly he freaks me out a little.

1)  He named himself Pope Francis after Francis of Assisi.  That guy was not even part of the church as a priest, he was just really poor and prayed a lot so they priested him (not sure if that is the term, again I haven't been a Catholic expert since 2005).  Jorge was recently quoted as saying ""Oh how I would like a poor church and a church for the poor".

2) He is from South America. I'm American and I am pretty sure that everybody south of us is now communist (except for Chile because they have great skiing).

3) He's a Jesuit (no not the West Virginia punk band from '95).  Jesuits are Catholics but believe in education and science, that sounds pretty communist.

4) Communists love titles, his full official title is:

His Holiness Pope Francis, Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church,Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman province, Sovereign of the State of the Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God.

5) He sold his his huge mansion when he took over in Buenos Aires and moved into an apartment using the money to help the poor.  He rode the bus in to work from said apartment.  Even after the white smoke puffed he rode the bus with the riff raff cardinals back to where they were staying instead of taking the pope mobile out for a test drive.

Here's where the Archbishop of Canterbury used to live until it became the new religion, a country club

So there you have it, but in all honesty, I'm not sure how you could be a good pope and not be communist.

Most of the book of Acts in the Bible sounds awfully communist to me.  Sell what you have to help those with less, eat all your meals together, don't exalt the rich inside of the church.  This Pope Francis sounds like the real deal, and I'm ashamed to say it but the Catholic church looks like it might be practicing what it preaches, maybe it's time to reform the evangelicals here north of the communists.

Dave Grohl and Crappy Christian Art

Dave Grohl is awesome, take fifty minutes out of your day and watch this, his keynote from sxsw, lot's of F-bombs so don't watch it on your phone in church or you will feel bad.

David Eric Grohl

Dave is awesome, his music is awesome, his story is awesome.  I think he is so authentic because he actually is.  In the aforementioned speech that you can find here, (seriously, watch this) he says one major theme,

the artist comes first

I think this concept is wild when it comes to really crappy christian art.  Think about how David, the rock star who wrote all those songs in the middle of the Bible.  David knew that the artist came first.

Half the Psalms are David bitching about how hard his life is, and go read them his life was hard.  But he would complain by creating art and then tap back into the source to keep fighting and keep creating more art.  In my book David was known for two things, being a song writer and kicking ass.

And what are Christian artist's known for today, a false humility that covers the fact they won't expose themselves out there or their art.  At one point in the speech Grohl says "I was no longer one of you (pointing at the crowd) I was one of us (he points at himself)".  He is speaking to becoming a punk rocker and the idea is startling.  He openly and happily separates himself from the world.  My Bible has some passage in it talking about being in the world but not of the world.  It's a shame I have to go to f*****g Dave Grohl to see that best exemplified in modern culture.

The final thought is that Nirvana, according to Grohl, was "three people playing like their lives depended on it".  When was the last time you saw somebody acting like that, look at that picture of Grohl above again, do you see any part of his heart, his soul, his mind or his strength going anywhere but into that music.  You can feel the music from looking at the picture.

I don't know who this guy is, but I don't think Dave Grohl would like him.

A list of one ways to be the MOST successful

I remember hearing a speech by the most successful guy at a company. He was the guy, number one, grossing seven figures a year in his forties.

Number one.

He said people always asked him why he was so successful, he was not good looking, did not come across as particularly smart etc. He said succeeding was hard, and sometimes it felt bad to do the things required to succeed because they were so hard. He then said THE reason why he was successful.

He felt more bad, more often, than anybody else.

What if success never gets easier, what if what it takes to win feels bad forever?

I say go for it, I mean look at Steve Jobs, he seems happy and he earned ten figures.

The Doing Thing

I wrote this is 2009, still good and sitting it the drafts folder, hope it helps you as much as it helped me:

A recent Ted talk got me thinking, you can see it here, about how children interact with the world. My Theory of Everything is that everything is everything so you can succeed by knowing one thing immaculately. We often think that the one thing we should know should be important, and yet understanding something simple is easier and, as stated, something simple is everything.

Children are simple, maybe they hold the key to how we should act. In the video, there is a team building design exercise and the average kindergarten team out performs the average team of CEO's. Kindergarten students do it by iterative learning.

My wife ran Sunday school classes this weekend where all of the students gather together, just like the adults, and sing before heading off to individual classes. Except when they showed up that day, instead of singing, they had to all dance. Everyone participated exceptionally.

If you showed up at an adult church service (board meeting, project orientation, etc) and told everyone they had to dance I would be shocked to see 10% involvement. So whats the correlation between design and dance?

Fear.

As adults we are ready to put out a big design and fail (if we have to), shrug and say we did our best, and quit. Kid's do their best too, but they do it quickly and realize that it is not the best and continue trying. And the trying is where they beat us.

In school we teach the adult way: hand in one paper, do one art project, pick one sport, choose one college.

School is wrong, so wrong that in the design exercise recent MBA's did the worst.

School teaches us fear, and going into the business world teaches us fear plus money. It's time to dance, look a little stupid, realize our first try is not the best way, push past the fear and go again.

Drugs, Jesus and 90's music

I'm focusing on worship this month and that usually starts and ends with twenty minutes and four songs on Sunday morning for Christians, change that, most Christian men.  So let's start there.

That guy

Last Sunday there was a great worship session.  We have recently started going to a new church in our new hometown, it's about three minutes away from our house which means we are only five minutes late.  My wife and I play a game where you take anything good and you call it a creation of two other things that had a baby.  Like my 4 year old daughter has hair that looks like the lion king and little mermaid had a baby.  Or Kale is when lettuce and boring had a baby.  This church has a worship pastor that sounds like hootie and the blowfish had a baby with mumford and sons, in my opinion.  Kelsey thinks he sounds like our old worship leader had a baby with John Goodman.  Either way, this worship team is great.

So they go through there thing and they sing a great Michael W. Smith song and then out of the blue they crush a little song called "Lullaby" by Shawn Mullins.  It was like awesome had a baby with the 90's.  And here we are.  The best of the best Christians are ten to fifteen years behind everybody else.  I have a reason for this.

The progression of the average Christian is based on age and nothing else.  When you meet a normal forty year old Christian sitting in church on Sunday, getting ready to get back in the minivan and go home to watch golf, that guy used to be cool when he was a sinner.  He watched cool movies, got drunk and had feelings.  He used to sleep with his wife because he liked her and listened to music because it did something.  That guy is now full steam in the system, and has not done anything new in ten years.  But he wants to feel something because he is in fact, still a creation of God, no matter how much he abandons living.

(as a very side note, I miss spelled abandons so badly that the first suggestion on spell check was boondocks, I actually saw a tear fall from my English Literature degree)

Thus, he goes back to what he knows, and right now what that guy knows is music from 1995.  As an ugly side effect, he starts to have feelings again but since he has not really felt anything in ten years he just has the feelings that died when he was twenty eight, so he wants to run a marathon and start a business.

And mind you, this is the good stuff.  This is the best of what we have to offer, there are some sects of Christian music that were never good, just like a women in a denim romper.

So what is the culprit and what can be changed...  Well I think there are a few issues, let's start a list.

1) Church worship pastors are the only musicians who get paid an adequate wage, imagine if all of the music at the grammy's was created by middle school music teachers.  Musicians either make way to much or way to little, and that is where the art thrives.
2) The listeners are broken, as discussed above in regards to fifteen years ago.
3) We are afraid to offend (we Christians) and the truth is some Christians are offended by feeling anything because they are hiding in cultural Christianity as cover not as salvation.
4) Worship is about being a blessing not being blessed and we actually don't know how to do that.

So here we are, where the edge is singing Shawn Mullins, the cutting edge, and we are singing worship songs to a guy who partied with hookers, mocked the reigning super power and literally raised ten year old girls from the dead (something Justin Beiber has gotten close to doing but is yet to accomplish).