Augie on Expectations & Process

I have eliminated that word from my vocabulary. Expectations are a false reality that have nothing to do with goalsetting or learning; they're just momentary comments given as a result of a thought that somebody wants, not about the process. In the process, there is no fear. And the results is where all of the fear is, because we can't control it.

On Christian Growth

The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When He said, ‘Be perfect,’ He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder—in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

From Mere Christianity

In the City of the Decadents

In the City of the Decadents

Control & Power of Secularization

Process of Secularization: 

Process by which religious ideas, institutions, and interpretations have lost their social significance. 

They are biased, we are objective. 

How does one answer the distinction and fundamental differences of an art gallery with nudes and pornography?

Exploitation and provoking of imaginations. Shame eroded. 

Naturalism cannot distinguish between what nature has given for life and that which is refuse. 

Men without a sense of shame are, perhaps, the most deadly of weapons. 

Pluralization 

Competing WV's where no one WV is dominant. It does compel individuals to know what and why they believe. 

It breeds philosophical relativism. "All truth is relative". Does this statement exclude itself? 

All major religions have non-negotiables that have an epistemological basis. 

Lewis on Arguments against God

The Presence in Which You Have Always Stood

If you want an argument against Christianity (and I well remember how eagerly I looked for such arguments when I began to be afraid it was true) you can easily find some unsatisfactory Christian and say "so there is your boasted new man! Give me the old kind." But, if once you've begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds probable, you will know in your heart that this is only a evading the issue. 

What can you ever really know of other people's souls – their situations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands.

If there is a God, you are in a sense, alone with him. You cannot put him off with speculations about your next-door neighbor or memories of what you have read in books or how you were hurt in church. What will all that chatter and hearsay count when the anesthetic fog which we call "nature" or "The real world" fades away and the presence in which you have always stood become is palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?

C.S. Lewis

Stubbornness of Man

For it is a dreadful truth that the state of (as you say) ‘having to depend solely on God’ is what we all dread most. And of course that just shows how very much, how almost exclusively, we have been depending on things. 

That trouble goes so far back in our lives and is now so deeply ingrained, we will not turn to Him as long as He leaves us anything else to turn to. I suppose all one can say is that it was bound to come. 

In the hour of death and the day of judgement, what else shall we have? Perhaps when those moments come, they will feel happiest who have been forced (however unwillingly) to begin practising it here on earth. 

It is good of Him to force us: but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time....

- The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III

The Real Self

The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of ‘little Christs’, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. 

He made them all. He invented— as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. 

In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. 

In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call ‘My wishes’ become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men’s thoughts or even suggested to me by devils. 

Eggs and alcohol and a good night’s sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. 

I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call ‘me’ can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

From Mere Christianity

Lewis on Forgiveness

Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it.

From The Weight of Glory

Humility of the Soul

Humiliation of soul always brings a positive blessing with it. If we empty our hearts of self God will fill them with his love. He who desires close communion with Christ should remember the word of the Lord, “To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.” Stoop if you would climb to heaven. 

Do we not say of Jesus, “He descended that he might ascend?” so must you. You must grow downwards, that you may grow upwards; for the sweetest fellowship with heaven is to be had by humble souls, and by them alone. God will deny no blessing to a thoroughly humbled spirit. “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” with all its riches and treasures. 

The whole exchequer (Royal or national treasury) of God shall be made over by deed of gift to the soul which is humble enough to be able to receive it without growing proud because of it. God blesses us all up to the full measure and extremity of what it is safe for him to do. If you do not get a blessing, it is because it is not safe for you to have one. If our heavenly Father were to let your unhumbled spirit win a victory in his holy war, you would pilfer the crown for yourself, and meeting with a fresh enemy you would fall a victim; so that you are kept low for your own safety. 

When a man is sincerely humble, and never ventures to touch so much as a grain of the praise, there is scarcely any limit to what God will do for him. Humility makes us ready to be blessed by the God of all grace, and fits us to deal efficiently with our fellow men. True humility is a flower which will adorn any garden. This is a sauce with which you may season every dish of life, and you will find an improvement in every case. Whether it be prayer or praise, whether it be work or suffering, the genuine salt of humility cannot be used in excess

Absoluteness of Truth & Freedom to Disbelieve

How absolutes have contributed to the volatility in the Middle East-

Question at Waterloo U in a Ravi Q&A:

If absolutes are esteemed in the Middle East, why is there so much taking of life? In a culture of relativism here in the states, life appears to be valued more.

What does a culture do to make sure that the absolutes believed in are defendable and rationally tenable? Every absolute is based on a worldview. 

Relativism cannot be held onto without a cost.

Ravi asked a leading philosopher about his statement, "There is no compulsion in in religion". He then asked the philosopher "if your daughter was to become a Christian, what would you do?"

The philosopher simply responded, "I'd kill her".

Freedom to believe must go hand-in-hand with freedom to disbelieve. If one's absolutes are defendable, it should never be defended by the taking of a life, rather it should be defended by reasoning and sharing why you believe what you believe is truth.

A worldview answers for important questions: Origin, Meaning, Morality, and Destiny. Christianity answers those four questions coherently while also allowing for those that choose to disbelieve, to disbelieve.

Absolutes have to be grounded. 

Examine the world view behind the absolute and then you will find the cause, and perhaps the problem. 

Absolutes unanchored in a coherent worldview is the problem. 

Question: "Where do you draw the line between pluralism and relativism?"

Shifting priorities of the way we made decisions. Enlightenment/ Empiricism / Rationalism / Existentialism. 

All trying to define the ultimate reality. 

One defining decision made: Has to be a moral framework. Kant: reason can take us there. Moral parameters can be arrived at by reason. 

Kai Neilson, renowned Canadian writer and atheist, said this: "We have been unable to show that reason requires the moral point of view or that really rational persons need not be egalitarian or classical amoralists-reason doesn't decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one for me, and reflection on this actually depresses me. Pure, practical reason even with the good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality".

Morality is a titanic question for a pluralistic society to answer. 

There must be an anchor, transcendent reference for right & wrong.  

Seven principles needed for a society to thrive-

1. Sacredness of life

2. Sacredness of the human body

The western culture is the first culture to try and build an ethos without a moral framework. 

Nietzsche said two things will happen with the philosophical murdering of God: It will be the bloodiest century ever recorded and madness will be preeminent. 

3. Sanctity of your word

4. Sanctity of property

5. Sanctity of your neighbor

6. Sanctity of time

7. Sanctity of worship

If the Foundations Be Destroyed

Civilizations thrive when there is a foundation of unity, brought about by a common belief; conversely, civilizations fall apart when that foundation of unity crumbles. 

What shall the righteous do?

Culture - God marginalized in 20th century, so what drives our culture? 

Enables and affirms whatever we choose to do. Culture is a term that is now fluid enough to bring together all of the contradictions with which we choose to live.

Definition 

"Effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential situations that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives."

Should life be coherent? Should culture be coherent? 

Well, do you want the answers to these questions to be coherent? 

People living with contradictions struggle with the meaning of coherence. 

Daniel Yelkelovich-

"A genuine cultural revolution is one where there is a decisive break from the shared values of the past, particularly with those that deal with the questions about purpose & nature of life"

Yet fundamental questions remain unanswered. 

When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes anything. - Chesterton

Taking away the anchor of truth is the beginning of the end. 

So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.

-Malcolm Muggeridge

The foundation of our thinking has changed. Ohio State University built the first "post modern" building. The building was designed was "no purpose in mind". Stairs went nowhere, random pillars. The architect was quoted as saying "Life is capricious. If life is random and without meaning, why shouldn't our buildings be the same?".

Ravi asked, "Did he do the same with the foundation?"  

We can be fooled on the infrastructure of reality, but not the foundations of reality. 

1) Eternity- we have a yearning and longing to live. Worship, not love, brings meaning. Created for something beyond our short, physical existence. Redefines existence. 

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you--the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence: the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves: the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. 

-The Weight of Glory, paragraph 6

Lose dimension of time, you'll live pragmatically, (only in the moment) and we aren't designed to live that way. 

2) Morality - No point of reference anymore. No absolutes. Redefines our essence. 

Truth can be propositionally stated. The law of non-contradiction. Open minded leads to close hearted. 

We need a moral center. What we have tolerated is now being celebrated. 

3) Accountability "It is public scandal that gives offense; it is no sin to sin in secret." -French Dramatist, Moyer

Redefines our conscience 

4) Charity- 

Have we progressed? One on one, concessions are made and recognition of something lost. 

Culture has collapsed. Yet, community is still longed for. Coherence is still sought 

Leadership

Leadership is a transfer of 

1) purpose 

2) passion

3) optimism

4) belief.

Research from the HeartMath Institute ( heartmath.org ) shows that when you have a feeling in your heart, it goes to every cell in the body, then outward—and other people up to 10 feet away can sense feelings transmitted by your heart. This means that each day you are broadcasting to everyone how you feel. You are either broadcasting positive energy or negative energy, apathy or passion, indifference or purpose. 

Research from Harvard University also supports that idea that the emotions you feel are contagious and affect the people around you. Your team is just as likely to catch your bad mood as the swine flu, and on the flip side, they will catch your good mood as well. And this principle applies to everyone, not just the leader. Each member of your team is contagious and every day you all are either sharing positive or negative energy with each other. 

Great cultures are built with positive contagious energy so it's essential that you and your team share it. When you walk into the locker room, the office, or onto the field, you have a decision to make: Are you going to be a germ to your team or a big dose of vitamin C? Will you infuse your team with positive energy or be an energy vampire and suck the life out of them? 

Great leaders and teams are positively contagious with a vision and purpose that drives them, positive thoughts that fuel them, and emotions that energize them. Great leaders and teammates realize that their overall attitudes affect everyone in the locker room and the building.

Research shows that people are most energized when they are contributing to a bigger cause beyond themselves. As a leader, you want to inspire your team to move beyond their own selfish desires and concerns and contribute to a cause bigger than them. When your team has a greater vision and purpose they will play with greater passion and energy.

“Never a bad day, only bad moments.” This was a commitment to never let myself have a bad day. It did not matter how many bad or challenging moments would occur; at the end of the day, I would make sure to identify enough good and uplifting moments to declare it a good day. It is so much easier to deal with and overcome the bad moments when you think about how fortunate you are to have an opportunity to impact and lead others. So instead of allowing myself to focus on the negative, I created moments of gratitude and focused on the positive.

when I approached the challenges of the day with a positive, helpful attitude to serve others, it not only uplifted my spirits, but also set the tone for the entire organization and helped everyone perform at their highest levels. Keep in mind that your attitude is reflected in your body language

facial expressions

demeanor

inflection in your voice

The leaders of the team or organization set the tone and attitude. Every moment of the day someone on the team or organization is taking cues from you. A positive approach takes practice and a different mindset, but it's well worth the effort.

No energy vampires!

What we think matters. Our words are powerful. Our body language is always being evaluated. The energy we share with our teammates and co-workers is essential. Instead of complaining, we focused on gratitude and appreciation for the chance to compete, to play a game we love, and the opportunity to get better. If you are complaining, you are not leading. If you are leading, you are not complaining.

-Be contagious - Energy Vampires / No complaining

-Live for causes bigger than yourself

-Never bad days, only bad moments HW: Gratitude checklist / What went well (15-63 things)

-As a man thinks!

Two Kinds of People

Scene from Signs with Mel Gibson asking in the end, "Is it possible there are no coincidences?"

http://youtu.be/27qUO8_9uT0

Table in the Wilderness

They spoke against God, saying, 

“Can God spread a table in the wilderness?"

Psalm 78:19

What had brought about the question above?

This-

Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. 

Whiners, the whole lot. Before we get too tsk tsk with them, they represent a group of people lost in circumstances, unable to see the provisional hand in the midst of the wilderness. 

They forgot his works 

and the wonders that he had shown them. Psalm 78:11

Russ Taff, among others, did a song about that table. 

David penned it best, though, in Psalm 23:5:

You prepare a table before me  in the presence of my enemies;  you anoint my head with oil;  my cup overflows. 

The question by the Israelites was rhetorical, but was asked as if God couldn't provide what they needed, after seeing all that God had done. 

Limited vision and ungrateful hearts leads to questions like that. May my heart not to go to a place that questions Your ability to provide a table in the wilderness. 

As Spurgeon wrote, "Let thy face ever wear a smile; live near thy Master; live in the suburbs of the Celestial City"

Uncle Andrew and the Voice of God

Bring out that creature,” said Aslan. One of the Elephants lifted Uncle Andrew in its trunk and laid him at the Lion’s feet. He was too frightened to move.

“Please, Aslan,” said Polly, “could you say something to—to unfrighten him? And then could you say something to prevent him from ever coming back here again?”

“Do you think he wants to?” said Aslan.

“Well, Aslan,” said Polly, “he might send someone else. He’s so excited about the bar off the lamp-post growing into a lamp-post tree and he thinks—”

“He thinks great folly, child,” said Aslan. “This world is bursting with life for these few days because the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles in the ground. It will not be so for long. But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good! But I will give him the only gift he is still able to receive.”

He bowed his great head rather sadly, and breathed into the Magician’s terrified face. “Sleep,” he said. “Sleep and be separated for some few hours from all the torments you have devised for yourself.” Uncle Andrew immediately rolled over with closed eyes and began breathing peacefully.

From The Magician's Nephew

On Hell

[The fictional George MacDonald is speaking.] “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice, there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek, find. To those who knock, it is opened.”. . .

“Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.”. . .

“Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste. . . .

“A damned soul is nearly nothing: it is shrunk, shut up in itself. Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.”

“Then no one can ever reach them?”

“Only the Greatest of all can make Himself small enough to enter Hell. For the higher a thing is, the lower it can descend—a man can sympathise with a horse but a horse cannot sympathise with a rat. Only One has descended into Hell.”

From The Great Divorce

Screwtape reveals the Enemy’s intentions:

Now it may surprise you to learn that in His [the Enemy’s] efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.

From The Screwtape Letters