“With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.” ~ G.K. Chesterton
We’re in the middle of a worldview shift across the western world ~ or so says Brian Mclaren, and I am inclined to agree. As with the shift from the Medieval to the Modern Era, new data about the nature of the universe and what it means to be human has blown apart current paradigms of who we are and how the world works.
“Right now” is the only life you really have. Why not be here while it’s happening?
I remember when I was a boy summers seemed to last forever. Each day was like an eternity. My mother would often send me outside after breakfast and I wouldn’t be allowed back in ’till lunch, then out again till the streetlights came on. (It was a different time.) I remember how those hours stretched. A single day could hold a hundred adventures or more, and still leave time for me to linger at the back door for what seemed like years, waiting for my father to come home for dinner.
This video reawakened my soul to a deeper truth this week ~ about what it means to be a leader in God’s Kingdom…or perhaps to simply be a real, wholehearted human being.
In the video, Michael Schaefer and Dean Potter create a scene of a solitary man walking the highline at Cathedral Peak. As Potter begins his unaided walk, you hear the camera operator take deep, anxious but meditative breaths. And I breathe with him, reminded of highlines I, too, have walked at night alone.
“Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.” ~ Richard Hooker
I’ll bet you’ve seen those nature shows where a school of fish reshapes itself into a ball when threatened by a predator. Every time I watch a scene like that, I’m mesmerized by it. It’s like this collection of individual life forms somehow transforms itself into a single entity, becoming this cloud of life that moves and reacts to its environment as if it were one creature rather than a collection of hundreds. How do they do that? How does this balled-up life form decide where to go, how to move in response to a predatory threat? It looks for all the world like those hundreds of fish are operating with one mind. But where is that mind?
“We are not made of skin and bone, we are made of stories.” ~ Sue Monk Kidd
Culture is the lens through which we see the world. It shapes and shades absolutely everything about our lives, and ourselves. I like that well-known quip about two fish who went out for a swim one morning. Along the way, they ran into a third fish, who greeted them warmly and declared, “The water’s great today, isn’t it!” before swimming on past. But the two fish just looked at each other quizzically and asked, “What’s water?”
That’s how most of us experience culture. It’s the bubble around us that we don’t see, but through which we see everything. This is true whether we’re talking about our national culture, our family culture, or the culture of our church or organization. Culture is ubiquitous in this way at all levels of our experience for the simple reason that it is essential to our human journey. We don’t have instincts as animals do; so the only way we learn to survive in the world is by being taught. Sometimes we learn from our elders; sometimes we learn from our peers. But the end result of all the learning we assimilate ~ about what the world is, how it works, and our place in the grand scheme of things ~ is what we call culture. Culture tells us who we are, and defines for us the story we are living.
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
I was in Houston a few weeks back working with the leadership team of a faith-based organization there. We’re doing culture-change work, which is one of the most exciting things I get to do in my coaching, and also, as you might imagine, one of the most challenging.
