This came thru from Grendel today…
Hey, if this blog is worth $85000.00 then its for sale as of now!
I’ll take the money and run.
Any takers?…
Anybody?…
Hmm…
So… just give me the money!
8
Monthly Archives: January 2007
BHAGs?
I remember learning about BHAGs – big hairy audacious goals – and their importance in being a visionary leader who people would follow.
But lately I’ve been struggling to come up with BHAGs.
Sometimes I look at my goals for the year (yes – I do set goals at the start of each year!) and they look less than big, hairy and audacious. In fact they occasionally seem rather tame and uninteresting.
I am reminded of William Carey’s words ‘Attempt great things for
God. Expect great things from God’ which is well and good if that is what God is asking of you.
Lately (the last two or three years) I have felt like God has been asking me to keep walking steadily in the same direction and in one sense that is a huge goal for me. I love change, variety, new initiatives and new challenges, but it seems the biggest goal of all at the moment is to keep walking the same line.
I think something has happened theologically to also cause me to rethink the appropriateness of BHAGs. I have no doubt that sometimes God gives people a dream and they must chase it to fulfill their own identity/destiny, but sometimes I wonder if BHAGs are a way of co-opting God to our own plans for self aggrandisement and personal achievement?
Or is that just me looking for a lazy man’s escape route?…
All this is not to say I don’t have a dream or dreams. I do, but annual goals are a little different!
2006 Top Reads
I use the ‘book’ section of the blog as a way of keeping track of what I have read over the year. You can see what I got thru last year in the column on the left.
I’m not a superfast reader nor a slow one. I think I average a book a fortnight.
So here are last year’s top reads:
Fiction: The Kite Runner – a brilliant story of an Afghani child who grows up and goes back to his old home 20 years later. It narrowly gets iin ahead of The Turning but only because it was a ‘re-read’.
Biography – Bruchko – a great stroy of a young missionary forced to ask what it means to love a community of tribal people.
‘Christian’– A tie between Organic Church – which I love for its simplicity and profundity as well as Church Without Walls, a text for the acom unit I taught, but a classic on missional engagement and allowing mission to shape church.
There’s not much very deep or theological there… Might need to stretch my diet a little in the year ahead!
Part of my reason for choosing to blog less is that I want to free more time for actual reading of books. I find I read online quickly and easily – which is fine – but sometimes it involves sifting the quality from the dregs as well as not getting drawn off on sidetracks… like ebay!
60%…
The day I got back from holidays I woke up at midnight with such an acidy stomach I couldn’t get back to sleep. A couple of antacids helped, but since then (last Tuesday) I have a had a stomach disturbance that won’t seem to go away.
It is one of those bugs that makes you feel tired, distracted and like not engaging with people. It has left me with little energy for writing, thinking or anything actually.
So if the blog seems a bit neglected it is partly intentional (i plan to blog less this year) but also partly because I feel like I have bugger all to say!
There’s no great complaint here. I know people live with much worse stuff every day, but it is a pain when you just can’t shake off a sickness.
Treasure!
When you send your kids to Grandma’s house you never know what treasure they will find hidden away…
This time though it wasn’t the kids – it was me that found the treasure!
Pete just happened to mention that they had the complete two volume set (1200 pages) of Hudson Taylor’s biography written by his son Howard back in the early 1900’s.
‘You have what?!’ I responded…
‘Would you like to borrow them?’
‘Would I ever!’
Part 1 is entitled ‘the growth of a soul’ and part 2 ‘the development of a work of God’. Part 1 actually begins with Taylor’s great grandparent’s story and we eventually start to hear about him by page 200.
There are many journal/diary quotes that give a great insight into the character of this man. I am almost finished part 1 and looking forward to the story of the development of the mission work.
What is most amazing is that when he left England on a 5 month boat ride to Shanghai he was 21. Yes 21!…
Is he a rare breed or are there other Hudson Taylors out there today? I find myself constantly challenged and confronted by the old missionaries who lived lives of great sacrifice and risk at times when it was so much harder to do so.
Pure treasure!
Dipsticks…
They say you can sell anything on E-bay.
Well this guy tried
…
I couldn’t resist emailing and asking him if pick-up was available!