The High Calling: A Path Paved with Poetry

Today marks the end of The High Calling as an ongoing web site focused on work and faith.

My personal path to The High Calling was paved with poetry.

In the summer of 2009, I was having a conversation on Twitter with two people I had never met face-to-face. One was Jim Wood, who had a blog called Shrinking the Camel (now a Patheos/High Calling blog) and wrote on faith and work. The other was L.L. Barkat, who had a blog (or two, perhaps three) called Seedlings in Stone and was the managing editor of a web site I had just begun to visit, called High Calling Blogs (HCB).

We were talking about making sandwiches, wine, poetry, and a movie called Bottle Crazy. Within a few minutes, I composed a short poem encompassing all of those elements within the character count of one tweet. We laughed, but something had changed. An awareness, perhaps a bond, had formed with a poetic tweet that connected us.

Later that summer, I was in a bike crash and spent the night in a hospital so the doctors could watch my four broken ribs and partially collapsed lung. Unable to sleep with an oxygen mask on my face, I read Laura’s Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places straight through. It was rare for a book to speak directly, almost personally, to me, but that one did.

Eventually, I screwed up enough courage to start participating in the HCB poetry prompts. I started writing occasional articles. And then L.L. asked me (and Jim Wood, too), to be contributing writers. I made my first trip to Laity Lodge in the fall of 2010 – joining the rest of the “virtual” staff at the writer’s conference. I attended the poetry seminar, and so The High Calling, Laity Lodge and poetry came to be even more bound together in my mind.

In 2012, I became the Twitter editor and discovered The High Calling network, comprised of all of the people who had signed up with The High Calling and had an official network entry on the site.

I went exploring and realized The High Calling’s reach expanded beyond the site and beyond the virtual staff I had come to appreciate and love. It expanded beyond the office in Kerrville and that almost sacred place called Laity Lodge.

I discovered poetry in the network—not actual poetry and poems, although there was some of that, but poetry in the much broader sense of God’s people. To discover this network was, at times, to be overwhelmed by faith. A significant portion of the Bible is written in poetic form, and perhaps for that reason I find a strong connection between poetry and faith.

So, on behalf of The High Calling, I tweeted this network of God’s people, using Twitter to promote the links for their articles and personal blog posts. To tweet all network members all the time would have taken a staff of several people. But I tried.

Who is, or was, the High Calling network? Diana Trautwein. Lisha Epperson. Brock Henning. The Center for Faith and Work. Mari-Anna Stalnacke. Ed Cyzewski. Billy Coffey. Jen Sandbulte. The Theology Work Project. 4 Word Women. Jolene Underwood. Lynn Mosher. Zechariah Newman. Megan Willome. Linda Chontos. Jen Avellaneda. Maureen Doallas. Chris Peek. John Blase. Tanya Marlow.

And hundreds and hundreds more. My RSS reader overflowed with the blog postings of the network. I had to develop a second list of blogs to visit.

I read people who struggled and celebrated. People who hurt. People doubting their faith. People overcoming their doubts. People with seminary degrees. People with a high school education. Single people. People struggling to have children. People struggling to manage families. People who had published books, and people trying to publish books. People with addictions.

I read people who mourned the deaths of loved ones, and one way they had to deal with it was to write. I read people who laughed. I read people who suffered debilitating illnesses, and some who were dying. People who supported the right to bear arms and people who ardently believed in gun control. Political liberals, conservatives, moderates, and independents.

I read the incredible diversity that is God’s church. And I found poetry everywhere I looked, the poetry of faith, the poetry that is faith.

And I learned that, for all of our differences, for all of our politics and denominations, for all of our hopes and dreams and occasional nightmares, we are one in Christ Jesus.

Like all other human endeavors, The High Calling may pass, but that unity will always be.

Related: Change at the High Calling.

Photos: Various pictures of The High Calling staff activities during the past five years, all taken at Laity Lodge in the Texas Hill Country.

My First Grandfather Story

I have no grandfather stories.

My mother’s father died of a ruptured appendix when she was 12.

My father’s father died when I was nine months old, when my family was preparing to move to Florida. My father had taken a job in Jacksonville and was already working there when he got the call that his dad was failing fast. My father drove like a maniac to New Orleans to get us and then on to Shreveport. By the time we arrived, my grandfather could barely recognize anyone, but he kept asking for the baby. When they placed me on his bed, he touched me and smiled. He died a few hours later.

To continue reading, please see my post at The High Calling. This week, the final week for essay content, The High Calling is featuring “Best of the Editors,” stories selected by the editors themselves as favorites. This one of mine was originally published in 2010, a few months after the birth of my first grandson, Cameron. My second grandson, Caden, was born in 2012. And Jacob arrived in May of this year.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A Sad Goodbye - and New Beginnings

Note: The editors at The High Calling are beginning to post final stories about the years we spent working on the online publication. I’ll be posting links to the articles as they’re published; my own is scheduled to publish here on Aug. 31.

Here’s the beginning and link to the article posted by Dena Dyer.

A Sad Goodbye – and New Beginnings

By Dena Dyer

“Hi, I’m Dena,” I said to a dark-haired man, about my age, sitting down the row from me. We were both waiting for the “newbies” meeting at Mount Hermon Writer’s Conference to begin.

“I’m Marcus,” he replied, and as we chatted about poetry (his passion) and non-fiction (mine), we discovered that we lived twenty minutes away from one another in Texas. It was a God-incidence, and soon after our initial meeting, Marcus asked me to write for The High Calling about my work as a singer and actress in a theater company. So began a friendship, and a professional relationship, for which I’ll always be grateful.

To continue reading, please visit Dena at her blog, Dena Dyer: Hope and Humor for Hurting Women.


Photograph: The Frio River, which you have to drive through to reach Laity Lodge, where The High Calling staff met annually.

The Stewardship of Retirement

Original themed content at The High Calling is ending this week, with posts next week featuring each editor’s favorite post (I have to sort through five years of articles to determine a favorite.) Appropriately enough, the theme this week is “Finishing Strong,” and I have a post entitled “The Stewardship of Retirement:”

As the time approached for me to seriously considering retiring, I discovered something: retirement is not a biblical concept.

Moses led the Israelites until he died and God buried him somewhere in Moab. David was king until he died. Paul and Peter continued their ministries until they were martyred. Even the Apostle John, exiled on Patmos, the only disciple who (it’s believed) died of old age, was still working, writing down the vision given him.

The Bible has no retirement road map. But it does have a concept that applies to retirement in the twenty-first century, and that concept is stewardship.

To continue reading, please see my post at The High Calling.

Photograph by Paul Brennan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Change at The High Calling

For the last five years, I’ve been part of the editorial staff at The High Calling. We are a part-time, mostly virtual group, living in Texas, West Virginia, Indiana, Nebraska, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania and a few places I’m likely forgetting. We’ve had staff members from as far away as Ireland, South Carolina and Australia.

Working with these writers, editors and fellow pilgrims on the journey of faith has been a remarkable, unforgettable experience. It’s one of those experiences that you cherish each day, knowing that it can change and perhaps end, but while you have it, it is a remarkable thing. What started as an idea in the mind of Howard Butt Jr. created a major presence in the faith and work area.

The announcement of change – that should probably be change in all caps – was made Friday night. A lot of discussion ensued this weekend, mostly on Facebook but some, too, on the post itself. The announcement generated some misunderstanding as well, and I’ve personally received a lot of email messages and private Facebook messages asking for any clarification possible.

Here’s what I know:

The High Calling will cease publishing as it has been at the end of August. Some form will continue – a couple of reflections each week and the Facebook page. But the regular posting of stories built around weekly themes will cease. The site will remain live and accessible.

The Butt Family Foundation, led now by Howard Butt’s son-in-law David Rogers, has decided to go in a different direction with other initiatives. It’s that simple. The High Calling uses the Foundation’s resources and attention, and the Foundation has every right to choose what initiatives it will pursue. My personal feelings, and those of the other staff members, are important to us, but really don’t have any bearing on what strategy the Foundation’s leadership decides.

The understanding of faith and work – living one’s faith in the context of work, including and especially in the secular world – is just now beginning to take hold. It is not a done deal that everyone understands and “gets.” Too many of us still separate Sunday from the rest of the week when it comes to faith. And considerable work remains and, I would argue, is going to become more important as Christians find themselves increasingly at odds with the prevailing culture.

Other groups are actively working the faith and work concept – LeTourneau University’s Center for Faith and Work, the Theology of Work Project, the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, and several more. None of them, however, has the online presence that The High Calling has. And the reason for that may well be that The High Calling was envisioned from the beginning as an online presence, and not only the web and social media properties for an organization or initiative.

The reality is that the change at The High Calling will leave a significant gap in the faith and work area. It’s an exaggeration, but perhaps not much of one, to say that, for faith and work, it would be analogous to The Wall Street Journal announcing it would no longer cover business news.

What I will miss will be the people I work with. We’ll find ways to keep in touch – we already do a lot outside the official High Calling channels via email, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. But losing that regular interaction, that opportunity to work almost every day with people who have come together to create something of value, not for themselves, but for the thousands of people who've participated in what we’re doing via the online world – that’s the part that’s hard.

So: Ann Kroeker, Charity Craig, Sam Van Eman, Deidra Riggs, Marcus Goodyear, Bob Robinson, Cheryl Smith, Dan King (#Fistbump), David Rupert, Dena Dyer, Kris Camealy, Laura Boggess, Tina Howard, and Katie Cherniss – thank you.

Marcus, Deidra, Katie and Tina – best of success with new Foundation initiatives.

To the thousands of members of the High Calling Network – thank you for those blog posts you created, those posts I read every day and tweeted on behalf of The High Calling. This was an incredible community of people, who were so open and caring that virtual always seemed real.

To all of you: thank you for how much you taught me. Thank you for your patience with me. Thank you for your encouragement. Thank you for the opportunity to work alongside of you and create something wonderful. Thank you for living your faith through the work we did – and doing it over and over again.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. Bottom photograph: one of my favorite photos of The High Calling staff.

Art Matters: Asking the Questions No One Can Ask

We recently watched a German mini-series (English subtitles) called Generation War, the story of five young friends in Berlin and what happens to them from 1941 to 1946. Two are brothers, soldiers in the Wehrmacht, sent east to fight the Russians. One girl is a café singer with dreams of a singing career. Her boyfriend is a Jewish tailor with his own dreams of fashion design. And the fifth wants to be a nurse, “representing German women” and helping to tend the soldiers wounded at the front.

It was a riveting series. When it first aired in Germany in 2013, it caused no end of controversy, including a protest by the Polish ambassador over the anti-Semitic depiction of Polish partisans fighting the Nazis. Overall, the series renewed a public conversation lying rather dormant over German war guilt.

The series, and the conversation it inspired in Germany, might not have been possible without the paintings of Anselm Kiefer.

Breaking of the Vessels by Anselm Kiefer (1990)

Until 2014, the sum total of my knowledge of Kiefer and his art was limited to a multi-media sculpture in the St. Louis Art Museum, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels” (photograph above). Few St. Louisans know the work’s official title, but ask anyone who’s been to the art museum “Where can I find the broken glass?” and they know exactly what’s being sought. It’s currently in the main entry hall of the museum. Kiefer created it in 1990.

Last year, I was able to see a major exhibition of Kiefer’s work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (“Breaking of the Vessels’ wasn’t included; I can’t imagine anyone shipping all that broken glass, and there’s a lot of broken glass). His work is overwhelming and often overpowering. It was the kind of exhibition, and the kind of art, you can leave as a changed person. I walked out with the exhibition catalog and a biography of the artist.

Kiefer was born in 1945, not the most auspicious time to be a baby in the wreckage of Nazi Germany. He grew up in southwestern Germany, and graduated from the University of Freiburg in 1969; he began his studies in law and romance languages but switched to painting. Through a series of art installations and also artworks presented as books, the artist asked the question that no one in the German art world was asking or even wanted to ask: what does it mean to be a German artist after the Third Reich?

Anselm Kiefer

Kiefer’s art essentially forced Germans to consider that question. It was part of a broader question: What does it mean to be a German after the Third Reich? That was the conversation Kiefer started. And it was a conversation that had to happen, or Germany and Germans would have forever lived in the dark shadow, and the dark sin, that was Nazism.

The Royal Academy exhibition included numerous striking works: A large oil and acrylic painting entitled “Interior,” representing a rather decayed and ruined version of Albert Speer’s Mosaic Room in Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery; “Man in the Forest,” a man in a nightshirt holding a burning bush in the deep forest; and “Iron Path,” showing railroad tracks through a muddy, gray landscape (railroad tracks have a special meaning in our understanding of Nazi history).

This is what art can do, and this is one of the reasons why art matters. It isn’t just about beauty and the creative act. Art can take us to places we need to go, but that may be politically or culturally difficult if not impossible. Art can force us to acknowledge that “there’s an elephant in the room.” And art can keep asking the questions, which is what Kiefer continues to do with his art today.

More on Anselm Kiefer:

Anselm Kiefer by Matthew Biro provides a good overview of the artist’s works and development.

Anselm Kiefer by Richard Davey and Kathleen Soriano, the book produced for the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Related to the theme “Art Matters:”

What I Learned from a 400-Year-Old Painting

The High Calling has a community linkup with the theme of “Art Matters.” To see what others have to see, please visit The High Calling.

Top painting: “Interior,” oil, acrylic and paper on canvas by Anselm Kiefer, 1981; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

The Power of a Good Question

In the short time I worked for an urban school district as director of communications, I traveled to almost all of the city’s schools. I saw parts of my metropolitan community that I had never been in before; I saw neighborhoods that I didn’t even know existed.

Like the elementary school that sat by itself, isolated by lots around it so long abandoned that trees had taken roots about the weeds. The school had bars on the windows on the second floor. The eight-foot fence around the school was topped with barbed wire. And to enter the steel entrance door, you had to look at the surveillance camera mounted high on the building and be buzzed through.

In spite of that, with all of the schools I visited, with all of the crises I had to deal with, I never felt unsafe, not even at night, not even when 400 people would be shouting in a school board meeting, or 2,000 people would be massed outside in the parking lot.

Perhaps it was ignorance on my part, or assurance. Or both.

The school district’s budget was a shambles; the district was utilizing deficit spending and had been for some time, and hadn’t known it. The day of reckoning had arrived, and the acting superintendent, acting chief financial officer (CFO) and top financial administrators had prepared the possible options for dealing with the crisis. All the choices were bad.

Rather than impose one of the draconian solutions (and all of the options were draconian), officials decided to take the message out to the district – to parents, teachers, students, voters and taxpayers. A series of meetings in different parts of the city were being planned, not only to present the administration’s options but also to solicit ideas from everyone on other possible actions.

This had never been done before.

The CFO called 30 of us into a meeting in his office, which, while nice, was designed to hold perhaps 10 people comfortably. Fifteen was a squeeze. Thirty was like a sardine can. I remember I was sitting on the floor. We were the people who would be making the presentations and answering questions. All of the meetings were scheduled in the evening.

As the CFO walked us through the options and the school locations selected for the meetings, he was interrupted by a long-time administrator.

“I am not going into that building,” she said, referring to one of the high schools. “It is not safe at any time of the day or night, and I’m not going into it.”

The ensuing silence in the room was profound. She had articulated what many of the people on the room were thinking. I could see heads nodding.

No one, including the CFO, knew what to say.

Leave it to the politically naive communications guy to ask the obvious, from his commanding position on the floor.

“If the school is unsafe at any time of the day or night, what are we doing sending children into it every day?”

It was a question no one could answer, or would answer. Some looked away. But no one responded.

Finally, the CFO said, “Let’s get on with finalizing the plans for the presentations.” Everyone went where they were assigned. No one’s safety was threatened. The presentations were made; the community was able to participate in helping the school district make a difficult choice.

A good question can make needed change happen.

The High Calling is hosting a community linkup this week on “The Power of Good Questions.” Please visit the site to see other posts, and consider sharing your own story.

Top photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Good Question Image by Mary Anne Morgan; designed by Kris Camealy. Both used with permission. 

The Thing They Did Right

It was a tumultuous time, and a tumultuous place to work.

A management firm had been hired by our urban school district to undertake the change that, politically, the school district had been unable to do. The district’s infrastructure had been put in place at the height of student enrollment, back in the early 1960s – 130,000 school children.

The current enrollment was officially something like 40,000, and that may have been an exaggeration. Aging, if beautiful, buildings, a huge administrative staff, processes and procedures that might have worked a half century before – expenses were approaching the out-of-control point.

Almost as the management team arrived, the superintendent surprised everyone by announcing his retirement. The head of the management team was named acting superintendent, and looked at the financial books. The district was broke, and had been for some time. A serious educational and infrastructure problem had also become an urgent financial crisis.

For the next three months, budgets were shredded. Hundreds of people were laid off. Longstanding school programs like cafeteria food services were to be outsourced.

Imagine taking on the most conservative bureaucracy with rapid-fire change. It became ugly, exacerbated by the role the school district played in city politics. Protests at the district office and school board meetings became standard operating procedure.

I was hired as the communications director about four months into this process. My team and budget told the story of what was happening. From a staff of 13 and a budget of $1+ million, there was now a team of 1.5 (and I was the 1) and a budget of $20,000, which had already been spent.

I had experience working with management firms. For the previous two decades, these firms had helped restructure much of corporate America. Simultaneously vilified and lauded, they had played a major role in downsizings, restructurings, acquisitions, and divestitures. But I had never heard of a management firm taking over a school district.

This particular firm was better than all of the previous ones I had dealt with. It did some things wrong, and mostly political things. The grand poobahs of the school district and political establishment were often disregarded (many for good reasons). The president of the teachers union didn’t speak for all of the teachers in the union. City Hall was always ready with advice and specific directions.

But the firm did many things right. In fact, it did the important things right. The single most important thing it did right was to have courage.

It took courage to close and consolidate schools.

It took courage to outsource functions like food services.

It took courage to take on the teachers union.

It took courage to stand down the hundreds of protestors who showed up angry and screaming at every school board meeting.

It took courage to engage the community about unpopular decisions that had to be made, or how to determine the least of all bad choices.

It took courage to root out decades of favoritism, nepotism, and gentlemen’s agreements that benefitted the gentlemen (and often the ladies) who made the agreements and no one else.

And it took courage to state the obvious. The district was broke. It had been poorly managed for a long time. Children were not being well educated, except for a very few elite schools.

The management firm’s contract eventually and wasn’t renewed. It didn’t finish everything it set out to do. But it saved the district financially, and set the stage for the state government to come in a few years later to take over the district’s educational programs.

Of all the people I worked with in the school district, it was these outsiders, these “MBA types” with hard-charging personalities and iron-fisted determination to get the job done, who most had the interests of the children of the district at heart.

And it was because they had courage.

The High Calling is looking for stories on “what my employer gets right.” My story here is taken from a work experience I had a few years ago. To see more stories on the theme, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“Have You Ever Lied for Your Company?”

I’ve spent 40 years in organizational communications, mostly in the corporate world. I’ve been on the firing line more times than I want to remember – product crises, environmental crises, public controversies involving the company, and more. I worked for slightly less than year for an urban school district forced into massive change during a full-blown financial crisis and became the most familiar face on local television during that time.

Once, perhaps more than once, I was asked a question by an acquaintance that caught me up short, because I had never been asked it before.

“Have you ever lied for your company?”

I thought a moment, looked at the person asking the question, and answered.

“No. Not once.”

He was surprised. That’s what public relations people are supposed to do, right – lie on a regular basis? Or “mis-speak,” to use the more common word today.

I understand the question. I have seen PR people lie. I’ve also seen just about every other kind of professional and worker lie as well.

But with PR, it’s expected. PR carries a bias for the organization, or bias for the client.

And I will say this: the questioner actually asked the wrong question. The question he should have asked was: “Have you ever been asked, or told, to lie for your company?”

He would have gotten a very different answer. Actually, he would have received four different answers.

First, being directly and knowingly asked to tell a lie is exceedingly rare. It might have been more common in the days before tape recorders, listening devices, and email, but no one says “I need you to lie to the newspaper about this one.” It can happen, but it’s not at all common.

But things quickly get more interesting, more “gray.”

It is possible to speak the truth and lie at the same time – but omitting a key fact or number or situation or perspective. Most of what passes for “spin” – positive or negative – falls into this category, emphasizing one perspective while hoping no one asks about the other. This isn’t limited to business and the private sector, by the way; many others commonly do this. The list  includes politicians, social and environmental activists, lobbyists, attorneys arguing court cases, and teachers trying to explain why they don’t teach penmanship any more but that sensitivity training module for 8-year-olds was wonderful. Newspaper editorial writers are often especially prone to this.

Spin is not something done only by PR people.

The third form of lying is how you say something. You use enough high-sounding words to make a statement seem substantive but really say very little. You emphasize a particular word or phrase, directing attention away, such as “We would never consider doing something that dastardly” (meaning, “No, but we might have done something slightly less dastardly”). What may the most common form of lying in America today – the non-apology: “If I offended anyone with my statement, I’m sorry.” That little word “if” changes the entire meaning.

And finally there’s the old standby, “No comment.” In some cases, organizations truly can’t comment for valid legal reasons – like when an executive gets fired after losing an internal political battle, or a merger or acquisition is pending and what you say will be scrutinized to death by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Publicly traded companies have to be particularly careful.

But much of the time, “no comment” means you don’t want to talk about it because it’s embarrassing and the accusation is actually correct, or a response might get you sued, or answering the question will only drag you into a deeper quagmire.

So, have I successfully avoided lying in all of these contexts? The answer is yes.

In most cases, candid discussion will set things right. People often don’t realize that omitting something or a particular phrasing can be misleading or untruthful, and they will work to make it right.

But it’s made for some difficult work situations. If you regularly raise objections to a planned statement or course of action for valid reasons, you will not be seen as a team player. There can be and often is a cost to your career, your salary, your bonus and your position.

But if you take your faith seriously, and if your faith accompanies you into the office, cubicle or shop floor, that’s what you do.

This week, The High Calling has been having a community linkup on the theme of “Clear Conscience.” To see what others are saying, please visit The High Calling and check the links.

Faith at the Firing Line

At the end of this week, I’ll be retiring from my day job, and I’ve been looking back at some thirty-seven years in corporate communications.

Most of my work has centered in the oil, chemical, and agriculture industries; none of them lack controversy or crisis. My career has largely been spent on the firing line.

At times, it felt like the firing squad.

Government and regulatory issues. Environmental problems. Product crises. Transportation accidents. Public protests. “He said/she said” litigation. Even the short time I worked in a non-corporate environment for the St. Louis Public Schools, it was much the same. There, I dealt with restructurings, school closings, layoffs, protests at school board meetings, and teacher sick-outs.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling.

Photograph by Any Bay via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Choosing the Greater of Two Evils

You make a mistake. You get yourself in over your head. You want the problem to just go away. But it doesn’t. It festers. And then one day the problem erupts. Instead of doing the right thing and coming clean, you make it worse. Far worse.

John the Baptist was no shy wallflower. He preached repentance from sin. He baptized. He lived what he preached. He called people out. He called leaders out for bad behavior. And that was a problem for Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea. John was rather outspoken and didn’t mince words when he condemned Herod’s divorce from his first wife and then marriage to his brother Philip’s wife, Herodias. Divorce was not popular among the people Herod ruled.

To continue reading, please see my Daily Reflection today at The High Calling.

Painting: The Executioner Presents the Head of St. John the Baptist to King Herod; Giambattista Langetti (1625/35 – 1676), private collection / The Bridgeman Art Library.

The Conflict of Interest That Saved David’s Life

The idea of a conflict of interest goes back to at least Babylonian times, when judges were forbidden from accepting bribes from people involved in legal disputes. (Yes, this sounds like a no-brainer, but it must have been a significant enough problem for it to be forbidden.) The origin of the phrase "conflict of interest" is less certain, but it was in use in the English language by the 1740s, primarily in a legal context.

One of the best examples of conflict of interest occurs in the book of 1 Samuel. And yet the account never raises the question itself.

It's a familiar story. Jonathan, the son of Saul, is the friend of David. That friendship saves David's life, over and over again. It also put Jonathan squarely in the middle of at least three types of conflict of interest.

To continue reading, please see my Daily Reflection today for The High Calling.

Technology: A Love-Hate Relationship

I’m in New Orleans for a treasured aunt’s funeral, sitting in my 88-year-old mother’s kitchen, some 650 miles away from my office. It’s four in the morning. I’m connected online via my mother’s landline. We make do with what’s available. My company’s CEO is in Switzerland for a big business conference that will be livestreamed over the internet. The plan is for people at the event to livetweet, and I will retweet them. The program will last one hour.

Nothing goes according to plan. The people in Switzerland forget to livetweet. The livestream will work only herky-jerky over the landline. The company is announcing a big initiative, and we have to livetweet it. I feel the panic rising.

Yes, we make do with what’s available. I pirate the next-door neighbor’s wifi, pull up the livestream, and begin to tweet a meeting 5,000 miles from where I’m sitting. No one knows that I’m not in the room in Switzerland. And by following the stream via the meeting’s hashtag, I can periodically retweet photos and what others are recording. I end up with 45 tweets in an hour. I quickly assemble the tweets into a narrative flow and post them on the company’s blog.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Nice Guys Finish…What?

I’m reading the newspaper one Tuesday morning, and there on the obituary page I see a photo with a story about a local retired executive who had died of cancer.

I stared. I could barely comprehend the words.

I wrote speeches for this man for four years, some of the best speeches I’ve ever written. I loved working for him. He was smart, capable, a quiet kind of leader, and somehow he had managed to work his way through the ranks and arrive at the executive building.

To continue reading, please see today’s edition of the Patheos Work and Faith Channel of The High Calling. The article was originally published by The High Calling.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A Community of Four – For a Week

The church had never quite had a short-term mission team like this one.

A chemist. A retired engineer. And a PR guy / writer.

Our assignment: An eight-day trip to Eastern Europe, with a whirlwind itinerary: Budapest, Prague, Dresden, Brno, and back to Budapest. We were to interview missionaries, to help with their support-raising efforts; film the world of the mission underway across cities in Eastern Europe; do a short film to help with fundraising to buy a permanent building for the mission in Budapest. And prepare a series of reports that could be used by the mission agency back in the United States.

None of us had been to Eastern Europe before.

The retired engineer – Jack – manned the video camera. I was the writer and interviewer. The chemist – Steve – was the gaffer, trip manager, equipment manager, and general factotum.

We trained for months – studied, planned, discussed, and met. We practiced interviewing missionaries. We pored over maps and some of the history and background of the places we would be visiting and the people we would be meeting. We also spent time getting to know each other. And somewhere in that time the team became a small community.

Once we landed in Budapest, we would have a fourth member of the team – Gary, one of the permanent missionaries. He would be our guide, chauffeur, teacher, answerer of questions, hotel finder, translator, and church and mission office locator (a sort of human MapQuest).

The mission in Budapest was enthusiastic, we were enthusiastic, and our home church coordinator was enthusiastic. The national mission agency and our own church missions committee were less enthusiastic. We were different. They had never heard of such a team before. Was this more of a vacation than a “real mission trip?” A communications team? Really?

Still, we flew to Budapest. We were waiting for our baggage at the Budapest airport when we learned our overscheduled itinerary had just been thrown out the window. Erfurt in Germany had been added as an itinerary stop, about three to four hours from Dresden (and we drove like Americans, not Germans).

Gary, our driver, slipped right into our little community as if he’d been there all along. He explained what we might see along the roadsides and near border crossings in the two countries with legalized prostitution (he was right). He got us through back streets in the dark of night to find our hotels. As we approached one border crossing, he told us to remove our jackets and throw them across the camera equipment, to discourage confiscation by the border guards.

Four countries, eight days. On our way to Dresden, we stopped for dinner at a restaurant in the Sudeten Mountains, where no one spoke English and all conversation stopped when we walked in. (The menu was, fortunately, in Czech and German; my college German was sufficient to figure out what we could eat.)

We were in cities and suburbs, large towns and small. We filmed interviews with almost 20 missionaries. We filmed the building in Budapest the mission hoped to buy. I wrote story and after story. We ate tomatoes together for breakfast, and had a lunch at the McDonalds in Chemnitz, Germany. We walked down Wenceslas Square together in Prague, and across the Charles Bridge.

Our little community worked. We carried each other’s bags and equipment. We became something of a cohesive news crew, especially when we found ourselves right in the middle of the biggest news story in Europe – the murder of 16 people at a high school in Erfurt. It was at that school and the small church nearby whose pastor was ministering to the bereaved families where we met the Holy Spirit.

Most of the writing and film editing work happened after we were home. Did our community succeed at its task?

Missionaries were helped with support, and their video reports sent to their home churches and supporters. The video for the hoped-for mission building in Budapest succeeded in helping raise the needed funds. The people working in the mission were encouraged.

And we, our little band of three plus one, were changed. Forever.

Over at The High Calling, a community linkup has been posted for the theme of the power of community. If you have a story about community, or even just want to read what others have to say, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph of Budapest traffic by Mick Lissone via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.