They are serious about the great work of the serving people.  They work as people who have their last message on earth to convey. It was not just another job they do. They love life and support life and those that treat all people with value.

They are people of faith. They plough and work and know that they would sow at the right time. The have faith in God and trust completely in Him – even when it they may not have all the answers before they start and are honest enough to know it.

They are people of hard work. They bear the brunt of hard times, willingly, without holding back. They might murmur at times, once they catch their breath in the adventure before them they work on. They work with an eye on eternity knowing that truth is better than compromise of your core life.

They are people of patience. They do not get easily discouraged or dejected, although they work hard and they would want more fruit or quicker results but they hang in their even if it cost everything. They trust other to come along side but are excellent in discerning liars and they deal with them.  

They are people with nerve and determination. They aren’t afraid to speak the truth and to take a stand against corruption and evil. We need today leaders of nerve to lead and enjoy the adventure of living full out with a zeal that is tender-hearted and full of strong ethics.

They are people of continual prayer. It is true that they work hard, have coffee with many, speak even to the media (even when they are always mis-quoted), but they also pray. Their prayer life soars as the one aspect that seems to exceed all others. They know that there is some One greater than themselves and they need prayer to sustain them as they serve others proactively.

 Let's vote - if you don't stand up for those that are republican and vote for them... you will get what Germany got in the 30's. When good people do NOTHING - are SILENT... you get only fools in charge and the consquences will be needless pain. VOTE! We can help reform the republicans easier than the democrats who have NO CORE.  So vote republican and in Colorado - YES on 43... no on 1 and also vote to keep local control of our schools! 

  VOTE!!!

Recently I read a book called “Believers in Business” based on interviews with about 85 Christian CEOs and executives in some major corporations in America. It explores how these executives deal with ethical dilemmas in their business lives. Understand that we are all business people, if you write a check, drive a car, shop for anything we all exchange goods for services (not just hours for money) - business.

The author, Laura Nash, summarizes their experiences as a series of sustained tensions between personal faith and seven basic elements of capitalism. She identifies these tensions, I call them "double binds":

• Love for God/the pursuit of profit (profit is defined by what you do with it – personal note)
• Concern for people/the competitive drive
• Care for employees/profit obligations
• Humility/the self-importance of success
• Family/work
• Charity/wealth
• Being God's change agents in the secular city/ being separate

Nash has observed three different responses to these tensions:

• The generalist - who never gets down to specific examples, so denies there's any real tension here.
• The justifier - who generally assumes that the business side of the equation is supported by the faith side anyway, so there is no real ethical conflict.
• The seeker - who is acutely aware that there are points where the concerns of faith and business conflict, so expects to struggle with difficult choices in order to do what is right – and so moves to a wholistic mindset.

Nash, who is not a Christian, was surprised to find how many people in her study fitted the 'seeker' category. She was impressed with the way they worked through ethical dilemmas.

The 'seeker', she says, recognizes the tensions between Christian belief, human failing and economic realities, and so wrestles with Christian conscience on the one hand and business responsibilities on the other, in order to seek the most compatible response possible. She hastens to add that these people were also realists rather than idealists, in the sense that they certainly didn't subscribe to the concept of trying to be 'perfect' Christians doing the perfect Christian deed.

Nash also notes that in many cases people seek activity, which leads to alternative courses of action, which not only express Christian ethical concerns, but often strokes of economic brilliance as well. So, she suggests, if Christian people can learn to live more consciously on the intersection of the world- faith and business, some very creative solutions to ethical dilemmas are possible. Again I might add that a Christian needs to have a whole world (global Christian – Kingdom) and life mindset & that is - that all work is sacred, that all life is sacred!

But, Nash warns, if we want to give expression to a profound connection between faith and economic activity, we are in a delicate position. Trying to maintain a traditional biblical worldview while immersing ourselves in the modern culture of the corporation or constructing an invisible wall between these two, which creates personal dilemmas. Again maybe we need to get out of the box of the traditional view held by some because they think it is easier, that the only "sacred day" is Sunday & Monday through Saturday is secular. Oh the tension of life... isn't it wonderful!

The seeker, then, must attempt to reconcile these two worlds and make them relevant to each other by using the tension between business and faith and stretch ourselves to think creatively. As a seeker we can & do create a combination of economic and spiritual activity by thinking Christianly, which transforms not only us but also those around us. But if we are too distant - as in a completely privatized faith - faith concerns will no longer have an impact on the economic world – and it is a dead faith (James 2:14-26). We may profess to be Christian, but we will no longer venture into the world as Christians. Faith will become just what we do with our leisure time. If faith is a leisure activity then the ethics of Tyco, Enron - and “Clintonism” of "is - is" systems will dominate again and again because good people of faith do or say nothing.

Compartmental or Wholistic life? Compartmental thinking says each section is separate and doesn’t effect/affect any other. And Wholistic thinking says each part affects and effects the whole - nothing is done that is totally independent of the other. Which one are you? Your life has lasting or temporary impact depending on which is your core operating principle. Business and Life isn't it great!!! Have fun in your discovery! What do you think?

Last September, in an op-ed published in the International Herald Tribune, a virtual unknown outside of nonprofit circles slammed the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals, the framework for a massive global antipoverty effort, as a "recipe for disaster" doomed to "be achieved only on paper." Jeffrey Sachs, who, as director of the Millennium Project, is pushing the goals toward action, says, "I basically fell off my chair when I read it."

Who was this upstart? An Indian named Bunker Roy, 60, whose Tilonia-based group, the Barefoot College, has spent 30 years empowering India's rural poor to innovate their way out of poverty. Given that most of his constituents are among the population the Millennium Development Goals are targeting--the 1 billion people in the world who live on less than $1 a day--you'd think that he and Sachs would be on the same page. They're not.

Roy's track record makes it hard to dismiss his motives as pure politics. In 1967, he abandoned a privileged upbringing outside Calcutta to spend five years digging wells in rural Rajasthan. That experience brought an epiphany: Leverage the tremendous knowledge and skills of the poor, and they'll be able to work toward their own development.

Barefoot College students, "washouts, copouts, and dropouts," as Roy fondly calls them, learn skills ranging from midwifery to computer programming, solar engineering to rainwater harvesting. There is no required curriculum, no deadline for graduation, no degree awarded. The school, which includes stipends for all students, is supported by the income generated by offering such services to villages all over India. "The point," says Roy, "is to demystify technology, to allow people the space to acquire a skill on their own time, and to build self-confidence so that they can replicate what they've learned at home."

That catalytic role has sparked the Barefoot College's expansion to 20 independent sites across India. The network, with nearly 1,000 Barefoot experts in 1,000 villages, reaches 500,000 people with basic services such as drinking water, health care, and education. "On the people's-empowerment front, Bunker's model is unbeatable," says Brenda McSweeney, who, as the top official for the UN Development Program in India from 1998 to 2003, worked with Roy and the Barefoot College. "There was an enormous sense of dignity among the people."

Roy hopes to seed baby Barefoots all over the world, something he's starting with a $615,000 grant from the Skoll Foundation. It's a scalable, community-based model of development managed from the bottom up by the poor themselves--a decentralized alternative to the Millennium Villages launched in Kenya and Ethiopia by Sachs's Earth Institute at Columbia University (which is dependency focused at it's corre - like at the U.N. is!) . The big difference is, it costs at least $250,000 to set up each Millennium Village. "Do you know how much I could get done with that kind of money?" Roy says. Last year, with just $100,000, he brought 10 Afghans to India to train at the Barefoot College for six months and bought 120 solar units to power five villages.

In the face of mass poverty, of course, strategies such as Roy's can take decades and help just a relative few. "Not taking advantage of the West's technology and trade doesn't make sense," says David Evans, an associate economist at the Rand Corp. On the other hand, some Barefoot College programs already have made inroads in places such as Afghanistan and the northern Himalayas, where Western development efforts have trouble penetrating - common sense wins again!!! Use that which is duplicable and be expanded on to improve!  

What are doing to give to life? Share it with us!

 Greetings... this is my first blog, hopefully it will spark thinking, insight and a informational exchange that will bring added ingredients of life to our Culture. So here's to Life...may we be lifegivers to it!

Look around you…in many communities, churches, ministries/organizations, even in fast growing companies, you'll find friends, family even colleagues who have given up. They're disillusioned, disengaged, even cynical. Somewhere along the line, they were disappointed by dumb decisions, passed over for key promotions or raises, or just beaten down by banging their heads against life’s wall day after day. Asking these folks to commit to any kind of meaningful transformation seems like a waste of time. The psychology of change confirms, the odds of making lasting changes are almost always against us -- even when our very lives are at stake. That troubling fact only underscores the difficulty of altering the culture or direction of any enterprise populated by thousands of different people with different agendas.

Truth is, as John W. Gardner once pointed out in his interesting book Self-Renewal, we construct our own prisons and often serve as our own jail keepers. We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of life and work are more stale than they know, more bored than they care to admit.

Yet we know how crucial it is to advance, to change, to grow, to discover and to know what Apostle Paul talks about all the time and then what Jesus said that He came to give life more abundant than anything else. I am dedicated to the belief that change (transformation) is at the core of our human fulfillment and it is the sustainable fruit that lasts in life. When a person's internal clock is frozen in time, when he or she has given up on growing, learning, being transformed that person has lost one of the most precious gifts of a well-lived life. And if people or organizations can't change, they will sadly die.

We can talk forever about strategy, structure, process, and culture which is helpful. But more than anything, life’s struggle is about change/transformation. Your life, marriage, family, ministry, business, so your life has to be lived in the ability to stay fresh and vital. It all will depend on the ability to change the core of who we are to the perfect will of the Father, then the behavior of ourselves and other people with impact the world with real life.

So how do we shift the odds in our favor? Here's what I think a transformed life has to teach us:

• Real change isn't motivated by either crisis or fear. The best inspiration comes from leaders who can create compelling living visions of the future. Your faith core determines your vision. Jesus gave us some of the best inspiration that I can think of, read John’s story and Jesus’ word recorded there.
• Small, gradual changes rarely lead to transformation. Radical, sweeping changes are riskier but often more effective, because they quickly yield benefits visible to everyone most of all to you. So go on be transformed by the renewing of your mind to a new pattern, go on! Within a ministry, company you need to have a change group that leads the way to communicate the change. Then you as a leader inspire and infuse the change group with the vision of the future, then change can happen with celebration not rebellion.
• Narratives, not always just facts, guide our thinking. Data on declining marriages, family crisis points, churches, company sales, the market share or quality problems won't get people to change what they do. Rather, appeals rooted in life giving emotion are what best inspire people to alter course mixed with factual outcomes of change and results of those that don’t. Find creative people who are living it to speak it to others, CD's, books and last but not least YOU yes you are a life-giving story to mentor others! 
• That quest for a real life is the most compelling reason for change. Life is a process of self-discovery in light of eternity, an adventure with some unpredictable turns in life situations in which we find ourselves and yet we don’t fear evil because we aren’t alone in our journey. Our potentialities are not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving, and aspiring.

I can think of no better reason not to give up, not to run down like an unwound clock. We’re transformed, we grow, and we truly live. The worst of all fears is the fear of living, so LIVE overcome have resolute courage to do so. Then tell the narrative of how you overcame that fear to LIVE life to inspire our fellow travelers. As Christians we really can do all things through Jesus who is the author of life and so we can have our lives full and overflowing! "We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage", T.R. Roosevelt once said, can that be true of us as people of Faith, I deeply hope so!