One of my mentors died yesterday. 

Rest in peace Dr. Craig Gannon.

When I was a doofus of an 18 year old college freshman more interested in what girl I had a shot with than academics of any kind, Dr. Gannon endured academic advising sessions with me that must surely have caused him to wonder what the Hell he was doing with his life. With folded hands on his crossed legs, and with the ubiquitous classical music of Kansas Public Radio playing behind him, he made gentle suggestions of ways to fill my schedule with core requirements. What a thankless chore. 

That spring I took his Language Studies class. It was an overview of linguistics, and I was totally and hopelessly lost. 

Still, two years later I decided on Language and Literature as a major, and over the next four semesters Dr. Gannon taught me Shakespeare, Kipling, Wordsworth, Woolf. He made me analyze prose and memorize poetry. The work I do now as a preacher and teacher derive directly from a sensitivity to tone and context, rhythm and diction, that I learned at his feet. 

In 2002 he came to my wedding.

In 2006 he retired, and I was honored to write about it for the alumni magazine. The phone interview I did with him from the Memphis airport was the last conversation I had with him. 

Today I recommit myself to the ideal of the literary life in honor of Dr. Craig Gannon. 

I’m back from a week of vacation, and I’m thinking the most important parts of it were not the parts we planned but rather the parts in between the plans. 

Who doesn’t want to lay on a white sand beach or visit a spider monkey sanctuary? That we’re able to enjoy such activities places us in privileged sector of the human family, do doubt. Yet vacation revealed to me just how lacking our life is in another valuable human commodity: unscheduled leisure time. 

When else do you teach your kid to shuffle cards? 

I’m working on persistence. It feels like a game of whack-a-mole.
For two weeks now I have persistently blogged posted a daily blog. I have also spent time with the daily paper. These are both habits I committed to.
During the same stretch my exercise regimen has evaporated, and my diet has tanked.
Is there a limit to the things you can persistently perform? Does committing to something new mean you have to give something else up?
Note: I’ll be on vacation next week and not posting at all. Be well.

Failure has become popular among the circles of writers and speakers I pay attention to, a trend I think is very healthy if not a little over-enthusiastically endorsed some of the time. So I love “The Worst I Ever Bombed,” the web exclusives posted by The Tonight Show where comedians share truly horrific stories of their worst performances (see Rob Riggle below).

Bombing isn’t always a performance. I’ve bombed at the supermarket as my kid’s toddler tantrum spilled all over the produce section. I’ve bombed in small talk (“So when are you due? What’s that? Oh you’re not pregnant? Awesome). I bomb in marriage all the time. One time I gave my wife a Christmas gift about which she had to seriously had to ask me–with a straight face–“Is this a joke?”

What’s the worst you ever bombed?

I did a Children’s Sermon about six years ago only minutes after my wife and I had sniped at each other on the church patio. With my lavaliere mic on. So things were already shaky. Then mere seconds into my story about Jesus feeding the 5,000, I made the rookie mistake of soliciting a response from the kids. They obliged. One girl in particular obliged more than her peers, launching into a story all her own.

I politely cut her off after several seconds and continued about Jesus, but every time I took a breath, this little girl picked up her story right where she’d left off. After about five of these interruptions, the congregation started to chuckle. By her eight or ninth intrusion there was open guffawing going on, so I stopped my story and implored the congregation, “What would you do?!”

A loud chorus of laughter followed, which had the immediate effect of shaming this poor little girl. As she buried her head in her hands I did my best to assure her that they were laughing at me and not her. Bomb.

I prematurely ended the story, leaving a hungry crowd and a humiliated kid.

What’s the worst you ever bombed?

Our work is only partly for its proper objects.

The teacher works for his students, the pediatrician for her patients, the CEO for her shareholders. These are the proper objects of their work.

Yet we all also work for spies who are watching our habits and our smallest decisions and who can benefit tremendously from our craft.

I thought of his while watching a photographer take a portrait of my daughter. He was so thorough and so fluid in his work that I couldn’t help but want to imitate him in mine. His work was not for me, but it totally was.

Let’s beware of spies and wow them.

So says Charles M. Blow in yesterday’s New York Times.

I recommitted to that daily paper a few weeks ago, and now I’m paying a price of that commitment that exceeds the monthly subscription fee. It’s a mental and spiritual cost; I feel more tired and more discouraged, less hopeful, and, ironically, less engaged in the world around me.

I understand Gaza, Ukraine, and Ebola better now than before. But I honestly wonder what good my “staying abreast” of those conflicts is doing anyone.

The allure of ignorance is strong these days.

http://rd.io/x/QEq_KzNIqA/

 

I had a dream last night in which I led a youth mission project alongside one of the former Youth Directors at my church. I can’t say which one it actually was; it was something of an amalgam of two. As we picked up trash on a hill, I questioned my predecessor on the congregation’s youth ministry of yesteryear. Her answers crushed me. Things were so much better then.

One specific question I remember. I asked, “What about graduates who stick around and don’t leave the area for college. Did you still do work with them?”

“Oh yes,” she answered, “I worked very hard at that.”

Dreams are weird. I have an inferiority complex. There’s nothing new under the sun.

Still, though, I’m listening.

 

 

 

It’s annual personnel review season here at the church. and this year we’re using a new narrative template for these things. I like it a lot. Here’s one of the questions:

Are there particular skills or areas of professional development you would like to undertake during the coming year?

Yes. Yes there are.

I want to get better at leading change . I want to learn strategies for forming self-learning groups. And some other stuff.

I want to get better.

What about you? 12 months from now, what do you want to be better at?

People play recreation league softball for different reasons. Some are there to play a game they love and get better at it. Some want the competition. Others need the physical activity. Still others do it for the regular social interaction. The community softball league is a durable institution because people want to do it for lots of different reasons ranging from the competitive and athletic to the social.

Some teams are young, brash, and win a lot. Others are slow and laid back, and they don’t win as much. They don’t care as much either. The fiery competitor will be frustrated on the laid back team, and the team won’t take well to her. Same is true of the duffer on the team of hot shots.

Of course this makes me think about church. There’s a line of thinking that churches need simple expressions of themselves that everyone can rally around, things like, “Bible-based” or “Inclusive” or “Missional.” That seems to me to make a team out of church, rather than a league.

Which is better?

Susan Cain says there’s no correlation between the best talker and the best ideas.

I’ll stop talking now.