40 Thoughts at 40 by Will Mancini (@willmancini)

1. Clarity isn’t everything, but it changes everything.
2. Jesus was totally clear about His origin, His mission, and His destiny.
3. In the first half of your life, the opportunity of every situation is found more in what you learn than in what you give.
4. The rest of your life will be in the future, so prepare for it now.
5. The most important question I have ever discovered is, “What is God up to?”
6. Imagination is more important than knowledge – Einstein
7. My personal calling is to serve God and others by helping people “apply essence”.
8. The height of your clarity is related to the depth of your humility.
9. Because God’s creative genius is endless, our genius is the ability to scrutinize the obvious.
10. Clarity brings fresh meaning to the familiar.
11. What you CAN do for God is a distraction to what you MUST do for God.
12. You can’t be anything u want to be, but u can be everything God wants u to be – Max Lucado.
13. If you are copying someone’s else’s vision, than who will accomplish yours?
14. “We were meant to live for so much more…maybe we’ve been living with our eyes half open” – Switchfoot
15. Two things bring clarity- scarcity and courage to think.
16. People are addicted to product, but process provides the meaning.
17. Most people don’t like to think.
18. I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side. – O.W. Holmes
19. The clearer I become, the more work, service and play become one.
20. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication – DaVinci
21. My family mission is to build the central circle of love for guiding each generation to courageously follow Christ.
22. All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and nought – Thomas Carlyle
23. What’s new is not always what’s best.
24. Our mission is to navigate leaders through growth challenges with vision and clarity.
25. The safe assumption today is that no two congregations are alike – Lyle Schaller
26. Clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader; if you do nothing else, be clear – Marcus Buckingham
27. State your vision framework before you frame your vision statement.
28. All vision is a solution to a prior problem. And if people don’t feel the problem they won’t catch the vision.
29. If we are to paint a picture of the future, we must remember, “There is no art without intention”.
30. If you have formal plans but no vision, then unpredictable changes will make you feel like the sky is falling – H. Mintzberg
31. Focus expands.
32. Success assaults clarity.
33. New levels bring new devils.
34. Successful church leaders: You are only 100 people away from diluting & polluting the clarity that got you there.
35. It’s easier to say no with a deeper yes burning inside – S. Covey
36. In ministry today, less is more. Programs don’t attract people, people attract people.
37. The church of God does not have a mission, the mission of God has a church – Reggie McNeal
38. If at first the idea is not absurd, there is probably no hope for it – Einstein
39. The only way to change culture is to create more of it…creativity is the only viable source of change – Andy Crouch
40. Profound knowledge comes from the outside – Deming (Who is your strategic outsider?)

Global-Local Initiative

What does it mean for the local body?

 The Global-Local initiative is a change of mindset for many of those who fill the comfortable seats of the local sanctuary.  It’s more than just giving to missions and never seeing the results.  It’s more than just sending a check.  It’s more than giving a dime to a homeless man on the exit ramp of a major highway.  It’s about getting involved and actually being the feet and hands of the ministry, not just the wallet.

Don’t get me wrong, the wallet is a very important part of the initiative, for without support, we cannot attain the works that we desire to see happen.

We aren’t doing this to make ourselves look better in the local community.  We aren’t trying to get our church in the local papers or on the nightly broadcasts.  We truly have to want to make an impact and change people’s way of living.

What about the family in Ghana with no running water?  It’s one thing to take bottled water to them, another thing to build a well for a boundless supply of fresh water.  But, why stop there?  That’s why we are building a church.  We want to give them The Person from whom the Waters of Life never cease.  That’s what it comes down to.  We want these people to know that the physical, fresh water that they are drinking was provided by people who know and want to share with them, the One with Living Water.

Does that make sense?  It’s more than just getting a drink…It’s getting an answer to life.

What about the homeless who have been displaced through the economic downturn or because they are a disabled American veteran?  We need to make ways to get them off of the exit ramps of our highways and the exit ramps of life and get them re-routed and back onto the road to a new future.  It’s not enough to throw them a dime.  They need a lifeline and someone who can help them understand that there is more to life than what they are experiencing.  The church is supposed to be just that. 

Let me quote this phenomenal, heart-wrenching song, Asleep In The Light by the late Keith Green:

 

Do you see, do you see, all the people sinking down,

Don’t you care, don’t you care, are you gonna let them drown,

How can you be so numb, not to care if they come,

You close your eyes and pretend the job’s done.

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Oh Bless me Lord, bless me Lord, you know it’s all I ever hear,

No one aches, no one hurts, no one even sheds one tear,

But He cries, He weeps, He bleeds, and He cares for your needs,

And you just lay back and keep soaking it in, oh, can’t you see it’s such sin?

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Cause He brings people to your door,

And you turn them away, as you smile and say,

God bless you, be at peace, and all Heaven just weeps,

Cause Jesus came to your door, you’ve left Him out on the streets.

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Open up, open up, and give yourself away,

You’ve seen the need, you hear the cry, so how can you delay,

God’s calling and you’re the one, but like Jonah you run,

He’s told you to speak, but you keep holding it in,

Oh, can’t you see it’s such sin?

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The world is sleeping in the dark,

That the church just can’t fight, cause it’s asleep in the light,

How can you be so dead, when you’ve been so well fed,

Jesus rose from the grave, and you, you can’t even get out of bed,

Oh, Jesus rose from the dead, come on, get out of your bed.

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How can you be so numb, not to care if they come,

You close your eyes and pretend the job’s done,

You close your eyes and pretend the job’s done,

Don’t close your eyes, don’t pretend the job’s done.

 

 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXb45UTUFWU&hl=en&fs=1&]

There is a difference between being moved and being mobilized. 

Whenever we choose to engage a divine opportunity, there is the real potential of bringing others into God’s presence and God’s purpose. 

It should not surprise us that when God is moving there is a human agent of change.

God has not remained silent.  He has spoken both through the Word, who has walked among us, and through His Word that He has written to guide us.  The adventure begins here.  Live out what God has already spoken, and you will not find God silent.

To live a prayerless life is to miss the life that God created you to experience.  Yet there are times when prayer can become a religious veil for an empty life.

If one danger in regard to prayer is to be prayerless, another is to pray more and remain empty of genuine contact with God.

Praying is not about informing God of your needs, nor is it even about trying to convince God to help you.  Prayer is about connecting to God.  It is about experiencing His presence and moving with Him in intimate communion.

It is when prayer is active rather than proactive.  It is the way we subtly use prayer not to seek God’s will, but to delay our obedience to His will.

Our lives are to be a continuous conversation with God.  This kind of life of prayer is one where we are sensitive to every prompting and whisper of God.  We are not only informing God, but God is informing us.  He is an active and intimate participant in our daily choices.

Prayer is an obstacle when we keep praying about things of which God has already spoken.  If He has commanded us in his Word, there is nothing to pray about – just obey.

Prayer can also be an obstacle when we hide behind prayer while the moment needs action.  There are moments when it is too late for praying.  It is when God has already spoken and we are late to the appointment.  When that’s the case, we need to run.

Are you using prayer as a way of resisting God’s will rather than a way of accessing God’s will?  Jesus did not have a value for prayer for prayer’s sake.  He had a value for the intimate communion between God and man.  The purpose of prayer is to know God and, in knowing Him, to her God’s voice and understand that God has heard your voice.  The end result of this kind of prayer is a heart pliable enough to move wherever God is calling.

Prayer that connects you to God positions you to seize divine moments.

Prayer should move you, not paralyze you.  And when you pray with intent to obey, you become a magnet who draws others into God’s presence.  You can choose to establish a monument for prayer or pray to unleash a movement.  One is religious; the other is revolutionary.

With Moses, God parted the waters, and then the people crossed over. With Joshua, the leaders were required to begin crossing first, and then the waters parted. In my life journey, I have found time and time again that God changes the parameters of my faith. He increases His expectation of me. What it means to live on the edge as your faith begins to develop is not the measure of faith when you walk in maturity. You should expect and desire that God would move from parting the waters while you stand on the shore to calling you to step out into the waters and experience the miracle happening around you. In the first, you watch the miracle. But in the second, you become a part of it.

What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?
Six months before he was assassinated, King spoke to a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967.

I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is your life’s blueprint?

Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, and a building is not well erected without a good, solid blueprint.

Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid and a sound blueprint.

I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life’s blueprint. Number one in your life’s blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you fell that you’re nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.

Secondly, in your life’s blueprint you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You’re going to be deciding as the days, as the years unfold what you will do in life — what your life’s work will be. Set out to do it well.

And I say to you, my young friends, doors are opening to you–doors of opportunities that were not open to your mothers and your fathers — and the great challenge facing you is to be ready to face these doors as they open.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture in 1871, “If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

This hasn’t always been true — but it will become increasingly true, and so I would urge you to study hard, to burn the midnight oil; I would say to you, don’t drop out of school. I understand all the sociological reasons, but I urge you that in spite of your economic plight, in spite of the situation that you’re forced to live in — stay in school.

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well. If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill.

Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.

— From the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Have you ever looked at the middle of the word influence?  What do you see?  It’s hidden right there.  F-l-u.  That’s right, the flu.  People who are influential pass on what they have like the flu.  If you don’t want what they’ve got, stay away from them because they’ll sneeze all over you.

Influence is contagious, and if you want to know how influence works, just follow the trail of influenza.  It is airborne and passes most quickly through human contact, but proximity still endangers your contamination.  You can’t see them pass from one person to another, but you know when they have you.  And we are all carriers – not of a dangerous virus, I hope, but carriers of character.  And through our character, we pass on attitudes, values, and other life-shaping virtues.  All of us pass a bit of ourselves on to others.  You better like who you are and make what you give to others from yourself a gift and not a curse.

Excerpt from “Chasing Daylight” by Erwin McManus

I can’t help but notice some very interesting points in the beginning stanzas of Mark, chapter 2.  Sure, we’ve all heard this story before.  A guy that is paralyzed has his friends take him to the place where Jesus is and tear the roof off and lower him in to be healed.  Yada, yada.  But there is so much more to this story than the surface level.

My prayer is that we surround ourselves with friends such as this un-named man had.  

Do you have people that will carry you across the town whenever you are down and out?  How about friends that don’t just stop there, but hoist you up on the roof to be able to get you the miracle that you so desperately need.  I am lucky to be in the midst of guys like this and I hope they know that I would do the same.

Think about this.  This man was lifted, on a mat, up on the roof, then lowered to be right in front of the man who can change his world, but who were the faces that he saw as he was being lowered?  Lying on his back, he saw his friends faces up above, full of faith and belief in a real God.

It is even mentioned in verse 5, “Impressed by THEIR bold belief” (The Message) and “When Jesus saw how much faith THEY had” (CEV).  It wasn’t so much about the paralytic as it was about his friends.

Who are those friends who are around you?  Are they willing to believe whole-heartedly for YOUR miracle?

After studying many passages from books, I keep going over the question, “Am I just believing or am I actually doing?”

There is  a vast difference in the two, as you know.  Believing that people need help and actually doing the help is a great shift in thinking that we need to change.

On Monday, we were on our way to the mall for the twins’ birthday party when a homeless man was standing on the corner, looking ragged and in need of someone who cares.  Sure there are some people who are swindlers, but it’s not my call to judge who is whom.  My call is to help those who are in need.  I had my wife and my four young and impressionable girls in the van with me, so I thought that this would be a great lesson.  We didn’t have much in the car to give this man, but what we had, we gave.  At first, Kara was reluctant, but I asked her, “what are we gonna do with this money?”  It was mere change in our hand that could change his day.  After she rolled down the window and gave the money to the man, I could see her attitude change.  Where she was just saying, “You want me to roll down the window?”, she changed her tone to, “When we come out of the mall from the party, if we still have cake left, we can stop and give it to him, if he’s there.”

That’s what I’m talking about.  Not just believing what God teaches, but actually doing it.  We are called to love people and to teach those around us to love people.  Our girls didn’t ask why we gave to that man, but I guarantee, that it is something that they’ll remember.  Doing is a much greater teacher than talking about it.

As many of you know, I was laid off back in February, so we haven’t exactly been living the high life, financially these last two months.  I have to tell you though, we have every bill paid up to a balance of $0 and food in the cupboards and money in supply.  We have committed ourselves to be tithers.  We have tithed here and there, but never consistently, until now.  Our kids have never gone hungry.  Never cold.  Never forsaken.

We just participated in adopting a family with our Journeys class and today we took a van full of goodies to this family, paid some of their bills, and really just helped out with many needs.  Our family gave some meat, but I really wish we could’ve done more.  Personally.  I felt like, “Silver and Gold, have I none, but such as I have, I give.”

It’s all about the Sheep and the Goats….Matthew 25:31-46.

Well here we go.  I am starting a blog after much thought and prayer.  I have been wondering if I really have anything to say that people would want to read.  More or less, I am making this a journal of my journey through life and some of the insights that I draw on a daily basis.

On this day, four years ago, my wife, Kara and I were in the hospital as she was giving birth to our twin girls, Abbie Grace and Aubrie Hope.  I will never forget the day when she came to my place of employment to tell me that she was pregnant.  I know for many of  you that would be a great day full of excitement, but I have to be honest…I was silent.  I didn’t know what to do.  You see, Makensie had just turned one year old nearly four months before we found out that Kara was pregnant again.  SURPRISE!  It was major trauma for me, although I didn’t want to let anyone around me know.  I was just trying to figure out how to be a good dad to a one year old, now I am about to have another?  Oh but wait…there’s more.  Figuratively and literally.  Well I had to suck it up and come to the promise that we are having another child.  We went to visit Kara’s doctor to then be notified of SURPRISE #2!  TWINS!  You have to be kidding me, right?  What did I do to God to make Him so upset with me?  I know Kara was the one that was pregnant, but I was dealing with the emotional trauma.  I went from having a daughter that was with us every other weekend (Julie) to having Makensie, to now having three kids under the age of two?

I have to say though, from the time that I first heard the whimpering cry of Abbie Grace and then the fussing of Aubrie Hope  to now listening to these beautiful young girls conversing with each other and talking about God living above us and Jesus living in our hearts, that’s enough to bring a father to his knees.

As you can see, we named their middle names Grace and Hope, because where there is Grace, there is Hope.

At the time  I felt completely overwhelmed, but Father knew what he was doing.  I felt Him teaching me simple truths about His love.  I longed for a boy for a long time.  I prayed about it and fought with God about it and questioned Him a number of times.  Then I heard Him say this:

“You know how you long for that boy you have always wanted?  Well, you are that boy that I have always wanted.”

Really?  Me?  Why would God want me?  Because he has a purpose for my life that only I can fulfill.

I read this earlier:  “I have a fingerprint that no one else has so that I can leave an imprint that nobody else can.”