Tag: resources

Dispatch from Prison (Ministry): how to inject HOPE

inmatereading   Again, last night I heard from a man about my age whose been locked up for more than 20 years. Plenty of the men I encounter have spent more time behind bars than outside them.

PLEASE, try to imagine that for a moment.

  Want the truth? For some, the thought of going back “to the streets” as they call it, fills them with true dread and anxiety. The world outside of prison is full of unknowns and it’s absent of structure (like 3 meals a day, concrete expectations, and consistent scheduling). There are hazards and temptations, and of course, a bleak outlook employment for future employment. They have little or no ways for doing legitimate work. (Would YOU hire a felon?) Some inmates are so fearful of the outside and paralyzed by their prospects that they will purposefully break rules, hurt others, or commit crimes in prison to lengthen their sentence.

Imagine picking to be in prison rather that choosing to start over anew in freedom.

It seems insane, perhaps, until you realize the terrific poignancy:

Captivity is primarily is located in the mind.

This is just as true for non felons. • Too many of us walk around is prisons of our own making.  We see closed doors instead of open ones. We let our past tell us a story about ourselves that can continue to enact. We feel trapped or confined with no way to truly free ourselves. We stay oppressed by sin, soul sickness, and slow forms of dying.

We all need healing to find the fruition of Justice.

True justice involves restoration and rehabilitation for re-entry into community and renewed relationships.

Even the Federal Government realizes this. Prisoners need to prepare ahead of time for release and transform their ways of thinking and doing things. New programs have launched that focus on acquiring skills and tools for successful re-entry into communities were a return to crime and old ways becomes less probable. Building more prisons isn’t working. Many of these re-entry programs focus on drawing from a deeper spiritual place and making choices based on the highest of morals to ensure that the best outcomes are the result. They rely on volunteers to help. Amazing that more resources aren’t carved out for something so important, huh? As a volunteer, I’m working multiple times per week teaching and guiding inmates to prepare them for their eventual release.

But God has put something else on my heart.

• I want my brothers behind bars to be missionaries to fellow-inmates. • I want them to be lights in that dark place.   • I want them to pray for others and be sources of support and encouragement. • I want them to be vehicles of God’s love and rays of hope for everyone they encounter. Last night, I told them out loud. As I shared my vision with them, the excitement was palpable. They started smiling. They nodded in agreement. Some laughed because they had been thinking the same thing. God has been at work long before I showed up. They want to be a part of what God is doing. They want to be a part of something bigger in the family of God, now, and in the Kingdom of God past, present, and future. It’s a kingdom that was inaugurated fully with Jesus the King more than 2,000 years. It’s a Kingdom that will continue, as is has all over the world, all the way into eternity. Forever and ever, Amen.

In sharing a vision, where others can use their gifts and talents for a greater purpose, we inject meaning and hope. What power that has!

These men are men who are having their hope renewed.

Would you like to help?

Click here to learn more or volunteer. Click here to help me continue this ministry.

A Season of Returning : 2014

This is Ash Wednesday, 2014.

lent

 

It wasn’t a special day or season as I was growing up in my particular Christian faith tradition, but with the new connections and resources I found through graduate school and the kindred spirits I found on the internet over the last ten years, I have been able to tap in and reconnect with this very ancient, rich, and reflective seasonal observance, each year.

 

This time of year, and especially during this particularly harsh winter, we can feel isolated, burned out, discouraged, troubled, or restless. It’s not just a state of mind, it’s a spiritual thirst.

Lent is a whole season that specifically helps us work through the darker, profound things that reside in the deepest recesses of our hearts, and prepare us for Spring (in every sense of the word).

 

This year, my husband and I are using a YouVersion Bible App reading plan called Lent for Everyone which includes a daily commentary by N.T. (Tom) Wright. Each day, the Lenten scripture reading and commentary brings the season into a richer light.

(Click to see all the Lenten plans.)

Why not do a reading plan this season?

 

Here’s another resources you might like.

It’s from Ruth Haley Barton’s Transforming Center.

(Click it to read the whole thing.)

Scripture for Ash Wednesday: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17 or Isaiah 58:1-12; Psalm 51:1-17; 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

“‘And yet even now,’ says the Lord, ‘return to me with all your heart . . .’” —Joel 2:12 

Are you using a GPS? (advice to communicators and startups)

We tend to think that we operate out of our values as if it’s like a default setting on a washing machine.

 

The truth is, at best, we are consistent at that stuff only sometimes. Not because we are horrid cads, but because we get busy.

If you are a person of faith or want to live from a set of important values, you can’t take this modus operandi for granted.

You have to do some groundwork. (I’ll get to specifics in a moment.)

First, the short story of Jackie will help us out.

taxes

Jackie is tax consultant. She had worked for a national brand firm in town and was striking it out on her own–almost by accident and not all at once.

It started when she kept noticing that some of her friends and family members didn’t know what they were doing. In a panic, usually at the end of March, they started asking her for help. Most of them didn’t know enough to get the best refund, and she heated the idea of that.

She picked up some side work, and within two tax seasons she had herself completely booked at tax time. About 20% of those clients needed accounting help throughout the year for their small business. She also found a few non profits clients too. She really needed help by the third year and had left her other job by then.

Like you would expect, she hired help and plunged into her work.

I didn’t put too much weight into the particulars of hiring. I was so busy with the details of getting the work done. So, the most important thing got steamrolled by the urgency of my work.

Things started going badly.

Out of the 3 part-time workers, only one of them actually had the same values as she did. She realized this too late and it created friction and a tense working environment. One person left and started bad-mouthing her in her small town. The other position seemed like a revolving door of employee turnover. She almost quit the whole thing. It was keeping her up a lot at night.

Jackie didn’t have Human Resources Training or organizational management training. She just had a bunch of work and she was good at those skills. She needed to clone herself.

It didn’t come to that, of course.

Fortunately, a mentor gave her some great advice. She said,

Back up a bit. Sit down and put your most important values and business aims down with ink on paper. It’ll work like a compass or GSP. It will help with both the route and destination.

It worked. Her commitment statements guided all her business decisions after that. Hiring, training, working with clients, getting new clients, and getting her little company running smoothly needed that solid foundation.

It’s a great lesson. If you aren’t using a GPS you’re going to get lost.

Before you take on side work. Before you hire someone. And most importantly, before you get busy, do the ground work so that your priorities and core guiding principles are something that flow out and throughout all your interactions, not get tacked on afterword.

If you value honesty, joy, compassion, and persistence, for instance, make them the anchor for all the skills you execute and all the projects you take on.

Have you initiated your GPS? Do you have your guiding principles on paper and operate from them?

I hope that was helpful.
Do you know someone who might need this advice?

Please share!

Update on the Time Machine

 

 

 

 

Interested in Time Travelers Mints?
CLICK HERE.antiueweather

 

Time to give you a tiny glimpse of what’s going on behind the scenes. (an update)

I’m building a time travel machine, as some of you know.

Well, sort of. That sounds really grand to say “I’m building a time machine”. It seems like it should involve a Delorean. It doesn’t. That’s just the movies. Real time travel is painstaking and boring hard work, like everything else that is a meaningful project.

OFFICIAL UPDATE:
So far, in the initial first tests the “machine” takes you back in time to a beautiful day or forward in time to a day with very poor weather. You can’t pick the day.
I was surprised and, to be honest, disappointed by that bit. I’m a novice at this stuff (obviously) and I got more than a few of my calculations and instrumentation configurations dead wrong. Correcting it completely could take nuclear power, and I just don’t have the resources for that…yet.
I’ve had to become more resourceful.

(This is another reason why my jetpack work got sidetracked in late summer. Shortly after learning to weld a mishap with a grey squirrel, a metal harshness and headset, and a PVC cannon style concept went awry, I settled in for a long, but probably safer, haul with short interval time traveling work and animals without bushy tails.

But, back to the weather travel.
Yes, I was hoping for a time machine in the strict sense, but maybe this glitch has happened for a reason. I do prefer late Spring to November weather. I’m still working on it and I have several other prototypes in the works too of varying sizes and capacities. All of it is in the very early stages.

Let me be clear:
I don’t have all the kinks worked out, and I haven’t actually traveled in time, personally, because I’ve been too frightening of being caught in bad weather with no chance of escape back to my own time, or of being stuck in the past on a gorgeous day. Never returning to family and friends isn’t something I’m up for, even on a good day.

I’ve been able to visually see and document what is happening through the power of properly placed technology (sort of like a periscope and a camera thing with some twisty bread ties and hot mess of petroleum jelly), but I haven’t made any trips yet myself. It’s risky, so I’m sure you understand.

Early RESULTS:
The test data seems to indicate that time travel occurred for about 11 seconds, until it didn’t.

Now before you are tempted to mock me because that is a rather meager number, I’ll remind you that the Wright Brothers only flew off the ground in the skeletal airplane-tpye contraption for just 11 seconds and everyone thought it was a very big deal.

Besides, I don’t want to get caught up in the hubris of mentioning statistics or worse: starting to show off, and besting myself as my own worst enemy. (For instance, listing the seconds as they increase during each trial, when they happen to. This could easily lead to emotional elation followed by terrible despair–the ruin of many creative people. Also I don’t want to shift my thinking to inadvertently assume I’m doing all of this just for your approval, and it could come to that.)

 

Again, it’s still early into the project.

The point is to stay focused and refine the instruments the best I can.

I’m documenting all the stories of my work, travels (or near-travels), and mishaps, and I’ll be sharing them with you in a collection in a few months (via a Kindle Book). God willing and if I don’t blow up…

or change my mind.

Now for the best part.
I’m synchronously building a few contraptions –one-off pieces– and other related ephemera for your own adventures, your personal collection of unusual things, or conversational props you can take out at cocktail parties. There will be a Kickstarter campaign to dole those out. More on that in time, so to speak. I’d like to see if it works out first in the future before I actually do it. But, if I can’t lengthen the traveling to a few months into the future to know, this will not be possible. Presently, that sort of result is “iffy” at best. I may just risk it anyhow. Clearly, I’m debating it with myself.

FOR FURTHER UPDATES
Tweets and reports to Facebook will be sent out from time-to-time using the hashtag #weathertravel.

If you want to keep up with the project or view the occasional pictures, see the occasional video, or learn when the items will be up for grabs search that hashtag. [Also my email list will get updates, so that’s another option, if you’d like to sign up in the side bar.] Many of the items will also come with their backstory included and written out for your amusement and records in short form. It will also include any usual related situations associated with it. There’s one about a prairie dog and a whiskey flask, for instance.

Another particular item is a ring device. It looks like jewelry but it is a non lethal (I think) mini travel device. I hope to get a photo up of it soon once it’s ready. It’s not as powerful as the bigger pieces, as you might imagine, but I think you’ll like it.

Fear is Jail

jail

Fear is  jail.

The world has so much information to offer.

Libraries, schools, experts, and the troves of resources on the internet make learning almost anything possible.

But is success probable? Only sometimes.

Education and information don’t create success. If it did, success would be simple and assured.

Since it’s not, there’s always some psychology to understand first.

Namely, fear.

Despite the resources, we hit bumps. We stagnant. We get discouraged. We give up too soon.

We are both afraid to fail and afraid to succeed. We fear the unknown and the too familiar. We fear change and we fear sameness.

Just knowing this can take a few teeth out of fear and can give us a cell key.

cell key

Information can help us through our fear. It’s a tool, key. But, we can sit in a cell whose door is wide open.

We assume information is the solution sometimes. It’s certainly not.

That’s why when you make resources and opportunities available to a frightened population success is still rare.

People–whether they know it or not–get stuck being afraid. Jailed.

But, back to the key: Information.
We live in a time were we can pick so many things for ourselves. The rich and powerful used to corner this market. Not just recently in the Industrial Age, but in every age. Social classes, gender, skin color and many other inescapable factors determined what you could accomplish in a lifetime. No more.

But so much will stop us. So, back to fear. It must be tamed. Always.

A path, a formula, or expert advice make wading through a bit easier. But here is the best key: As we utilize our resources we sill have to be honest that we are fearful and it affects us greatly.

If you sense that you aren’t moving forward, or you’re distracting your self routinely, ask yourself some hard questions about what you fear.

Armed with those answers you can push through if you get brave. Fear will be back of course, but you’ll be more prepared for it. You’ll do battle again and again. Know your enemy. Use your tools. Work your key.