Tag Archives: Work

Thanks Marina

Posted by stephenboutry on

On Friday’s I get to hang out with this beautiful little girl.

HPIM6510 HPIM6511

I don’t get work done on Fridays. Maybe a few emails, maybe a couple of minutes on this project or that assignment.

But, for the most part, normal work ceases.

However, Friday is not a sabbath.

It’s still work.

But in some ways, Fridays work like a sabbath. I have to let go of my work…of being productive…of getting everything crossed off my list.

Because there’s always more to be done…always another meeting to take…always another project to tackle.

So, thank you Marina, for helping to slow me down.

Craftsmanship

Posted by stephenboutry on

‘Craftsmanship’ may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society–but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.

Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding. The relation between hand and head appears in domains seemingly as different as bricklaying, cooking, designing a playground, or playing the cello–but all these practices can misfire or fail to ripen.

There is nothing inevitable about becoming skilled.

~ Richard Sennett “The Craftsman”

Not Worth It

Posted by stephenboutry on

I wrote two weeks ago about a “faithfulness deficit” in our culture. I continue to think about this.

I had a conversation the other day when a new thought struck. I don’t have a well articulated theology of spiritual warfare, but I do think a way the enemy attacks the church in the west is through undermining faithfulness.

We question whether the hard work and the rejection and the nastiness and the disappointment is really actually worth it. Someone stabs us in the back and steals our job. Someone we trusted turns out to be completely untrustworthy. We ignore a gut instinct and it comes back to bite us so we question our ability.

I have experienced all of those things and I’ve talked to other leaders who have experienced those things in just this last week.

I think about the conversations I’ve had in Acts this semester with students. I think about the blogging our staff has been doing through the Psalms. I realized this is a tension everyone feels, and has been feeling for thousands of years. David was hated and people tried to kill him. Paul was run out-of-town. So was Peter.

When injustice wins, when we get screwed, when it all blows up in our face, it rocks our world. It rocks our theology. It rocks our logic.

I keep coming back to this reality: not even Jesus could control the outcomes. He was rejected and despised in a big way, but also in a lot of other small, more subtle ways. Like this and this and this.

All you can do is throw yourself into the work and then let go of the outcomes. We can’t control what people will say about us, or what people will think of our work. But we can do the work and we can give it everything we have.

Again, we can’t control the outcomes, but we can choose to stay faithful. And that is a difficult but courageous choice.

Identity, Work, Time, Seminary, Lost Things, and Baseball

Posted by stephenboutry on

Check these excellent articles out:

  1. The Pew Research center recently published some interesting findings on “Hispanics and Their Views of Identity” (interesting period, but also given the nature of out neighborhood and family)
  2. Seth Godin with more wisdom…this week it’s about protecting and defending your time so you can do the things that are important (and I would add life-giving)
  3. Scot McKnight (who recently made the jump from North Park University, teaching undergrads, to Northern Seminary, teaching grads) gives us 10 Reasons to Attend Seminary
  4. My friend Ryan on “the things we find”…God has a habit of finding things that are lost!
  5. A baseball article. I love Joey Votto. Watch him hit if you get the chance. Plus some of the stuff in this article is so amazing I don’t even believe it.

Linkage

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  1. Some thoughts on leading a dysfunctional team (part of a series)
  2. Surprising thoughts on sexuality and boundaries
  3. A lot of writing on introversion has come out lately. Here’s a look on how the “extrovert ideal” is affecting the academy.
  4. Will a more robust theology of work bring the “nomads” back to church?
  5. Rangers’ pitcher Yu Darvish gets the glory of the quad pen

Easters!

Posted by stephenboutry on

We had a great Easter Sunday yesterday. Unofficially 650 people came to REUNION (Sojourn’s church partner), which will be a record. I love the energy in the Hilton when the room is so packed.

And, we hosted friends and family in our home afterwards. It is always great to bring family, church, students, and Amy’s work together in one place because it doesn’t happen often (or at least as often as we would like). It was on mission, and most of all it was FUN.

One of my all time favorite Easters!