Finding Beauty

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. – 1 Corinthians 13:11

I had a really weird dream two nights ago. I am still a little troubled by the vividness of it.

In my dream, I was being forced to have an arranged marriage. I entered a room full of encouraging well-wishers, all excited to present their chosen bride. I recognized the faces of the people. I knew them all. They all wore plastered smiles on their faces, the faces of people overjoyed to present a wonderful gift. One by one they shook my hand, encouraging me, telling me that I would love “her”. As the crowd parted, I saw  my would-be bride. Standing before me was a rather large, slow-moving, very old nun, with gnarled and sagging skin, stooped over and supported by a cane, dressed complete with a habit, and wearing a dangling large gold crucifix around her neck.

I was stunned.

This was the bride they had been so excited about. This was the beauty they were presenting. This was the love they had promised. I was appalled and confused. Was this who they were really offering?

My confusion turned into obvious dislike. Some in the crowd gently asked, “Are you not pleased with your bride? She has much to offer. Great wealth, history, influence, and stability.” I said, “Those are wonderful. But you promised great beauty, and I see none, feel none.” Then another part of the crowd spoke up, “Oh you carnal young man. How shallow are your requirements? You find no beauty because you don’t know what beauty is. She is beautiful.” “She has respectable qualities”, I replied, not wanting to insult the crowd. “How blind are you? How lost are you? How naïve can you get?” the crowd asked. “What do you want? Perfection? You are not perfect yourself. You have nothing to offer, but she, she can offer you so much.”

The crowd, now turning into an upset mob said as one as they surrounded me and the old woman. Tighter and tighter their circle around us got, pushing us closer together. The closer I was to her, the more despicable she became. She hissed at me, saying, “Who do you think you are to not love me? Look at all these people who have loved me. Look at what I have done for them. And you, in your arrogance, won’t embrace me? You foolish boy.” I was a few steps away from her. She was holding up her arms to embrace me, with her left hand holding her crucifix necklace out to me. I could feel the push of the crowd inch by inch moving me forward.

Then I heard a baby’s cry. I could not see any baby, but I could hear it. And it seemed I was the only one in the crowd who heard it, since the others were too busy trying to execute the forced marriage. I turned to where I thought I heard the baby, and ducked under the legs of the crowd, crawling determinedly to get away from that old woman and find the helpless child instead.

I saw a door in the far wall past the growing crowd, and I stood up and made a run for it. I could hear the disappointed crowd’s accusations. “Fool! Fool! Fool!” they chanted. “Fool!” I looked back the old woman, who was now inflating herself bigger and bigger, whether she absorbed the crowd or squashed them, I do not know. I knew that if I didn’t make it out the door soon I would be crushed by her.

With much urgency, I ran to the door, only to find it locked. I asked the white man by the door for a key but he did not reply. I sought around the door frame but could find none. I tried to pull and push the door but it would not move. I could sense the old woman growing towards me quickly. In my desperation I started knocking on the door, calling for someone on the other side. When that didn’t work, I started banging on it. Harder and harder I banged on the door, desperate to escape the ugliness about to envelope me.

Then it broke. The door broke. Just in time, I was able to kick the rest of the door to give me enough space to pass. I found myself standing in a beautiful garden with three rivers, and two massive trees in the middle. And lying on the grass was a beautiful child. The most beautiful child I had ever seen, lying vulnerably with only strip of white cloth, but full of joy and life. There was no fear in the child. The crying I had heard turned out to be laughter. And he looked at me. I knelt and picked-up the child, said to him, “Hello there, beautiful one.”

Then I woke up. #db

Glorious Unfairness

I sat on an old bench in an even older bank building as I waited for my turn to talk to my credit officer. I was there to tell him the same embarrassing news: we still didn’t have money to pay our loans. I thought about how I got to this spot, just a year prior I was part of the Real LIFE startup team and had just joined Habitat for Humanity. I was on my way, I thought, to building a fulfilling early career in the nonprofit world before jumping into, I thought again, my “amazing innovative exciting business” business.

I was so wrong.

At least that’s how I felt for the first few years of taking over a distressed company. In a few months, not only was I not achieving my “big dreams”, I was living my nightmare. As a young man, when asked at a talk I gave, what I feared most, I had one answer: failure. And I was a big failure by many objective metrics. Financially I was not just not good. I was in terrible shape. My company was in terrible shape. Physically I was in terrible shape, skipping meals and drinking too much alcohol – and doing a couple of 1 am runs or early morning swims when my anxiousness would keep me awake. I had tax issues, sales issues, investor issues, supplier issues, and staff issues. I stupidly mixed that with girl issues. Spiritually, I was not in good shape as seen in my never-ending feeling of impending doom, that I was one more mistake away from utter failure. Truly spiritual people have a sense of calm, peace, and rest. I felt like I would burst at any time. I’ve written about this period in my life before, but I want to share a thought I had on that bench, a very understandable but evil idea that went:

“Why am I going through this? Why do I have to fix this while my brothers get to move on? Why do I get debt when my classmates got capital? Why do I have to struggle so much when I’m a good guy (so I thought)? Why do so many evil people, truly sick, corrupt, and despicable people, become so prosperous?” All these thoughts led to this one evil idea: “It is unfair.”

I’ve had many versions of this thought in my life.

When I was younger, “Why am I so short? It is unfair”.

“Why do I have bad skin? (I have atopic dermatitis) It is unfair.”

“Why am I so slow to learn? Why do I need to have extra tutoring when others learn so fast? It’s unfair.”

“Why others have so much money and there are so many decent poor people? It is unfair.”

“Why are there incompetent people who earn more than me? It is unfair.”

“Why do people who are close to the leaders, to the pastors, to the officials, get away with so much, have so much influence, even if they are clearly without credit? It’s unfair.”

I can go on forever.

The number of times I have called something unfair is embarrassing. Many of you probably have had similar thoughts as me. I still get those thoughts a lot. But I think I have a better perspective now. Two days ago, I was having lunch with Nels, a very respectable friend who I’ve connected with very quickly, and he was telling me about how his life has a non-financial score despite having had a highly successful banking career. He used the example of when Jesus told Peter he would be crucified, which Peter followed by asking Jesus, “What about John?” Nels said, similar to Peter, he has learned not to compare his life with others but to trust God. After our lunch, I went to a meeting to discuss exciting developments with Bridge, but after work, I kept thinking about the story of Jesus and Peter. Jesus told Peter he was going to die and when asked about John, replied: “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?” This is an extra stinging response when we remember that Jesus was just reinstating Peter, asking Peter to reaffirm his love and to “feed my sheep”. It kinda goes like this:

Jesus: Do you love me?
Peter: Yes.
Jesus: Then feed my sheep.
Repeat 3x, then:

Jesus: You are also going to suffer and die a gruesome death.
Peter: What about John?
Jesus: None of your business. That’s mine.

Thinking about that, I thought that evil idea I know so well, “That’s really unfair.”

Then I remembered a question my dad had just asked me to think about: “Why did Noah, who walked with God, have to suffer through the ridicule of building the ark, and suffer through an actual cataclysmic flood while Enoch, who also walked with God, skipped death and went straight to heaven?”

Then one by one the different unfair stories of the Bible jumped at me. “Why did God like Abel’s offering and not Cain’s? Why did God favor Jacob over Esau? Why did God rebuke the law-keeping Pharisees and welcome the adulteress Samaritan?” I am sure there is more unfairness in the pages of the Bible.

Until I went back to the story of Peter in the book of John: 

(This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God.) And after saying this he said to him, “Follow me.” John 21:19 ESV http://bible.com/59/jhn.21.19.ESV

The words glorify God stood out, I thought, ”What a selfish God this makes Him when I’m some plaything, whose only worth is to used by God any way He wants.” Which is basically what they teach you in Sunday school. But me being the challenger, I couldn’t settle on that. This idea is so counter to the loving nature of the God of the Bible. The explanation that God will do whatever He wants simply because He is God, even screw with your life because it is His anyway, which I’ve heard so many times from preachers does not reconcile with love. While I believe that is His prerogative (He is God after all), I don’t believe He will contradict His nature. Maybe that’s why much of the world, especially the objective world, does not believe in the Bible. We preach a God of love, then when someone’s life gets screwed we have two default messages: 1. “What sin did you break?” Or 2. “God is sovereign. Who knows His plans?” (which basically means “just take it”). But as I thought about this more, as I studied glory, I remembered a verse in Colossians 1:27:

“God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Christ in you, in me, the hope of glory. Glory comes when Christ is in us. I parked that thought.

Then I remembered another verse in Romans 5:3:

Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; We glory in our sufferings…

There’s that word again. Glory.

I read up more on glory and came upon this on gotquestions.org:

The hope of glory is the fulfillment of God’s promise to restore us and all creation (see Romans 8:19–21 and 1 Peter 5:10). This hope is not a wishful thought, but the confident, expectant, joyful knowledge that we are being changed by God and will one day see Christ face to face, having been conformed to His image (Romans 8:29; 1 John 3:2).

Then it hit me. It is not about fair or unfair. It is about glory.

It is not about everyone receiving an equal outcome, like everyone being blessed or having a nice car (which is impossible anyway), but everyone has equal opportunity to experience glory.

How do we experience glory? Through Christ in us. –> How do we grow closer to Christ? By becoming more like Him. –> What does it mean to be like someone? It means to share the same values, the same purpose, and the same practices. –> How do learn how to be more like Christ? By allowing all our own diverse life experiences to result in greater virtue.

To be Christlike is to exhibit Christ’s virtues, love, joy, peace, patience, and the rest. Our life experiences good and bad are meant to grow us in virtue. And if the experience, the good and the bad, do not result in greater virtue, then we will miss the glory of God. This is why we can have wealth but not have peace. We have money but not virtue. We can have networks but feel lonely because we have not grown in love. We can have all the different success metrics of the world and not have joy because joy is a virtue. We don’t earn peace. We grow in peace or any other virtue. We grow in virtue the way we grow in muscle. We experience stress, we rest, and we heal, then we do it again.

That’s what I was doing on that bank bench without knowing it. I was growing in virtue. I was being put in a situation where I had to exercise faith, exercise peace, exercise commitment, exercise perseverance, and as I did God’s amazing pattern of growth worked within me. He wasn’t merely punishing me like a vengeful God (how petty is that?) nor was He playing with me because He is sovereign and I’m too dumb to know His intentions (again, how petty is that?). I now know that I do know His intentions, and it was, and is, to use my life’s unique experiences as different opportunities to grow in virtue, to be more like Christ, that I may draw closer to Christ. His intention is a loving relationship.

This is why God kept speaking to Cain despite his bad offering and kept warning Him. He was offering the chance to grow in the virtues of humility and forgiveness. Those were his missing virtues. Sadly, he didn’t see it that way. He was blocked by envy. Envy is the devil’s way of making us focus on someone else’s lack of virtue when we should be focusing on the virtues we should be exercising ourselves. When we make material and earthly things our goal, we will inevitably feel envy. Some people do have more materials than others. But when you realize that the virtue of love can be exercised in any situation by anybody, you realize we all have fair opportunity to grow in virtue. And what enables this opportunity? God’s glorious unfairness to Himself in order that we may have a way to Him, a glorious unfairness exemplified by the death of Christ.

Jesus was not simply telling Peter, “None of your business.” Jesus was telling Peter, “Your lives are incomparable. You and John are different. Now follow me. Don’t follow the lives of others. Follow me. The life I am taking you through is the life that will lead to more of me in you. It is the life that leads to more glory.” I guess the headstrong Peter needed the extreme experiences he had. We know he was headstrong as he was still being rebuked by Paul down the road. Even this rebuke was not meant to prove superiority but an opportunity for Peter to grow in virtue. Just as my own father treated my brothers and I differently depending on what engaged us most effectively, God does not apply one style with all of us because He acknowledges our individuality, in fact, He designed our individuality. 

Now, I’m sitting on a couch in Singapore. In my inbox are some very happy investor and some very unhappy ones. There are great challenges waiting for me in Manila and great opportunities as well. I’m exhausted but am pushed by a very real anxiousness to be a good provider, especially now that I have a son. I have a little bit more today than I did back on that bank bench, but the worry, envious thoughts, and accusations are the same. They just have more zeroes now. But God’s plan is also the same, and His process for me stays, “Exercise virtue, David.”

Earlier I thought, “I can’t wait to be done with all of this character building. Where i am so good at handling my challenges with virtue.” Then I realized, in the fitness world, you call that plateauing, when your improvement flattens out and there are no more gains. I guess this is why God always challenges us to step out. But the good news is this challenge comes with instructions, to step out in faith, which is the confidence that He is with us and will never forsake us.

For someone with a dark heart like mine, to be welcomed over and over, and to be given an opportunity to experience Christ more and more is a gift I do not deserve. My stained offerings to Christ is so little compared to His great gifts. What a wonderful thing to be treated with glorious unfairness. #db

We Are All Fulltime

Summary: We are all fulltime but we are NOT all effective.

I was talking with one of our leaders about the idea of “fulltime ministry”. Very much like the virtuous sheen that covers NGO work, becoming a “fulltime minister” (at least in the Philippines) comes with the romantic idea of dedicating one’s self to “God’s work”. I’ve heard many times about how someone “feels called” to the ministry, as if their current job is not just as much a calling. It is.

Whatever you’re already doing now, you are called to glorify God and love others. In other words, you’re called to minister, which means you’re called to serve (ministry means service). If you need a career change to minister than you’re probably not going to be that effective as a minister there, because you don’t understand 3 simple points:

1. Its all God’s work
2. We are all called to fulltime ministry
3. Proof of effective ministry is fruit

It’s All God’s Work
How I serve my wife and son, how I wipe his butt, how I lead our organizations, how I serve my partners and superiors, how I satisfy my customers, how I take care of my body, how I pray, how I rest, and even more, my attitude and heart state while doing all of this, are all either glorifying God or not. I don’t need a title change or career shift to start serving. I can and have been serving right where I am. In fact, I’ve found that I’ve been free to serve in some very creative capacities because I’m daily interacting with the crazy world as it is – with all the poverty, sleaziness, greed, and corruption that exists. How I build my life, and how I address the great needs of our time, and the heart I keep as I do, determines whether I am a true  minister or not.  This leads me to the next point.

We are all called to fulltime ministry, as we are called to fulltime service.
Sometimes I wish I could have a break from being a leader. Like I wish I could just sleep all day, ignore whatever responsibilities I have, and just do whatever I want. But while I may feel this way, it is contrary to the call of growing to be more like Christ, and to experience life with this in mind, that I may respond to all things more and more like He would. This isn’t an 8 to 5 job that I can take a break from. It is a fulltime call, as full time as it gets. The idea that there are full-time and part-time ministers comes with the same unintended consequences of having full-time social workers. While there is a need for teams of people to orchestrate good works, we should never fall into the trap that doing community work is for a few noble professional do-gooders while the rest of us focus mostly on self-security and self-enrichment. Just think about the logic of a small percent of the population trying to undo the unintended social, economic, and environmental consequences of the majority of the population being preoccupied with selfish pursuits. Is it really reasonable to a few “earth warriors” to beat our collective pollution and garbage generation? Is it really reasonable to expect that our token donations and once-a-year volunteerism will bridge the inequality gap that our collective greed, envy, and materialism contributes to? Just as pouring an annual cup of water won’t put off a raging fire, thinking that I can do token work while someone else, some “full-time” person, does the heavy lifting is illogical and counter productive.

Instead, Paul reminds us that the hope of the world is not in a few good men but in all the saints. He says in Colossians 1:24-29

24 Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church, 25 of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, 26 the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. 27 To them (the saints) God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. 28 Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. 29 For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me. I love verse 27. After talking about everything he’s doing, Paul shifts and says, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

The hope of glory, the hope of a better community, the hope of a better life, the hope for answers, the hope for rest, lies in Christ in us. He goes on in verse 28, switching from “I” to “we”. We proclaim. We warn everyone. We teach everyone all wisdom. We present everyone mature in Christ. After talking about all his personal labors, Paul reminds us that this responsibility of proclaiming, warning, teaching, being wise, and showing our results to Christ is not just for so-called full-time workers but for everyone.

This leads me to my last point, and it jumps off from the same verses: “that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” To present something means to show. All of this work should lead to tangible proof of result. The result we are told in the verse is maturity. Another word we can use for mature is ripe. Are we ripe with fruit? Is our lives bearing good fruit? Being “nice” or “behaved” or “sociable” or “agreeable”or “committed” does not necessarily mean one is being “fruitful”. Despite an almost universal dislike for metrics and proof-of-concepts in religious and NGO organizations, there is  proof of effective ministry. If, by our service, others become mature, meaning they are able to live out lives that bursting with good spiritual fruit, then we are effective. If not, than we are ineffective. This means that it is possible for people who are not employed by a religious or non-profit institution to minister more effectively than someone who is, simply from a  fruit perspective. It is possible that someone who is not salaried by an NGO or church is actually more a “Hope of Glory” than someone who is supposed to be doing that full-time.

So here is the tension: If all people are called to minister then why are some people paid for it and some not? The answer is simple but is many times avoided due to the dislike for performance metrics when it comes to spiritual things. My simple opinion is those who are doing it “full-time” or are paid should be providing a level of ministry, a level of service, that goes beyond that which someone who is not. I like playing tennis but no one will ever pay to watch me play tennis. People would pay to watch Roger Federer. Why? Because he plays a much much much higher level than me. I like to do many things no one will pay me for simply because I do not do them at a level that provides large enough value. In the same way, since everything is a calling anyway, what determines the compensation should not simply be motivations to do good or do “God’s work” but because someone is seeking and hopefully able to serve the community in such a high level. From an organizational perspective, resources should go to the people and projects that perform or bear fruit. Despite the success of books like Execution by Ram Charam, Necessary Endings by Dr. Cloud, and the leadership series of John Maxwell among non-profit leaders, it does not take careful inspection to see that just like many businesses, non-profits are not designed to reward and promote the best people. They will reward and promote those closest to the center, and those who make them feel most comfortable, many times because they are the most like them. By like them, I don’t mean similar personalities, but similar conclusions despite not having objective, 3rd-party, non-biased metrics. This is sad because it ensures that the organization, just like with any business, will either fail to live up to the loftiness of its stated mission (like end poverty, end hunger, or reach the world for God), and most don’t even come close when looked in comparison to the populations they operate in, but worse, it ensures that the next generation will have a harder task of undoing well-meaning bad just to start doing good. 

By going back to the simplicity of the Bible, and remembering, it’s all God’s work, we’re all full-time, and we’re all called to bear fruit, then we, individuals, won’t fall into the trap of thinking “we’ve done our part” when every single day holds a new part. This way we stop outsourcing our good works to a few good men and then complaining when the world does not improve. In the same way, we can build (or rebuild) our organizations to avoid a trap quite unique to well-intentioned organizations: “we have a good heart so we must be good”. Like I said, it’s very possible for well-meaning people from well-meaning organizations to be ineffective. In fact, I would argue, it’s probably more the case than other wise. What’s my proof for this? Just look at the proliferation of NGOs, foundations, churches, private charities, and personal causes and see if it has lowered poverty, crime, sex trafficking, and other measures of ills in society. This is not to say that it is the fault of these organizations that these ills exist, that is all our fault. This is to say we need to relook at our performances and see whether they match our stated purpose and stated principles. #db