Season of Creation 3C • Storm

Season of Creation 2C • Fauna & Flora

Brian J Dixon :: Start with Your People

Start with Your People: The Daily Decision that Changes Everything by Brian J Dixon on Amazon

Like the composer author Brian Dixon described as a guy who'd done everything you're supposed to do to get noticed so you'd get opportunities you prepared for and couldn't be truly alive without, I've worked all the traditional options correctly and compulsively, with close to no return. I've even done it knowing my own light shines brightest when I help other people discover and develop their gifts, therefore trusting God would respond to my awareness and to the world's needs.

But first, about Start with Your People book. Did you know your people include "everyone you interact with, not just your family, friends, and coworkers"? That's every single person. Good beginning. However, you still need your own tribe, which often means "asking for help. No one succeeds on their own. Everyone has a team. ... When you're inside the bottle, it's impossible to read the label. That's why we need other people. ... Allow these people to speak into your life and be honest with you." (page 129, launch team pdf book version)

Again, that validated what I've known almost forever, but that's where the book title and concept becomes powerful. You start with the people by serving them, by placing them first, as Jesus would.

When my social and professional networks both crashed, I knew I needed to rebuild, but that's the subject of several earlier blogs and not a topic for today. Brian includes a dozen examples of people who've reclaimed their dreams after failure or brought their dreams to life for the first time ever. If they could do it, so can you. Me, too!

Although Brian clearly is a highly committed Christian – follower of The Way of Jesus, as the early church would say – and Start with Your People is firmly grounded in service, you would not need to be Christian, religious, or even acknowledge some kind of spirit of life in order to benefit and change from reading the book, from asking, "What are you working through?" and – if that's your jam – doing the exercises at the end of the book.

Brian J Dixon's Start with Your People offers a practical, life-giving way to make your own particular gifts, passions, and skills matter to the world as you engage in community building that validates everyone's worth. Like very very many people these days, I found myself suddenly in the gig economy (sometimes ironically called the precariat), trying to find a way in a world where internet expansion and a major financial recession had moved a ton of work to third world countries where the cost of living is minuscule compared to North America and Western Europe. Still, Brian's ideas give me hope for a future when again I'll wake up excited about my work for that day. BTW, distinct and discrete projects never have stopped exciting me; I'm waiting for that next level that will happen because Brian Dixon's experience and insight has lit a new fire for me!

Notice of Material Connection: As a member of the launch team, I received a free pre-publication copy with no requirement or expectation I'd write a positive review. As always, the opinions expressed are mine alone.

my Amazon review: Validating, Igniting, Practical!

Season of Creation 1C • Ocean

Porch Story :: Summer 2019

• Porch Stories host Kristin writes about an August that sounds almost enviable.

• With August concluding meteorological summer, Emily P Freeman hosts her quarterly linkup.

June

• Day Camp in the San Fernando Valley easily was the high point of June, possibly of the summer so far. Check out pictures here!

July

• Reading and reviewing I See You by Terence Lester qualifies as a highlight of this year.

• For the first month in a long time, I didn't blog about July—no interesting outing or activities or pictures, but I did accomplish the amazement of retrieving my belongings, all of those everythings, out of South Central where they'd spent four years in storage. Despite downsizing and donating a lot of mostly furniture along with some other effects before leaving Previous City, like many or most, I couldn't Marie Kondo as thoroughly as might have been ideal. Almost everyone knows about items that don't necessarily occupy a whole lot of space, items you have three or four or more of that are similar but deciding which one to hang onto is too major at the moment, etc.

August

• No August pictures at this time, though I may add a few later. Continuing the sorting and donating theme because most of it has happened this month, everyone knows about donation regrets that frequently happen because sorting and unloading generates such an emotional high... Chances are I'll schedule a few more pickups (with Vietnam Vets of America) and waiting until I better could assess what to keep and what not has been freeing and satisfying. Due to different box sizes ranging from standard small through medium to quite a few large, blogging a number doesn't say much, but twenty five (25) is the current count.

Watch This Space!

1. For a review of another launch team book, Start With Your People, about gathering your tribe and being a supporter;

2. For a serious blog about Previous City friend Markus Watson's fabulous Spirit Life and Leadership podcast. It's not only for pastors, teachers, deacons, elders, and seminary types (professors and students). It's for everyone because if we are alive, we are spiritual so we have a spiritual life!

Terence Lester :: I See You

Equal parts testimony, analysis, and exhortation, at first glance Terence Lester's soon to be released I See You: How Love Opens Our Eyes to Invisible People is about the growing population of homeless individuals along with assorted "others than us" we don't perceive as part of mainstream society. However, as the late, highly admired and regarded Henri Nouwen observed, everyone is impoverished in some way, and surprisingly, "that’s the place where God wants to dwell! 'How blessed are the poor,' Jesus says (Matthew 5:3). This means that our blessing is hidden in our poverty. ... Let’s dare to see our poverty as the land where our treasure is hidden." from Bread for the Journey

So I See You is about all of us.

Terence tells us poverty of any kind is about lack of access, but that's only a starter. And yes, much of this book does focus on the economic and material impoverishment that often leads to individuals and families finding themselves without physical shelter, the poverty that happens because of lack of human connections, lack of a community of support and participation. Have you noticed how homelessness and poverty tend to be systemic and multi-generational? Lester dreams of eradicating (especially) systemic injustice. I see You chronicles the author's own experiences and his observations of others who've been poor; it particularly testifies to Terence's – and other's – experiences of being seen clearly enough to have their needs acted upon and met by people acting as God's agents—as God's eyes.

¹³Hagar answered God by name, praying to the God who spoke to her, "You're the God who sees me! "Yes! He saw me; and then I saw him!"

¹⁴That's how that desert spring got named "God-Alive-Sees-Me Spring." That spring is still there, between Kadesh and Bered. Genesis 16, The Message

The author reminds us scripture has over two thousand references to poverty and justice; we need to recognize aspects of justice include distributive, retributive, restorative, and procedural. Possibly others, as well, though they may be sub-sets of these primary types. Quite a while ago senior pastor asked what classes I was taking and I mentioned one called "Poverty and Justice." Senior pastor responded with a longish speech about the criminal (retributive) justice system and the highly disproportionate number of persons of color and others without economic means who remain incarcerated. I replied, "No! You're thinking of retributive justice! This course is about distributive justice! Who gets what, how, when, and why!" Most poverty seems to happen because of disconnects in distributive justice that often cascade into other injustices.

Hagar's God who sees me is a God who sees each of us as we really are. That includes individuals with massive financial resources it's easy to stereotype as having everything; it includes people in ragged clothes holding a Please Help! sign at the freeway entrance. What stereotypes do you need to start breaking down? What ones do I still hold onto?

Scripture tells us, Jesus shows us how God created humanity in the image of the divine. In the power of the Holy Spirit of life, God calls and enables us to claim that divine nature and live as God's presence on earth, to act as God's voices, hands, feet, and eyes everywhere we go.

Almost everyone underestimates what a "regular" person can accomplish. Terence advises each of us, "Do something, anything for the [solitary] one." I like to remind my adult Sunday School class everything we do is synergistic and adds up to far more than the sum of our small, individual actions and prayers. "Prayers"? Yes. Read the gospels! Jesus always prayed before taking any significant action, before making any response to human need.

"Where will you start after reading this book?"

With God's blessings to us concealed in our own poverties, with God's blessings and presence in those we see and encounter hidden in their own unmet needs, in the power and the grace of the Holy Spirit, each of us can be the spring named God-Alive-Sees-Me as previously invisible people become visible to us.

Some link love:

• Terence Lester online

• Terence on Facebook

• Terence Lester's Instagram

• Terence Lester on twitter

• Love Beyond Walls, an organization Terence and his spouse Cecilia started to draw attention to homelessness and poverty and to help mobilize people in situations of poverty into a full future.

Notice of Material Connection: As a member of the launch team, I received a complimentary pre-publication copy of this book with no requirement or expectation I'd write a positive review. As always, my opinions are my very own, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

my amazon review: vision and hope

Porch Story :: June 2019

• Summer's been in session with the fun and randomness that come with the season, so I'm linking my June summary to Porch Stories host Kristin's July.

• My end of the month summary blog for June 2019 covers less than a week, but those five days were good ones. Sometimes I sit on my actual porch, at other times it's a virtual veranda in a different time and clime, yet everywhere I'm still doing whatever I can to imagine my next move. Months became years became decades, and now?

• And now? I spent the last week of June helping with summer day camp in the San Fernando Valley. Besides mostly doing line chef-type dicing, slicing, chopping, and mincing in the kitchen, I enjoyed good conversations and glorious gardens. Snacks were yummy—one day we even had ice cream cones with our choice among five or six flavors of award-winning Thrifty Ice Cream! Dinner menus were varied and well-prepared. As usual, I've tried to be selective about the pictures I blog, so I chose color-filled ones to represent the venue well.



• With Day Camp sessions from 3 to 9, on Tuesday I got there just as all volunteer, LA-based The Rescue Train wrapped up a day of feline Trap-Neuter-Release, partly sponsored by the church that sponsored the onsite day camp. I have the impression Feral Fix LA also welcomed household pets who needed neutering.