Quest for a New Perspective, Be Different Make a Difference

Why Have a Different Perspective?

May 17, 2013 · 3 Comments

(photo from searchenginepeople.com)

In the late 1930′s, General Motors board chairman Alfred Sloan led a discussion and vote on a new and exciting idea. The room became electric with enthusiasm. “We’ll make a lot of money,” they said. “We’ll bury the competition,” a board member said. “We should implement this as soon as possible,” another said.

When Sloan saw that the vote was unanimous, he announced that he was tabling the motion until the next month’s meeting. “I don’t like what’s happening to our thinking,” he said.

“We’re getting locked into looking at this idea in just one way and this is a dangerous way to make decisions,” Sloan told the board. “I want each of you to spend the next month studying this proposal from a different perspective.”

When the board met the next month, the proposal was discussed again. It was voted down.

Sometimes we easily fall in line with the majority. If the group is moving left, we tend to move left. If the group is going up, we will follow the group up. Conformity isn’t always a good thing.

There are benefits to conforming, however. As a member of a society that drives a car regularly, I’m grateful that we conform to traffic rules and laws. I’m glad everyone drives on the right side of the road. I’m glad everyone (usually) obeys traffic lights.

Lots of our behaviors conform to the people around us. We must pronounce words a certain way in order to communicate with others. We stand in a check-out line in an orderly fashion at a store. We bus our own tables after we’ve eaten at a fast-food restaurant.

Centuries ago, St. Augustine was confused. In Milan, he observed the Sabbath on Saturday. When he visited Rome, he discovered that the Romans observed the Sabbath on Sunday. Augustine asked his mentor, Bishop Ambrose, for advice. Ambrose told him, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

Conforming to society can be a good thing, but we can choose to be different in areas of our life when the direction of the group is not so wise.

In church world, where I live, churches meet in many different places. Some churches meet in homes, others meet in restaurants, some rent school buildings, some churches build frugal metal buildings, and other churches meet in ornate palaces.

But it’s not about where you meet, it’s about why you meet.

When it comes to being different you need to ask yourself, “Why?” Why do you desire to be different? Don’t be different just to be different or to draw attention to yourself. Be different to make a difference.

Being different can be as simple as drinking fair trade coffee to do your small part in the cause of global work equality or it can be as radical as selling all of your belongings and moving to another country to work with the poor.

Being different means not conforming and doing things just because everyone else does it. Being different means following your heart, your passions, and your convictions so that you can lead a happy, fruitful, and productive life regardless of the majority’s opinion.

Being different can mean:

not trying to keep up with the Joneses.
living on 80% of your income instead of 110%.
limiting the amount of clothes in your closet. (See Project 333)
not buying a new car every three years.
taking a week of vacation to work on a mission.
maintaining moral, ethical, and sexual purity. (Unfortunately, this is becoming rare.)

Before you conform to the crowd, ask yourself, “Why?” Saying “Yes!” just because everyone else is saying yes is not a good reason.

For more on this topic, check out: What’s Different About Me? and Why Should I Be Different? and my eBook Quest for a New Perspective. It’s a free download!

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Mission 227: Nicaragua

May 14, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Mission 227 has made a donation to the Fabretto Children’s Foundation. Their mission is to empower underserved children and their families in Nicaragua to reach their full potential, improve their livelihoods, and take advantage of economic opportunity through education and nutrition. This mission is achieved through five strategic program areas: early and primary education enrichment, rural secondary education, vocational and life skills education, and community well-being and development.

Fabretto envisions a prosperous Nicaragua where all children and adolescents have meaningful opportunities to grow and learn, in communities that offer access to quality education, so that they may reach their full potential. For more than 50 years, Fabretto has built relationships within the Nicaraguan urban and rural communities served in order to provide hope and a better future to the children and youth in need. Today, the organization serves more than 12,500 children and youth through seven Fabretto-owned centers and 50-plus rural schools.

Nicaragua, a country of nearly 6 million people, is juxtaposed between beautifully inspiring scenery of volcanoes, pristine lakes, and beaches with the harsh reality of extreme poverty that tarnishes the country’s cities, towns and villages and burdens its people with difficulties unconceivable in the developed world.

Unfortunately, Nicaragua offers little in the way of a social safety net for the disadvantaged. Today, Fabretto has become a vital partner in providing an ever growing number of Nicaraguans with a more just and dignified life, offering new opportunities and new hopes to those in greatest need, through programs in education, health, food security, and nutrition.

Nicaragua is the 2nd poorest country on the continent, suffering from some of the worst poverty conditions in the Western Hemisphere. Official unemployment rates are reported at 9%, however, underemployment is rampant with over 60% of the work force laboring in the informal sector, where they receive minimal pay and no social benefits.

Education in the country is also deficient with roughly 43% of those enrolled in primary school making it to the 6th grade according to UNICEF. Of the students who manage to finish primary school (6th grade), only a third will graduate from high school. In the rural areas, that number drops significantly. In many rural communities, less than ten percent of young people finish high school.

Over 70% of Nicaraguans are trapped in poverty, with roughly 48% living on $1.25 a day and another 27% on $2.00 a day, crippling the ability of a typical family of four to provide even half of the basic food, hygiene products, and educational supplies necessary to subsist and provide a healthy livelihood for their children. As a result, 1 out of every 4 children in Nicaragua suffers from some form of malnutrition affecting not only their physical abilities but their learning capacity as well (in some rural areas that number is 2 out of every 4).

Under these conditions, Nicaraguans are in a constant uphill battle to subsist and live a more dignified life. Fabretto is dedicated unconditionally to equipping and aiding children, adolescents and families with the necessary tools to break the cycle of poverty so that they may improve their lives, their communities and their country.

Mission 227 has made a contribution to Fabretto. I would encourage you to consider doing the same.

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Note: The content of this post was taken largely from the Fabretto website. I made a few edits.

A Quick Word to RSS Subscribers

May 11, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Google Reader shuts down July 1

In case you don’t already know, Google is shutting down Google Reader on July 1. If you read Quest for a New Perspective on Google Reader, you’ll need to use another source. (If you don’t know what a RSS feed is and you’ve never heard of Google Reader, you probably don’t need to read this.)

The easiest thing to do is subscribe in the box on the right side to receive posts via email. You’ll also receive my series of emails titled 5 Ways to be a World Changer.

After that, you just get two emails a week from me. I rarely pester subscribers with email and I absolutely do NOT share this list.

If you’d like to use a Reader-type program, I’ve been using feedly.com. It will automatically transfer the current sites you’ve subscribed to on Google Reader. I like it because it seems a lot cleaner and easier to read. And, of course, it’s free.

I don’t want to lose readers just because Google decided Reader wasn’t profitable. I need you to read Q4NP and share it with your friends!

Thank you!!

Things You Think About When You’ve Been Hit by a Van

May 10, 2013 · 3 Comments

On June 19,1999, best-selling author Stephen King was taking his normal four mile walk near his home in Maine. He was going up a slight hill and unable to see the traffic coming toward him. On the other side of the hill was a man driving a Dodge van named Bryan Smith and his Rottweiller named Bullet. Smith had a cooler with raw meat inside and Bullet had sniffed out the meat. The dog wanted to eat and Smith was trying to shoo Bullet away from the cooler while driving at the same time.

As Stephen King approached the top of the hill, all of a sudden the Dodge van appeared riding down the shoulder of the road headed straight at him.

After flying 14 feet in the air and landing in a ditch, King had an “epiphany.” As he lay there broken and bleeding with “his lap on sideways” – almost dying – he realized “you can’t take it with you.” He had credit cards in his wallet but they could do nothing for him. He was a multi-millionaire but his money meant nothing at that point. “I got a painful but extremely valuable look at life’s simple truths. We come in naked and broke. We may be dressed when we go out, but we’re still just as broke.”

King wrote later that those moments in a ditch were an awakening of sorts. He realized how little money meant. He realized that he could tell time just as good with a Timex. He didn’t need a Rolex. He realized that he needed to become more of a giver in this life and not just a consumer. He realized that giving would allow him to live on even after he dies.

He realized how blessed we are to live in a wealthy nation. We are rich but don’t know it. In the same article where he wrote about his accident, King describes a family enjoying an outdoor barbecue. You know the scene. Dad is standing over a grill full of meat. Mom is setting the table with potato salad, cole slaw, and chocolate cake. The kids are playing on a beautiful green lawn waiting for dad to yell, “Come and get it!”

Now imagine hungry people from around the world standing at the fence silently watching. The family at the picnic is America and those hungry people on the other side of the fence are much of the rest of the world.

King continued to make his point. “This is how many people around the world see us. It’s not a pretty picture. But we have the power to make a difference.”

I pray that you or I don’t have to live through what Stephen King experienced to learn the value of life and giving. Take it from a guy who has lived the dream of being a best-selling, multi-millionaire author. You can’t take your money and your stuff with you. But you can make a difference with it while you’re here – and even after you’re gone.

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What if You Supported an Entire Missionary Family?

May 7, 2013 · 2 Comments

John Wesley (from wikipedia.org)

As a young man, John Wesley calculated that 28 pounds a year would care for his own personal needs. Since prices remained basically the same, he was able to keep at that level of expenditure throughout his lifetime.

When Wesley first made that decision, his income was 30 pounds a year. In later years sales from his books would often earn him 1400 pounds a year, but he still lived on 28 pounds and gave the rest away.

Wesley was a single man for most of his life and had no children so he did not deal with the financial challenges of raising a family. But the idea is good. What if you determined a base family budget, adjusting for children and inflation, and lived on that amount? And what if any additional income was given away?

Richard J. Foster proposes this and other ways of thinking in his classic book, Freedom of Simplicity.

What if a family decides on a lean, trim, and realistic budget that provides for retirement, education, and other concerns and then gives any excess to the Church or other worthy causes?

What if a husband and wife discipline themselves to live on one income and give away the second one? What if a couple lived on one salary and supported a missionary family with the other salary? What would happen to the worldwide missionary enterprise if each Christian couple gave their second salary to missions?

What if you evaluated your income and determined ways to simplify your life and budget so that you can live on half of your salary? What if you gave away the other half of your income?

What if you put a lump-sum of money in an investment product, i.e., stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, etc. and regularly gave the earnings to a worthy cause? What if you flipped a car or a house for the purposes of giving away the proceeds instead of keeping the profit for yourself?

What if you had another source of income like a part-time job at night or weekends or a home-based business that went straight to charity?

We often think that the ministry of money is for the wealthy. But it is not. No doubt large donations are welcome and often needed by worthy organizations but ministries and organizations are supported largely by ordinary people with limited budgets.

The requirement to be a generous giver isn’t a large inheritance, a successful business, an informative stock tip, or a lucky lottery ticket.

The requirement to be a generous giver isn’t great resources, but a humble willingness to be a blessing.

What if?

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