Common Sense

My Dad is a simple man. He didn’t make it past the eighth grade. He worked in the factory doing piece work for his entire working life. He hired himself out to a local farmer as a “hand”, not because he needed the money, but because he enjoyed the simple life of a small farm. He is not a good debater. He is not well educated. He does not subscribe to the Harvard Business Review. His favorite author is probably a tossup between Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour; however, what my Dad does have, is a healthy dose of common sense.

            I remember watching him thoroughly clean, oil, and sharpen a borrowed chainsaw before returning it; wash, wax, change the oil and fill with gasoline his brother-in-law’s pickup truck before returning it; thoroughly clean the deck, then remove and sharpen the blade of a neighbor’s borrowed lawn mower before returning it. “Robert”, he’d say, “Always return anything you borrow, better than when you got it!” 

            I came home from sixth grade one time and told Dad about someone picking on me, threatening to beat me up. “Robert”, he said, “Don’t ever start a fight, but never run from one, either. And if the [bleep] (Dad had quite a vocabulary of colorful metaphors) is bigger than you, get something to even the odds, but never run. You’ll run for the rest of your life.” 

            One time my brother and I were “helping” him work on the old pickup truck. Well, at least our intentions were to work on it, but the hood latch was difficult to pop at best, and impossible at worst. He kept a small pry bar in the cab to help the latch along, and was working both that latch and his temper into quite a frenzy. 

“Pry, twist, pry, pry, twist . . . swear . . .  pry, twist.“ 

Even as a kid, I could see where this was going.

“Pry, twist” . . . increasing frenzy and muttering of a string of colorful metaphors . . . “twist, WHAM!”

He took that pry bar a slammed it across the hood of that truck, putting a nice, obvious crease across it. (The old truck really wasn’t much account anyway.)

He dropped his shoulders and looked over at us and said, “Well THAT was stupid!” 

No excuses, no blaming latch or the old, practically worn out truck, just accepting responsibility for his own actions . . . common sense.

I’ve learned so much from that dear, uneducated, hot tempered Dad of mine, because he was a man of common sense, common sense that I’m afraid is rather uncommon these days. It wasn’t all that long ago that knowing what was right, and knowing what was wrong was pretty obvious. People . . . most people, anyway, and if you weren’t most people, you were the odd ball . . . understood what was right and just did it, and they understood what was wrong and didn’t do that: and if they did something wrong or stupid, accepted responsibility and paid the consequences for it. 

The old prophet Isaiah in chapter 5, verse 20 of his prophesy saw the disappearance of common sense coming, and had this to say about it: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

The definitions of right and wrong, good and evil, have been turned on their heads, but let’s be honest with ourselves. Way down deep in our souls, we know the difference. We just need to be bold, like my Dad, and make uncommon sense common again.

Am I a Freelancer? Part III

I’m learning that I’m not much of a freelancer; however, I am at least learning.

In this lesson I’m supposed to create a “List of 10 things I deliver to my client, things that aren’t the thing. Things like timeliness, confidence, respect, a story, etc.”, and the last bit of instruction, in purple, no less, 

“Be specific.”

Well, first of all I need to define my “client”. Since I’ve determined that I’m not a freelancer, and have no paying customers,

1.       Who do I serve

a.       My family: most specifically my Joy, my Barney, my Eric, and my Gidgy. Yes, my extended family, too, but these people are number 1.

b.      My colleagues (Those with whom I work every day)

c.       My “partners” in business. (I hate the term “vendors”. They are much more than that, or at least those I consider “partners” are much more than that.)

2.       What do I deliver to them?

a.       Overt and unconditional love

b.      Honesty

c.       Integrity, and yes, one can be honest and still lack integrity

d.      Transparency (as a dear friend of mine said recently, “No BS”)

e.      As in all healthy exchanges, everyone wins

f.        Humor

g.       Always a good story

h.      Genuiness (What you see is what you get)

i.         My undivided attention

j.        Opportunity

While most of these aren’t necessarily in any particular order, and I suppose over time one or two of them might change, letter "a" is indeed number 1, and by far and away the most important. I do love God, and I do love people. When it comes to loving people, I need to work on "overt" and "unconditional" for some of them.

Maybe I could be a freelancer after all.

Am I A Freelancer? Part II

Back to my freelancer’s course.

After a few more “lessons” from the Goden-meister, I get to my next assignment: What Do You Provide? 

What do I provide?

The first question under this topic is, What do people buy when they buy something from you?

I watched the series of videos leading up to this "quiz" several days ago, but haven’t been able to come up with a really good answer to this question until this morning – trust. I “sell” trust. If I don’t, everything else I do just isn’t worth doing. I suspect Mr. Godin was wanting something a bit more “hands-on”, but I don’t sell “hands-on” anything. I provide trust first, then everything else follows.

Maybe I’m not a freelancer.

The second and last question in this segment, which I’m finding even more difficult is, Leave out the easy, repetitive, generic stuff . . . What are you doing that’s difficult?

Well, certainly this course! It’s making me think in ways I’ve never considered. 

The whole thinking and research process for a potential alternative to Title IX funding is certainly a challenge, and there are the hotel / resident hall partnership discussions / decisions that are currently underway, and now a bond funding project to carefully research and implement. 

I guess now that I think about it, while I’m not so sure I’d call these “difficult”, they are most certainly challenging and they are not “easy, repetitive, generic stuff”. Actually, these kinds of things are the fun stuff!

Hmmm. Moving on . . .

Smart Phone or Just Dumb Me

It dawned on me the other day that I have become a slave to my smart phone. I’m convinced that they (whoever “they” are) call them smart phones because those phones have truly outsmarted all of us! Back when it was just a dumb phone, and only sent and received calls, it stayed in my pocket until I needed to make or take a call. In those days I was jealous enough of my limited minutes that I didn’t take every call, and was pretty careful about who and how long I talked when I called.

I was still the master of my personal phone!

                But, alas and alack, in the bowels of sterile laboratories in Cupertino, California, mad scientists like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak continued their wild experiments, and in less than a generation developed devises that were much more than phones. Now I find myself reading cryptic notes from other slaves, checking and rechecking the news every time I get a free moment, tweeting my occasional brilliant thoughts, tracking the blue dot that is me on the GPS, watching an occasional NCIS episode on Netflix, and a host of other things when I could be, should be, relaxing, or praying, or reading my Bible.

                Oh yeah, and I can read the Bible on the smart phone, too, although I’m not sure yet about texting Jesus.

                And it’s not just me. I watch people all across the Ohio Christian University campus, walking around, never looking up, glued to their smart phones, thumbs all ablur. The hapless few that are looking up have ear buds and brightly colored wires running down their chests into their pockets, connected to . . . you guessed it . . . their smart phones!

                So my daughter calls me this afternoon and asks, “Are you at home?”

                “No, I’m still at the office.”

                “Mom isn’t answering her phone again.”

                I get home and the phone is still in her purse from when we returned from a trip, a trip in which she did not use her smart phone one time, and subsequently forgot about it and let it run out of juice in her purse. Hmmm. Perhaps not everyone has become enslaved after all.

                Believe it or not, this isn’t an article about smart phones or our presumed dependence upon them. It about values for living, just like the name of this column implies. It’s about finding balance in our lives, and understanding what is truly important. Before smart phones, it was just something else.

                I’ll never forget back in the 80s when I was a pastor in Indianapolis. My daughter was somewhere between 8 and 10, and the two of us were in the car one Saturday afternoon, driving from parishioner to parishioner making pastoral calls. Back then I wasn’t a slave to smart phones. I was a slave to Indiana University football. (Why, I have no idea, because they weren’t much better then than they are now, but that’s what slavery does to a person.)

                Anyway, I was listening to the game between visits while my daughter chatted away about only God knows what. I sure didn’t know what because I was chained to that game, when I was suddenly and clearly aware of a “voice” and a “presence” beyond the game and my daughter’s chatting that said words to this effect; “You’re always asking for me to help you get through to Heather. Now she wants to talk and you’re chained to that radio.” I was so startled that I turned around to see if someone was in that car besides Heather and me. There wasn’t, or at least no one I could see.

                I turned off the radio, and focused my full attention to that wee girl, and never let anything interrupt a conversation with her again.

                Some may think this is a remarkable and possibly unbelievable story, and I get that; but I was there, and it changed the way I interact with children from that day to this.

                In Mark 10: 17 through 22 Jesus was approached by a young man who became a slave to his possessions, and instead of forsaking his stuff and following Christ, that young man went away sad because his smart phone, or his IU football, or his whatever, was just more important to him that the most foundational value for living of all; a relationship, not with his daughter, but with God’s son, Jesus.

                Don’t let it be so with your family and you, or more importantly with Jesus and you! Be smarter than the phone.