Every human being wakes up each morning and sees the world through the lens of a protagonist. The world revolves around us, regardless of how altruistic, generous, and selfless a person we may be.
I am willing to express a theory. I am willing to admit I’m afraid. I’m willing to contradict something I’ve said before. I’m willing to have a knee-jerk reaction, even a wrong one. I’m willing to apologize. I’m perfectly willing to be perfectly human.
This means that when we ramble on and on about how we have the biggest manufacturing plant on the West Coast, our customers don’t care. Why? Because that information isn’t helping them eat, drink, find a mate, fall in love, build a tribe, experience a deeper sense of meaning, or stockpile weapons in case barbarians start coming over the hill behind our cul-de-sac. So what do customers do when we blast a bunch of noise.
What if some of the most successful people in the world got that way because their success was fueled by a misappropriated need for love? What if the people we consider to be great are actually the most broken? And what if the whole time they’re seeking applause they are missing out on true intimacy because they’ve never learned how to receive it?
I didn’t want to need his affirmation. But part of our selves is spirit, and our spirits are thirsty, and my father’s words went into my spirit like water.
Maybe the reason we like stories so much is because they deliver wish fulfillment. Maybe we sit in the dark and shovel sugar into our mouths because in so many stories everything is made right, and we secretly long for that ourselves.
He said, “Don, when something hard happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get bitter, or better. I chose to get better. It’s made all the difference.
One of the best ways we can illustrate how we help our customers transform is through customer testimonials.
Nancy is a great friend! We highly recommend Nancy and her team!” While those are nice words, they do very little in telling a story of transformation.
The entire world is falling apart because nobody will admit they are wrong.
I realized that for years I’d thought of love as something that would complete me, make all my troubles go away. I worshipped at the altar of romantic completion. And it had cost me, plenty of times. ANd it had cost me most of the girls I’d dated, too, because I wanted them to be something they weren’t. It’s too much pressure to put on a person.
Your problem is not that God is not fulfilling, your problem is that you are spoiled.
It’s no wonder I hid from the world. It’s no wonder parties made me tired or I got exhausted after I spoke. It’s no wonder criticism made me angry or I overreacted to failure. I think the part of me I sent out to interact with the world was, in some ways, underdeveloped, still trying to be bigger and smarter as a measure of survival.
When we look back on our lives, what we will remember are the crazy things we did, the times we worked harder to make a day stand out.
You’re assuming that love is a feeling. It isn’t. It can involve feelings, but often it doesn’t. Love acts out of faith, which rarely involves feelings. Love is action; it’s deciding something is true and living out of that belief.
I don’t mean to overstate what is yet unknown, but part of me believes when the story of earth is told, all that will be remembered is the truth we exchanged. The vulnerable moments. The terrifying risk of love and the care we took to cultivate it. And all the rest, the distracting noises of insecurity and the flattery and the flashbulbs will flicker out like a turned-off television.
Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care. I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway?
Here’s a thing I’ve noticed: the greatest leaders, the ones who impact the world the most, are somehow able to turn the other cheek. It’s as though they believe so solidly in love, so robustly in forgiveness, they have the ability to forgive and even love those who attack them.
Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.
After all, to love somebody is to give them the power to hurt you, and nobody can hurt you if you’re the only one writing the script.