Blessed with Discomfort, Anger, Tears, and Foolishness

This morning I have been taking some time to process through my experience at this year's Leadership Summit. Once again, it was an amazing, inspiring, informative, and transformative event. It was a gift to share the Summit with other members of our leadership community and I look forward to enlarging the number of summit attenders next August (mark your calenders now August 6-7, 2009).

I took a ton of notes throughout the two day event as I find the environment to be highly stimulating in terms of both my receptivity to God and to the generation of fresh ideas. My notes take the form of both speaker content and the brainstorming of new approaches and fresh ways f living out both my personal and our communal mission. Today as I reviewed my notes from the first three sessions, I discovered fifteen integration and action steps. Some of these are small and can be acted upon with a phone call, email, tweak in my schedule or face to face encounter with a friend. Others will require more time, space, energy and prayer. And a few will take a lifetime perhaps to flesh out. I look forward to sharing some of this along the way here at my site.

For today, I wanted to leave you with a prayer that one of the Summit speakers, Craig Groeschel prayed over us at the end of his session on IT. It is a Franciscan blessing that, in a sense, summaries my experience at this year's Summit and captures my heart for the ongoing journey with Christ.

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain in to joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.

Stay connected...