July 2009

July 12, 2009

Perfect, Great, Good

While perusing this article about Oxford University and the Google Book Settlement, I ran across this quote from Voltaire: ‘Le mieux est l’enemi du bien’—the perfect is the enemy of the good. I was struck by how much this can tend to apply to any human endeavor, not least the sending of apostolic missionaries. On the one hand, potential missionary candidates often seem to think missionaries must be perfect, and thus they cannot be one. They envision missionaries to be ‘super-saints’: we often read to many biographies of ‘great’ people and not enough biographies of the typical missionary. Or, we [...]

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July 8, 2009

How a promise can cut through global clutter

Our world is an incredibly noisy place. Over 6 billion people live life and make noise: talking and writing and sharing about their lives, their needs, the desires, their dreams, their visions, their passions. Some make more noise(even when dead), and some make less. Marketing is the art of getting your message heard in the midst of this noise. It is a challenge, and growing more so. Every day there are new tools that enable us to write more, share more, talk more, in more ways, over more mediums. When Heidi and I married in 1995, the web was not yet born: [...]

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July 2, 2009

A promise is not a call

J. D. Greear at Resurgence.com has written a passionate post on The Confusing Language of “Calling” in which he says in part: “Jesus made it clear that his will was for people of every nation to know the gospel. Why, then, are so many Christians waiting on a warm and fuzzy sensation—for God to spell out "Afghanistan" in their Cheerios—before they go? The call has been given. Go. If your talents can best serve God’s kingdom by using them overseas, why would you wait on a call to do so?” The passion in his voice led me to reflect on [...]

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