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Posts Tagged ‘randy hasper’

Human — It’s Spiritual!

Posted: April 28, 2014 in restoration
Tags: human is spiritual, human. human is good, randy hasper, the beauty of being human

Christina Perri in her song “Human” expresses a universal sentiment; we can pretend to be perfect, but we are — human.

We break down. We cry. We doubt. We get overwhelmed. This is what we do. We don’t need to pretend we don’t.

The truth is, human, is attractive.

Most of us don’t like people who pretend to be perfect, who act overly spiritual. We like spiritual people who are comfortable in their own skin. We like godly people who are comfortable with their own imperfections.

I was walking on a sidewalk recently and stepped just off, half my foot on the walk, half on the grass, boom! Down. I laughed. We are top heavy: it is amazing we stay upright so much.

When we were finishing our oak floors last year, I came to the room and kicked over a whole gallon of polyurethane. We laughed. And had fun spreading it around. It gave us a quicker way to do the floors.

We spill, we fall, we get tired. Hungry. Sleepy. These things aren’t bad; they are just — human.

All the Bible heroes were human, weak and fallen.

Noah got drunk. Abraham said his wife was his sister. Jacob schemed. Moses was afraid. Jonah ran away. King David didn’t. He should have. Jeremiah raved. Peter was impulsive. Paul bragged.

Let’s face it. We humans aren’t perfect.

How should we Christians think about our bodies?

1Corinthians 6:19-20 says, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”

Bodies are good; bodies house God. God values bodies. He paid a great price for then. He created them as precious containers for the glory of God.

Last week I fed my body talapia, summer squash, yams, spinach, steel cut oats, almond milk. I gave it about eight hours of sleep each night. I worked out at the gym three times with weights and an elliptical machine. These activities were to me, deeply spiritual. I was honoring the house of God.

Last night I ate dark chocolate. I was deeply honoring my taste buds.

I love being human. I love my body. But I’ve never heard anyone say that in church. In church we talk a lot about the value of our spirituality. We don’t talk enough about the value of our humanity.

In fact, historically, Christians have too often had a negative and neglectful attitude toward their bodies. One of the early heresies of Christianity was Gnosticism.

To the Gnostic Christians God was transcendent, high, far removed from his creation. They did not believe a perfect God could create the imperfect material universe.

So they invented the idea that the material world was created by an evil, lesser God, sometimes called a “demiurge”.

The Gnostics put forward the idea that matter, whether it be the physical universe or the humanly body, was evil and the spirit was good. That is an error. This is the error of dualism.

Some even claimed you could sin in the body and it wouldn’t effect the spirit

The Bible doesn’t support this view. True Christianity rejected Gnosticism.

Bodies are not evil. God, the one, true God made bodies, took on a body, and will give us new bodies in the new creation.

The idea of a disembodied spirit, a ghost, is actually very spooky to us. It is unnatural. It is false.

But we moderns repeat the Gnostic error when we hate our bodies. We repeat this error when we neglect our bodies. We repeat this error again when we separate spirituality from our bodies.

Everyday I take a hot shower. This is part of my morning devotions. It ministers to the ache in my neck. Yesterday I ate a Popsicle in the shower.

Hot and cold — at the same time — it is the epitome of holy, sacred, devoted spirituality. This truly honors my God-given senses!

Bodies are good. They are made for honoring. Never hate your body. Feed it, Popsicles.

Jesus had a body.

John 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory.

Look closely at this verse. When God became flesh, then we saw his glory. the glory of God was revealed in the flesh of Jesus.

The creed upholds this: Jesus was fully man, fully God!

I love the humanity of Christ. He cried. He hugged children. He got mad. He allowed his followers to eat on the Sabbath.

True wisdom is gentle with human.

A Christian friend told me recently that the church leaders she grew up with were very “aloof, cold, inhuman. You wouldn’t want to talk to them; they were always wagging a finger and telling people what they were doing wrong.”

They weren’t very human.

Being overly-spiritual is the same sin as being overly-physical. Both are an “overly.” Coldness does the same damage as lust. Both abuse.

Jesus wasn’t like that. He identified with weakness. He would talk to anyone. The only people he judged were the super-spiritual leaders who acted better than ordinary people.

To the Christian who told me the leaders in her church were cold, I told her, “As a leader yourself, do the opposite of what you grew up with — be approachable, friendly, non-judgmental — and then you’ll be a good leader .”

There is so much to value, to cherish, to love about being human.

In Psalm 139 David gushes, “Body and soul, I am marvelously made!”

Bodies are a great gift. Bodies are marvelous!

Our noses can remember 50,000 different scents.

There are 100,000 miles of blood vessels in our bodies

If uncoiled, the DNA in all the cells in your body would stretch 10 billion miles, from here to Pluto and back.

Our bodies contains approximately 100 trillion cells.

We are freakishly complex! God did this. He gave us this.

Did you know that most of us have tiny mites living in our eye lashes. We are never alone.

We have more bacteria in our mouths than there are people in the world!

We are cities. We are thrilling. We are frighteningly marvelous!

1 Corinthians 9:24-27-25 (The Message) gets it right, “You’ve all been to the stadium and seen the athletes race. Everyone runs; one wins. Run to win. All good athletes train hard. They do it for a gold medal that tarnishes and fades. You’re after one that’s gold eternally.

I don’t know about you, but I’m running hard for the finish line. I’m giving it everything I’ve got. No sloppy living for me! I’m staying alert and in top condition. I’m not going to get caught napping, telling everyone else all about it and then missing out myself.”

Paul is the model of the fully awake and alive human who takes spiritual responsibility for his body.

Being human doesn’t mean doing whatever feels good. What separates us from the animals is the power to rise above our instincts, our cravings, and to make good choices.

Paul is no animal; he is a fully focused, empowered, self-controlled human being. As such:

He runs to win.

He trains hard.

He avoids sloppy living.

He stays in top condition, for God, for Christ, to honor Christ in his body.

To care for our bodies, to love them, train them, control them, push them, discipline them — this is part of true spirituality.

What if you want to change in this area?

Change begins with knowledge, and awareness, and desire to honor God in the physical areas as well as the spiritual.

And change begins with the Holy Spirit’s conviction and help.

If we have been overly spiritual, perhaps even religiously addicted, then our challenge is to again embrace our human side. Lets not cover up human with religious.

If we have neglected our bodies we must begin to love them again. When our bodies tell us they are tired, we should put them to bed. The most recent research on sleep indicates that getting less than eight hours of sleep per night, may shorten your life.

When our bodies are hungry we should feed them. Veggies and whole grains — not french fries and sodas — power us best to honor God.

When our bodies are inactive we should exercise them

When broken we should have them fixed.

What if we have abused are bodies and are paying for it now? What if in the past, we overate, we over-drank, we smoked, we used illegal drugs? What if we still do?

Then we should do this. We should forgive ourselves, get help, fight for health, and move on. We can, with God’s help, honor what is left.

To some degree our influence on others, the amount of good we will do, the number of people we might point toward God, the creativity we may offer the world … all this may depend in part on how well we take care of our bodies.

Human — it’s spiritual!

/iː/ is fun!

Posted: April 23, 2014 in clarity
Tags: fun with phonemes, phonemes, proverbs about phonemes, randy hasper, the good of small, the value of what's small

“The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.”
Aesop

Small has taken a traditional beating on the great world stage. Diminutive people are mocked, small-mindedness is scorned, ants and bacteria shunned. Small creatures are overlooked, small features ridiculed, small amounts and small accounts ill-regarded.

But small can be very good! Think poppy seeds. Consider rain drops. The truth is also fine in small doses, especially the truth about myself.

Small thoughts are powerful; we all love a proverb. I particularly like the miniaturization of meaning. I adore phonemes.

A phoneme is the smallest contrastive, meaning-laden linguistic scrap that carries us through each day. /oʊ/ as in the great “No!” is one of the most powerful phonemes; greater yet is /e/.

Consider the phonemes /s/ and /l/: they alone carry the significant difference between the the words “kill” and “kiss.” I am particularly fond of that difference.

One of the world’s most common phonemes is /i:/. /i:/ is so fun!

“Look at me,” shouts super /iː/ “Whoopee! I’m beep, receipt, feat and belief; I’m ‘Oh, baby!’, superb ‘Very!’, I am the sound of happy /iː/!”

/ i:/ is such a showoff!

I urge you, my great friends, think small, observe minuscule differences, think at the microscopic, subatomic, super-phonemic level. You’ll be entertained — more.

For more of my thoughts on the fun and wonder found in phonemes, visit my modern proverbs blog at http://www.modernproverbs.net where I have written a set of proverbs about phonemes.

Proofs

Posted: April 16, 2014 in nature
Tags: a fable about the sun, modern fables, Proofs, proofs of God, randy hasper, the sun falls on all alike, the sun shows off God's love, the universe is fair

It’s spring. It’s almost Easter.

Every morning now I wake up hopeful.

Reality seems good to me. I accept what is.

I accept the the proofs that God is good. I am not offended.

One of the most compelling proofs for me is sunlight, another starlight, another shadow, another color.

I am astonished by these simple realities. Everyday among the miracles of reality I find a renewal; every second alive I happen again upon my own resurrection from the dead, from the death found in unawareness.

I’ve taken to writing fables, about what is true. Here are is one for you.

The Sun

Looking south, the sun cast one arm over the Amazon basin.

Looking north, it put the other, covered with golden bracelets, lightly on the Sierra Nevada. It draped itself upon the earth.

Sliding through the jungle and slipping off the peaks it withdrew to the rumpled Pacific, and pausing there, and reaching its hands down to the west coast beaches, it ran its fingers through the tidal pools. They turned pure gold.

“And there, and there and also there,” the sun said softly, and it laid tender fingers of light across the stirring sand.

We are the best,” said the mountains, always first and last to warm and be warmed.“

Then the palms and pines along the western beaches whispered, running their fingers through their lovely hair.

“What about us? What about us?” they called out.

The sun flipped its fingers playfully and splashed sunlight up into all of the leafy trees lining the beaches, and seeing this they rose up on their pointy root toes, grabbed pieces of the light and fixed it in their hair.

Suddenly, each wore a sparkling tiara.

“Oh,” the trees murmured softly. “Give us more!”

But there was too much for them to hold.

Big pieces of the sun broke free and sailed toward the east.

The great sun slid along, pulling a shade across the Pacific ocean. It rans fast now towards Asia and Australia, crying out for Europe, calling out for Africa.

It ran, singing out for the Himalayas, the Tien Shan, the Urals, laying itself down upon the Tibetan Plateau and the West Siberian Plain.

“I’m coming now,” it whispered softly to Lake Baikal, to the Bay of Bengal and to the great Sundarbans.

“We are waiting,” they called back, “for you.”

Jealous, the great peninsulas of Europe, the Iberian, Italian, and Balkan, beckoned to the light. “But us, but us, but what about all of us!”

“Fall on our peaks too!” called the Alps, Pyrenees, Apennines, Dinaric Alps, Balkans, and Carpathians,

And the sun, with a total, complete and utter equanimity, sang out softly to the glowing earth, “But you know so well my precious ones from all my time with you, that I … I have no favorites.”

And then it fell with a laughing, loyal, lasting love upon the whole of the great Serengeti.

You can find more fables like this at one of my blogs, http://www.antifables.com

Did You Think You Weren’t Supposed to Be Strong?

Posted: April 7, 2014 in thriving
Tags: grow in confidence, how to be strong, how to be successful, how to build confidence, how to thrive, mastery experiences, randy hasper, Success

I woke up this morning with a choice. We all do — ambivalent or focused, bifurcated or fired up for a kind of single-minded success.

I chose, just what I wanted to, and not what I didn’t. I finished the book of Proverbs along with my chai tea latte and steel cut oatmeal. Super-cool wise stuff is found in Proverbs, like, “The wise prevail through great power, and those who have knowledge muster their strength.” Proverbs 24:4-5

Kathy Korman Frey, Harvard MBA, a kind of confidence guardian, has posited that successful women benefit from their experiences of mastery, choosing to find things they do well that build confidence to do other things well.

Tea, oats, proverbs — it’s is smart to choose to grow in power. The use of power, the mustering of strength — this is not merely the heady stuff of tyrants and despots but also the way of the godly wise. The godly wise proceed with things that build up their strength; they move forward in ways that build up their confidence.

After my reading, I went out back to my lily pond and mucked it out. I threw my aluminum ladder across the pond, crawled out on it, lay down and began pulling the last year’s cattails out.

The long webbed, fleshy roots came out with a sucking sound. The water was cold, but the day was hot and under the gaze of a gorgeous Santa Anna wind and a cornflower blue sky I mucked and tucked and chucked out my pond. Monet-like, I gently lifted my lily pads, gave them space to thrive, flipped them back upright, left just enough cattails to grace the water with height again this spring.

Then I set on the papyrus growing at both ends, cutting back the dead brown stalks, leaving the bright green new shoots to poke out of the water like exclamation points with fireworks at the ends.

Then, there, thus — I set back and soaked in, my pond, lake, sea; my strength, my chosen yard of life, my several meters of canvass to paint, my long, limned, lovely, lined, lipped, lopped confidence.

And thus it is so that this and that and those like these will lead to more and more and more of that — power! Exploding! Like papyrus in the Nile, and lily pads in my backyard pond.

I know this about myself: it makes me strong to fix things, and it really fires me up when I create beauty — a backyard pond, a school in Southeast San Diego, a school in Tijuana, a community center in Nicaragua, a church in South Africa, a church in Brazil, a church in Chula Vista.

This afternoon I write on my iPad, under the same sun that I labored under this morning, the same sun the pharaohs built the pyramids under, the sun filtered through the shade in the window at a Starbucks near my house.

I’m here because ponds and pages and the music and the smell of coffee just do it perfectly for me. Mucking out lily ponds and jungles and schools and writing blog posts — these are my mastery experiences. So too are my sermons, and my modern proverbs, my fables and modern soliloquies too.

This is what builds up my confidence — what about you?

I suggest you do things that fill you up inside.

Go grow — in strength!

By doing things!

That build mastery!

Things that decrease ambivalence.

Things that increase confidence.

Did you think that you weren’t supposed to be strong?

Perfect For The Dwarfs

Posted: April 4, 2014 in Uncategorized
Tags: a church restored, FB Church Chula Vista California, making a beautiful church, randy hasper, thrive, Why fix the church

The hole went right through the beautiful wood cabinet door and out the other side. I could see that the metal had pierced the wood cleanly, splintering only slightly upon its exit inside the interior space.

I tried the lock. Perfect. The communion bread — safe.

We hit the switch and slid the glass. Light splashed down onto the owl, perched inside the oak cabinet, and lit it up. As we pushed each button — more light, for more art. Perfect.

I slid my eyes across the case. Fourteen pieces, shining there like the finest art in the finest museums in the finest world.

I looked up to the ceiling inside the shower. The drywall was broken out at least a foot wide and eighteen inches long. It looked like someone was trying to escape. I peered up into the opening — a rusted drain, a new rubber sleeve and a shinny black plastic ninety swept up to the floor above. Perfect.

Not a drop of water anywhere! I love a toilet that actually works, especially just before I go on stage.

We put the tiny round table in place in room four, then the little chairs around it. The toys, the changing table, the rug, the step stool. It looked like a great setup for dwarfs. It was. Perfect.

494 — at an angle on the baked potato stucco wall. We stood back. The silicon was still drying in the holes, but the numbers were staying put. The first building had been put up here in 1927. Almost ninety years later, we were sticking numbers on site. Awesome.

Perfect.

Perfect and perfect and perfect. After all, you want people to find the place where the holy communion bread, the sacred art, the little table and the sacred water chambers reside – right?

You do. You want them to find what you have done for them. You want them to find the beautiful church and all the good waiting for them there.

You do. That is why you do it.

For the dwarfs, and their parents — perfect. Because they are coming!

It’s Not Optional!

Posted: March 25, 2014 in Uncategorized
Tags: good thinking, how to think, how to think like a Christian, Proverbs 3:5, randy hasper, trusting God is not optional

“Do you catch the tone of this?” David asked me.

“What’s the tone?” I asked him. I had memorized this piece when I was four years old. I had never forgotten it. I had brought it to mind again and again over the years, sucking some kind of truth sap and meaning from it, some kind of rational safety from it, but I had never, ever once thought about its tone.

“The tone indicates that this is not optional,” he said. “It says, ‘Trust in the Lord with all you heart.‘ Do you see that? ‘And lean not on your own understanding.’ It isn’t an option, to trust or not; we are commanded to trust, and it says ‘in all your ways acknowledge him.‘ This is really serious. It’s about being humble enough to not think just anything we want, but to trust God and his thinking.”

I had never thought about Proverbs 3:5 quite like this before, never seen the demand it put on me in quite this way. To me this proverb has always been a kind of map for how to live, but I haven’t really thought of it as a command for how to live. It is a command — to join the rationality of God!

David and I were doing a study together. I was the mentor; he was the student. But suddenly, with his keep powers of perception and insight, the roles were reversed, as they so often are when we try to teach someone something, and he, a new Christian, was mentoring me, a crusty old professional seer.

Cool!

“And it has a promise in it,” he said. “He’ll make your path straight.”

“I’ve experience that part,” I thought. Then a complication passed through my head. “Does this mean we stop thinking?” I asked, “that our mind is supposed to follow God blindly, and be a blank slate?”

“Not at all,” he insisted immediately. “God still expects us to apply what he has shown us”

A kind of picture passed before me. A person, entering into a whole different mindset than what existed within their own circle of thoughts, a person encountering intense rationality — wise, clear, rational thinking, from God — and beginning to think in his vein, thinking straight-up, thinking super meticulously, thinking with impeccable logic, with super sanity, with a fascinating perspicacity, because they were thinking along with the best mind in the cosmos — God’s.

Here’s the deal, from David, the new guy who knows how to think.

It’s not optional, as a Christian, to not be rational with the very rationality of God. It is not optional to not trust in the kind of thinking that God is thinking.

Think with God! It’s a command. I’m good with that.

The Real Trick is Paying Attention — and Not Worrying!

Posted: March 8, 2014 in thriving, wonders
Tags: how to live in the moment, how to not worry, how to pay attention, how to thrive, paying attention to the moment, randy hasper, seeing the beauty of life

Just before we left the house I remembered my binoculars. “What the heck?”

That was the whole point of the thing — the swirling, milky Andromeda galaxy; the flaming red Ocotillo against the cornflower blue sky; a crisp, white quarter moon; a perfectly pink, finely needled pincushion cactus — and not thinking about my dental appointment next week.

Sometimes it is so freakin’ deliciously and precisely, so fix-brainedly, knob-focusedly, fine-tunedly all about paying attention, which means not remembering and not imagining.

Sitting around the fire that evening I assembled Dale’s telescope on my lap. It was operating-room team work.

“Mount.”

“Diagonal.”

“Finder.”

“20 mm lens — no not the 9mm — too much for the optics.”

I honored each piece of technology with nomenclature, a moments-techno-touch, a loving-looking-pause.

We know the names of what we take the time to see.

We flipped a lawn chair on its side and made a table for the telescope.

Boom — there were the mountains and craters of our mad-circling moon, in crisp, blazing white — always there, seldom wooed, never won.

And then later, after we had talked the dry dust, desert wind and gas fire into oblivion — sighting the scope off the car hood — we ogled the moons of Jupiter, glittering in a row next to the giant planet, posing there for us in a way we could take in, the size of an @ in an email address.

Gorgeous — drop-dead-come-back-alive gorgeous!

Awareness is the thing, conscious, woken-up, fix-eyed, mind-sighted, calibrated awareness, in the moment — not tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

As we sat over dinner earlier in the evening, I made a conscious decision to take in the moment — the pianist, hunched over his swirling, finger-tipped atmosphere, the mushroom crusted scallop posing on my fork, our friends all holding knives while spinning stories of the children we have named, of calving glaciers and orca whales.

We weren’t thinking about the possibility of any of us getting cancer.

The other day I noticed that when I post a set of my freshly crafted modern proverbs on my website, I do so by touching the screen of my iPad, copying them from my “notes” program with my finger tip and then springing them — again from the tip of my finger — into a new post! Bam! — my finger-wand casts word-wisdom into the waiting world.

I reach out, riding on a cloud, finger extended — and living in that moment and no other possible one — I create, my world!

This morning my wife and I sat outside our room and watched the sun come up on the mountains in the Anza Borrego desert. Bright light flooded the alluvials and tipped the peaks.

The real trick is paying attention — and not worrying.

The Gorgeous, Quilted Masterpiece of Self-quieting Work

Posted: March 1, 2014 in conflicts
Tags: conflict reolution, how to be self-quieting in conflicts, how to manage your emotions, how to respond to anger, randy hasper, self-quieting behavior, thriving during conflict

“She’s a liar,” he yelled, staring at me super-intently, as if intensity would convince.

It didn’t.

“Do you have any issues?” I asked as calmly as I could manage.

“We all have issues!” he yelled back in a tone that implied, “You are so stupid for even asking me that; everybody knows that we all have issues!”

I paused thinking fast, taking a slow-fast motion pan over the entire scene in front of me.

It is interesting how much tone communicates.

It is also interesting how we can speak to it without even conscious awareness of what we are doing. In my brain there was a kind of automatic voice that told me, “He just deflected your attempt to help him, so you better try again.

I asked, “Might your issues be affecting your relationship with her?”

He blew.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t fun, and what he said next wasn’t true.

Standing there in the doorway of the church office, looking out at him — him so angry, in attack mode — it was vaguely clear to me that he was trying to get some truth out. So I helped him.

“I think she’s doing a good job,” I said, keeping my voice quiet. He waved me off, frustrated, threw up his hands, turned his back on me and strode off across the parking lot.

“Bless you!” I called after him. He just kept walking. I felt kind of stupid saying that, it was so cliched, but I was grasping for some way to end this well, to show that I wanted his good, that I wasn’t really mad at him, and that he did belong in our organization. I got it that he so badly wanted a bit of power and dignity. Who doesn’t? I don’t want him to lose value.

It was a conflict. I was mildly rattled — not much.

I have been thinking about this kind of thing lately. I want to learn how to go through conflict like I go through a good night’s sleep — turning over softly — so as not to wake my wife — breathing regularly, resting on my own firm but comfortable relational mattress.

How do I manage conflict well? How do any us?

First, in conflict with someone, it is essential to remain calm, so that we might do our best to bring them and ourselves no harm — or as little harm as possible — by always offering up careful, simple, helpful words — mostly questions.

We must figure out the truth together, gently, so we can at least remain at rest. And we must not duck, the way most humans instinctively do, and go get other people to do our work for us. We are responsible to enter into our own conflicts, thinking well.

This week I sat in my office looking at a letter I had just received from someone I am trying to help. Here it was again. Conflict. This person had their own issue to work out, but they were turning on our organization!

It’s interesting. If you try to help some people, they bite you! You become the problem — so they can avoid their problem.

In the moment, in the first wave of emotion, harsh responses to them easily come to mind. I am learning to dismiss those.

If I have learned anything about conflict, I have learned that my first reaction to people is usually one that needs some work. I am responsible to do well by them, no matter how hostile I initially feel.

In conflict, at first I am upset. That’s normal. I have learned not to act on that kind of normal. My upset needs time, and self-coaching — sometimes just seconds, sometimes days — to cool. I need just a bit of time to sort out how I should best respond.

I am learning, slowly, through managing conflicts in several organizations which I now help lead — churches and counseling entities– how to do the work, in the moment and later, required to stay calm and clear-headed.

Having a good conflict is like repainting an old room — the prep, the self-prep once you get going, is the biggest part of the job.

This week a high-level leader I work with made a decision that limited another one of the many young leaders I oversee. I was frustrated by how this might cause several of our organizations to lose traction.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I shared the issue with several of my colleagues, several wise, business-savvy, senior leaders. It was good. Nothing is yet settled, but we are starting some good process to bring a win-win solution to the many different professional organizations these matters effects.

A big part of the work needed in successful conflict resolution comes in creating calm space in which we can all clarify the real issues, focusing only on the areas that really need renewing, and then proceeding very carefully, with the good of all in mind — and with lots of clarifying questions handy.

In conflict, I must ever remain the learner, learning as I go how to bring healing words to everyone.

In tension with people, back-door work, stair-work, padded-room work, reflective-work protects us and everyone else from the stupidity of blaming and shaming each other.

Good process, in the midst of conflict, process well done, with skill, is something that minimizes harm, maximizes healing and becomes something we can later stand back and admire.

I’ve seen poor conflict resolution. The root issues were never even mentioned. People didn’t process their own emotions or each other’s. There was only an effort to blame each other for some superficial problems, to cover up the real problems and to ultimately create a loser and a winner. Nobody took much responsibility for themselves. I hated it. I think it can go better than that.

It helped me, however, learn to adore slow-motion, good-outcome, self-reflective, completely candid, win-win conflict resolution.

Here is the bottom line. To have a struggle between us go well, we must first do the work inside ourselves, we must take control of ourselves, and we must learn to sit back — in a relational easy chair that we pull up to the conflict — and relax, and gather self-knowledge and wise words and discover good questions.

In tension with others, we must first cover, we must first softly blanket the struggle with the gorgeous, quilted masterpiece our own self-quieting work.

Fixing the Latch

Posted: February 24, 2014 in conflicts
Tags: delete harmful people, how to handle conflict, how to resolve conflict, mend relationships, mend the latch, randy hasper

A while back, the latch on my side gate fell off. Don’t you hate it when you lose your latch?

The wood two-by-four that the metal latch was screwed on to had rotted. The gate wouldn’t stay closed.

So I went to work. I knocked off the old wood, replaced it with new wood, screwed back on the latch — all good. My gate stays closed again — nice and solid.

I was talking to a friend a few years ago who had a conflict with someone else I knew. The latch was coming off their relationship.

She said to me, “I’m a runner!”

What she meant was that when relationships got hard, she ran from the conflict. This time, true to form, she ran — clear across the country. When she came back, it wasn’t to the same place. I miss her.

I was talking to someone else this week. There is conflict on the team which she oversees in our organization. She told me, “Don’t worry! I’m not going anywhere!” She’s a stayer. She is willing to mend a latch.

Rot, difficulty, conflict — it’s normal, expected, certain to come, at home, work, community and church. But usually, with courage and some skill, and the willingness to stay through it, something broken can be repaired.

What is absolutely necessary to get a fix is to not run. To mend our relational gates we must stay for honest conversations, risk expressing underlying emotions, come to workable solutions, craft action plans that create win-win solutions.

The other day I spent some time deleting some contacts from my mobile phone. Many of them had moved. People come and go. We always have a few special ones to delete from our contacts, maybe even some people who have harmed us, whom we shouldn’t talk to anymore. They don’t get us. They limit us. Perhaps they dominate us. We delete them. That’s okay. Its protection.

But here is the deal: Delete who you must. Especially be courageous in deleting those who bring you ruin with their bad choices, but don’t delete the precious people who God has given you to love — family, team, coworkers, therapists, fellow students, friends — even when they aren’t perfect. With them, be a stayer!

Your people, those within your yard, those protected by your gate, your magnificent messes, all your sweet ones, all your fragile precious ones whom God has given you, when it comes to them — mend the latch.

Thrive!

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