Category Archives: Personal
On Making The Most Of Your Life: A Lesson From Bill Gates And Steve Jobs
Bill Gates was recently interviewed on the Nightline TV show in the USA. He had some interesting things to say about the effect Steve Jobs‘ death had on him. Here is an extract from one report:
Gates is now no longer the world’s richest man, having given much of his money away. Since 1994, the Gates Foundation has given grants totalling more than $26bn to various charities and projects. But Jobs’ death served as a reminder to Gates that he needed to push on with his philanthropic efforts, he said in the interview.
“Well, it’s very strange to have somebody who’s so vibrant and made such a huge difference and been kind of a constant presence, to have him die. It makes you feel like, ‘Wow, we’re getting old.’ I hope I still have quite a bit of time for the focus I have now, which is the philanthropic work.”
“And there’s drugs we’re investing in now that won’t be out for 15 years – malaria eradication, I need a couple of decades here to fulfill that opportunity. But, you know, it reminds you that you gotta pick important stuff, because you only have a limited time.”
Christians may have eternity, but we only have this life to make a difference. Do we need that sense of urgency and prioritisation that Gates outlines here? I was thinking about that recently when going through a few months’ worth of blog posts by Michael Hyatt. He talked one day about how to avoid the power of the drift. The next day he asked, are you living your own dream or someone else’s?
How easy it is to stop being intentional about our lives. He made me pause. Is my life just going by, because I just do the day-to-day stuff and don’t think about the longer term? It’s easy to do when you’re caught up in busyness and pressure. I realised I’d got as far as knowing some of the things I don’t want to achieve in ministry – most of which involve a distaste for climbing the greasy pole of the religious hierarchy. But I hadn’t fully explored the obverse. What are the positive things I want to do and to contribute? What gifts can I offer that will make a difference?
I realised that ‘ordinary’ circuit ministry only goes part of the way to answering that question. I enjoy it and I don’t disdain it, but I need something more on top. I’d still like it to be have an academic slant, but the doors aren’t open at present.
I can write, though, and if you’ve wondered why the number of blog posts has been increasing lately, that’s the reason. Some might think that writing is a poor relation to Gates’ philanthropy, but words have power to sway hearts and minds. And yes, I need to back up words with my own actions.
So I’ve been starting by trying to use the down time I’m allowed each day (our big bad rule book encourages us to spend up to an hour a day away from ordinary ministry) to research and write a blog post, such as this one. At the very least that will be good discipline. I’ve ordered a book that is recommended in some circles to help explore the more creative side of my personality – The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and happily that came in the post today. So let’s see how we go!
But it has to be a question for each of us: are we maximising the gifts we have been given and following our call to change some corner of the world? We may not have Gates’ billions, but in other ways we have all that and more.
So – how are we making a difference? Have we started? Why not? Let’s drop the excuses.
On Recycling And Moving Home
How is house moving for you? It’s stressful for most, if not all people. In the case of a minister, you are not just moving home but work base, too, if (like me and probably most British ministers) you work from home. In our forthcoming move, we are bringing together the following factors:
There are minimum standards for a Methodist minister’s house, but they vary hugely (that’s inevitable). When we moved here, we downsized from an Edwardian house with six bedrooms, two reception rooms and a huge kitchen that had once belonged to a Navy Admiral to a small three-bedroom house with a lounge-diner. We became Mr and Mrs eBay as we prepared to move. Now, we are moving back up the scale to a four-bedroom house with separate lounge and dining room, plus a conservatory. Whereas here it has been difficult to offer hospitality, in the new manse it will be eminently possible, and we need to kit ourselves out to that effect.
To do that, we need to rid ourselves of certain items, such as the small sofas we bought to squeeze into this house, a redundant wall unit, the current dining table and chairs and several other smaller things. We need to replace them with a new three-piece suite, conservatory furniture, a sideboard, and miscellaneous other items. How can we afford this? We have been given some generous financial gifts by the churches here, and we are sourcing good second-hand pieces on eBay. In some cases, we are using an excellent website called Shiply to arrange economical transporting of them. So this morning, we took delivery of the conservatory furniture we wanted, which came 150 miles, and which we could not reasonably have collected.
Next, we tried the local branch of Freecycle. If you don’t know Freecycle, it’s a great way to offer items you no longer need, or request things you do need. It’s all done by an email to a list that circulates around people in your geographical area. With our local branch, however, all emails have to go through moderators and can take up to two days to appear. When you do get rid of something, it also takes that length of time for the email you circulate telling people the item has gone to go round. In the meantime, you have to tell maybe ten other people that what they want is no longer available. However, most of the people who have collected from us have been grateful. Only the odd one or two have expected us to dance to their tunes.
In fact, Freecycle was so slow when we first started using it that in our frustration I rang the local council and booked a delivery slot for them to take away some of our stuff. I didn’t want to do that for two reasons: one, it would go to landfill, and two, I had to pay! Thankfully, as of tonight everything I had asked the council to come and take next week has finally gone on Freecycle. Tomorrow I get to ring the council again and see whether I can get a refund.
I can’t help thinking all this could be a lot simpler. Maybe you could strip the moderation out of Freecycle and just ban those who break the rules. All I do know is that I’m glad we have a three-week break between me taking my final service last Sunday and our actual moving date! Right now, I wouldn’t have time for ministry!
So – do you have any tips to share on successful ethical disposal of possessions? Do you have any stories about moving to share? I hope nobody has had incidents like this one.
The Picnic
Yesterday (Thursday), our children finished at their primary school before our forthcoming move from Essex to Surrey. The other week, the mother of one of our daughter’s friends texted us to ask whether we would be free to share a picnic with her today. We were, so we agreed.
At 11 this morning, we made our way over to the park where we had agreed to meet. Only it wasn’t just this one family. It was a whole collection of families. And more turned up over the next couple of hours. We were deeply touched by their affection for us, and their gratitude for the part we had played in the community.
It reminded me of a story from a previous sabbatical, when Debbie and I worshipped at a Church Of Another Denomination. The pastor was a friend and a good preacher, but one Sunday morning a lay elder preached. He pranced around at the front like an evangelical superstar, and pronounced in his sermon that when non-Christians ask you how you are, they never mean it. Only your Christian friends truly care about you.
“Idiot,” we both thought. We have both had good reason to be grateful for our non-Christian friends. Sometimes they have been far better friends than some of our Christian acquaintances.
Whatever I believe about the need for everyone to follow Christ (and I do believe that), we need a theology to cope with the goodness of non-Christians.
Regarding The Missing Sermon
This is another week when I am not posting a new sermon. I find myself having to look through my digital files and retrieve an old one to preach tomorrow.
The reason is this: although I had some rough ideas in my head for a sermon this week, everything changed on Thursday. I began bleeding and could not stem the flow – or at least it took hours for it to slow down. My GP referred me urgently to the local hospital’s Emergency Assessment Unit. After waiting over six hours to see a surgeon on call (they were all in theatre) I was told it was not sinister and not the kind of blood loss to need surgery, nor had I become anaemic. I just needed a non-urgent referral to an out-patients’ clinic. Hence they sent me home and I went off to hail a taxi.
So it was quite a fright. As is usual with me, although my rational mind told me it was all OK, my imagination kicked in and my body reacted by playing a game of ‘How high can we send Dave’s blood pressure?’ Not my favourite game, and it certainly concerned the nurses at the hospital.
Anyway, I am all right, but I lost a lot of time at a critical juncture of the week, and especially with having to attend Synod today (why do they always have them on warm, sunny days?), I cannot realistically come up with something fresh for this weekend. I hope those of you who enjoy the sermons will understand. Those who don’t enjoy them can appreciate the break!
It Was * Years Ago Today
Thirty-four years ago today, I found faith in Christ, when the Holy Spirit used the promises and professions of faith in the 1975 Methodist Service Book to make the heart of Christian faith come alive for me.
Sixty-five years ago today, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at Flossenburg.
Another Memorable Birthday
My ‘big’ birthdays – the ones ending in zeros – always seem to be memorable. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not.
My thirtieth birthday fell on a Sunday during my ministerial training in Manchester. My fellow student John Wiltshire and his wife Judy invited me to their flat for a birthday dinner. I still remember the delicacy they served up: beans on toast. Not that I was grumbling on a student grant.
When the time came for me to head back to the hall of residence, John asked if I wanted to call a cab. Being an experienced city dweller, I declined, thinking I knew the safe ways back. No, actually, it was because I was too mean to pay out for one.
Big mistake. I was mugged on the way by a teenage thug. So much for being city-wise. I recall another student, Martyn Coe, who phoned my bank and got my credit card cancelled, and another, Stuart Wild, a former solicitor, who came to the police station with me.
My fortieth was much happier. It was the day I introduced my girlfriend Debbie to my family. My sister and brother-in-law had booked a table at a French restaurant, and my parents joined us. When Debbie came to order her steak, the waitress asked her how she wanted it cooked. In a memorable reply she said, “Cremated.” It was, she explained, the only way she could ever be sure of getting meat well done.
A year and a quarter later, Debbie was my lovely wife, and my family have had to grow accustomed to her frequent comparisons between spades and shovels.
So to my fiftieth, on Thursday just gone. Debbie and the children had prepared a bag-full of surprises for me, all planned with loving detail. Perhaps most special was that both kids had made their own birthday cards for me. Price doesn’t matter: love does.
After taking the monkeys to school, Debbie and I decided we would drive somewhere for breakfast. Turning the key in the ignition, we heard a strange noise. Had it not been a dry, sunny day, I would have sworn it was the sound of the rear window wiper. But even an absent-minded person like me doesn’t usually manage that.
At a garage later, we discovered it was the exhaust. I couldn’t complain: it was the original exhaust, and the car is eleven years old. Nevertheless, I hadn’t bargained on spending my birthday morning at ATS.
That evening, we were due to go out for a tapas meal. Our favourite babysitter was ready to come, but at tea-time, Mark started complaining that he felt sick.
“Don’t be silly,” I said, “It’s just that you woke up early. You’re tired.”
Wrong, Dad. The bug in his stomach announced its presence in spectacular fashion. No meal out, but fish and chips later from the chippie. Debbie said we should have stuck a candle in my cod and taken a photo.
But who cares? Having become a parent at a later age than most, it’s a small thing to miss a restaurant to look after a child.
Mark
Our son Mark is five years old today. He was born as a ‘Monday to Firday, 9 to 5′ baby – that is, by elective Caesarean Section after Debbie had a rough final trimester in the pregnancy. (Seventeen months earlier, Rebekah had been an emergency Caesarean.) Debbie went into the hospital at seven in the morning while I took Rebekah to her childminder. But the planned trip to theatre at nine never happened, due to crises. Eventually, Mark was born at 2:21 pm.
A scheduled date for August had bothered me. It always would have been tight for him to stay in the womb until September, but I was bothered about him being one of the youngest in his school classes. (The school year begins in September in the UK.) I need not have worried, he has turned out to be the brightest child in his class by a distance. Amazingly, he is also one of the tallest. And had he been a September birth and had to wait until next month to begin school, I don’t know how he would have coped. I’m a proud Dad, in case you hadn’t noticed.
Having no brothers myself, I had always wanted to have a son, to keep the family name going. I know, it’s a guy thing. Not that I love our daughter any less – far from it, I feel a similar special father-daughter bond with her, compared with that my Dad has always had with my sister. And as our firstborn, she holds a special place in my heart. Besides, she is the most beautiful girl in the world!
Mark has certainly inherited my love of all things academic. He devours books, and has even started writing his own. Yesterday, he started writing his own Bible! He gets fixated on one thing and won’t let go. I call it tenacity and perseverance, Debbie calls it an obsession. It will stand him in good stead as he learns more.
He does have a redhead’s temper, though, and combined with the stocky build (that’s not from me) he’s developed in recent months, I don’t think he’ll have the trouble with bullies that I suffered for many years. I won’t be sorry if that’s the case, although he’ll need to improve his social skills in terms of conflict resolution as he gets older!
For some months now, he has compiled a list of girlfriends – especially one girl called Lily, but there are about thirty names on the list. They go on the list whether they consent or not – they just have to be girls he likes. One day he will learn that one woman is (more than) enough! But yesterday on the beach, Rebekah made friends with a five-year-old called Carla. Mark joined in, chatting the hind legs of a donkey. When Carla had to say goodbye, she came up to him and planter two smackers on his face. He looked so happy!
So – happy birthday, son!
A Financial Decision
This week, I bought a new toy. Actually, you might say I’m treating it less like a toy and more like a pet, given how regularly I am feeding it and taking it for walks.
I bought an iPod.
I’ve wanted one for aeons. I love music. I have a large CD collection. The thought of portable, available music is bliss. Yet I’ve never bought an iPod before.
Sure, the last time I had to buy a mobile phone, I bought one that came with an MP3 player. But despite good reviews, the Sony Ericsson W810i proved to be unrecyclable rubbish. As a phone it’s good, but the MP3 is terrible. The software provided is the most unreliable I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve become quite acquainted with Sony Ericsson‘s technical support people, who could only blame it on an unspecified clash with other programs on our PC. What are the problems? When I do get tracks on it, either because the software got out of the bed the right side just for once, or because I resort to a conventional copy and paste in Windows, it has a sneaky trick for me. It mangles the order of the tracks. Usually, they are completely reversed. Occasionally, just the first track is moved to the end. Imagine that when you’re listening to a live recording, such as Bruce Cockburn‘s brilliant recent release Slice O Life.
Then it has another trick. It calls this ‘Playback failed’. At the end of a track (and lately in the middle, too) it goes on strike. The only solution is to reboot the phone.
In short, it’s about as productive as a nineteen seventies British Leyland shop steward. I swear I have a Friday afternoon phone, much as we used to speak of being saddled with Friday afternoon cars.
So I’ve been Googling around forums, seeking advice. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who have reported the same faults with this phone. (So maybe it’s not a Friday afternoon one, but Sony Ericsson’s regular standard. Do they supply specially tweaked ones to reviewers and then ship piles of manure to the shops?) I’ve tried all the suggestions I could find. Nothing has improved the phone.
Well, I clearly needed a new MP3 player. And rather like Janis Joplin singing, ‘O Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz‘, I prayed, ‘O Lord, please may I have an iPod?’
Now my ideal iPod would be an iPod Classic. The 120Gb version. No, actually, the short-lived 160GB model. I would need all that capacity and more to fit in what I want. But the price was not right. Money for treats is not plentiful chez Faulkner. I could pray for the Lord to provide, but what had he provided? I had £25 in Amazon vouchers, and someone had also recently given me £20. The new bottom of the range 4GB iPod Shuffle was £56.60 on Amazon, whereas everybody else was charging the full £59.00. Whoo and indeed hoo, a £2.40 discount. I would only need to find £11.60 of my own money.
That was manageable, but was it right? I’ve always made a point of praying about financial decisions, especially big ones. I know this isn’t the biggest, but much as I wanted an iPod, I knew I could be giving in to self-indulgence here. There have been various occasions when God’s answer has been dramatically clear in my life. One was about getting to theological college the first time, when I was turned down for a student grant. There is a long and wonderful story I can tell about how God provided the finances.
And in 1998, I had another example. I was praying about buying a new computer. I wanted one. The old one was crawling and there was little more that could be done to cure its arthritis. I had an ongoing prayer, asking God to show me whether it was right to buy a new one or whether I was merely justifying my love of PCs.
I had a woman in one of my churches who had received the most remarkable gift of prophecy. One Saturday, she went down to the church building to pray on her own. While she was at the front of the worship area near the pulpit and communion table, she prayed for me. She told me soon afterwards that the Lord had told her to tell me I could have what I wanted. She had no idea that I was praying about buying a new PC.
It wasn’t so dramatic with the iPod. It clicked in a simple way. What was the reason I’d gone for a phone with an MP3 player? Answer: because I need to exercise more., and I needed a motivation to get out walking. Listening to music and podcasts became my incentive. All I can say is that still just felt ‘right’, and hence I welcomed my new silver arrival on Thursday morning.
And this experience prompts me to ask: what are the criteria you use as a Christian in making a serious financial decision? One or two of mine have poked their heads above the parapet in this story, not least the importance of prayer in the discernment of motives. Let’s have a conversation below in the Comments where we can encourage one another. And if you have some good stories, please share them. I for one would love to read them.
