For feeds that do not include the embedded video, click here.

hat tip: State of Pate

At the beginning of this year, I set some goals for myself, one of which was to

Move my spiritual journey from one of “learning about” to intentionally expressing God’s love in a tangible way to people who are in need. (hurting (everyone), poor, hungry, homeless…)

Even as I read that statement, I am stirred.  What does it mean when your own words stir your heart 10 months later? One of the biggest lessons of my year is around humility in my beliefs.  I want to hold my faith with open hands up to God and declare, “I don’t have all the answers.  I don’t believe the same things I believed 30 years ago.  I don’t even believe the same things I believed 10 years ago.  I am constantly changing, learning, adapting and I won’t believe the same things in 10 years that I believe now.  With that in mind, I pray God to help me have a humble heart that values the thoughts, beliefs and feelings of others.  Help me to see your thumbprint in everyone.”

This year has been one in which I am intentionally moving my focus from my intellectual beliefs to actually doing more of what God is calling me to.  Moving from talk to action.  you might say that I am adding more orthopraxy to my orthodoxy.  With that goal, the Justice Project has truly captured my heart; “a yearly comprehensive service initiative, where we invite a diverse collection of churches, organizations, & individuals to help us make a change for good in an inner-city community through selfless service, radical hospitality, & a message of God’s love & ability to transform the human heart.” I can hardly tell you how excited I am about what is going on here.  I am such a small part of it with such a huge desire to be more involved.  Folks from all over Charlotte have joined together to help folks in just one inner city neighborhood.  It’s a grass roots organization with little funding and the intention to remain that way.  It is relational from the ground up.  The focus is on building relationships with the community in Villa Heights as we serve them and partner with them to promote positive change in their community.  It’s about building relationships within the helper groups as well as those who have needs.

When I think about poverty (like any other problem), my troubleshooting skills take over. Let’s solve this problem once an for all!   I begin to consider the causes of poverty, but to find a solution, not just to blame.  The problem overwhelms me.  Part of me would like to explain away why it cannot be solved then walk away having appeased my own conscience.  H. L. Menken said, “There is always an easy solution to every problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.“  There is no easy answer… and I fear that many “easy answers” exacerbate the problem.  I could be oversimplifying things by saying so, but I believe that the solution begins in Jesus’ answer when someone asked him what the greatest commandment was.  He replied that nothing is more important than loving God and loving our neighbor.  Oversimplified or not, that’s where I am focusing my efforts.

Anyone want to join me in Villa Heights this Saturday?

I enjoy being creative. I like putting letters and words together with a photo or two or three to create a message that was never said quite like this before. There’s a risk in the writing and publishing. Will people like it? Could I have done it better? Will it make a difference? When I play music, I wonder if I shouldn’t hang it up because someone else can play better than I. Is that the right note? the right accent? the right feel? I turns into a perfectionist game, which I can never win. Creativity isn’t right. It isn’t wrong. It isn’t even about right or wrong. That’s the wrong measuring stick.

The value of creativity is from the value of the creator. Creative ventures are an expression of something that is inside of us. It is like nothing else. If you like my music or not does not set the value of the music. If you like my blog or not, does not set the worth of the art of my writing. Your opinion of the quality of my art is different than the value of the expression of my art. Does that make sense?

I like jazz music, but I do not like all jazz music. There are some artists that I enjoy listening to a lot more than others. Pat Metheny is one of my favorites. I also love the sound that Michael Brecker got out of a saxophone. He was amazing! I was so sad to hear that he passed away earlier this year. I love listening to live jazz more than studio jazz. There is something raw and creative about hearing the music as it is produced. The occasional mistakes, the wrong notes, the intonation problems, the missed cues… everything. It is art. No one wants to make mistakes, but that’s part of the creation. The risk one takes when you pick up the horn.

I said all that to say this. I wish I had understood that art is not about perfection when I was a youngster. I think I would have tried pushing the boundaries of artistic expression more. There was music inside me that I was afraid to express. I distinctly remember hearing tunes and musical arrangements, but I didn’t think I had what it took to make it happen. As a young adult, I wrote a short piece for piano (real short, like just a few bars). I really liked it, but I couldn’t seem to finish it, so it remains… unfinished, unshared. Oh, if only I could take my 49 year old mind and heart back to my 10 year old self. If only…

Express a new thought

Place the words just so. It is

Creativity

I can still create and I can appreciate the creativity in others. How do you express your creativity?

I do not want to “see the pattern”. A few years ago, a coworker told me about the TV show, 24. I got it on DVD and watched it with Jeanie. What a great show! I loved the way they put it together by doing it in “real time”. After the first season on DVD, we watched the 2nd season. By the end of the second season I was starting to “see the pattern”. I was seeing the formula. I started watching the clock and thinking to myself, “It is too early to solve this now. Something really off the wall is about to happen.” Sure enough, a new character would turn the whole thing upside down. By the end of season two, I didn’t care. In fact, I never saw the final episode. I didn’t skip it on purpose, but got too busy to watch it. I could have rented it again, but I just didn’t care any more.

When I am playing jazz on my trombone or flügelhorn, I may find myself running out of ideas. Sometimes I will just pick a note out of the blue (no pun intended)… one that will just stir things up for me. I won’t know what it will sound like and that’s the point. It may fit well with the tune or it may not. The challenge then (whether it fits or not) is to make it sound like I meant to do it. The mere change can inspire me to weave a different musical pattern completely because of where it took me.

When I am running, or riding my bicycle, or driving, I love to take different routes, just because I can. I sometimes shave my face backwards because I can.
A long time ago when I was in the musical instrument repair business, I toured a musical instrument factory. A group of my colleagues wandered away from the “official” tour when they saw a man engraving a saxophone by hand. As they watched him in awe, one of them asked him if he ever made a mistake. He said, “you mean like this?” and he purposefully scratched the instrument with his engraving tool. He paused a moment to let us take in the gravity of what he had just done, “I just make it look like I meant it,” and he began to add leaves to the scratch to make it look like a vine or a branch. That inspires me. Turning a mistake into a work of art. Creating variety. Using variety to be creative.

After all, a rut is just a grave with the ends kicked out.

Values are the fundamentals. Just the process of asking what a value is opens up a whole new set of questions. In general, I guess I always thought of values as being virtues. We are supposed to “value” them all. But if I say I value everything equally, I am really saying that I value nothing at all.

Although on some level, I value hundreds of things, it is only helpful if I narrow the list down to a few manageable items. If I could list the hundreds of things I could value, but only focus on the top few things, it would be helpful. In fact that’s what I did. Thanks to John for providing this list of values to start with.

Car Values
I just bought a Nissan pickup truck from Carmax. As I was shopping for it, I instinctively thought about the qualities I valued in a vehicle and chose this truck. Because it was:

• A pickup truck
• A brand known for reliability
• Used
• Good price
• Relatively low mileage
• I could buy it for the sticker price without having to haggle.

Change any of those top values and I probably would have bought something completely different.

Life Values
So the similar, but more important question is, “What am I looking for in life?” Here’s where I found some of the answers to that question:

• What do I just naturally do over and over? Patterns of thoughts, feelings and behavior.
• What resonates with me? What makes my heart do a flip?
• What do I desire to be more intentional about valuing?
• What do I admire in others?

At the risk of being known as Master of the Obvious, I don’t know what I don’t know. So many things that are important to me now, were not even on my radar just a few years ago. That tells me that values are not carved in stone. There will be things that I learn and am drawn to that will change my values in the future. But it is a starting place. My hope is that it inspires you to think about what you value.

These are the values I identified. If you know me, I hope you will see a picture of me in this graphic: