Servant Leadership, Marketing, Jesus

Reading a post today from Tanveer Naseer's blog I found the stuff of Jesus. I love when this happens!

In this post he's talking about Peter Drucker and an ancient book ('Xenophon's Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War'). In the book, a father asks his son: "Tell me how best to get a man to do something that must be done..." The son replies with an answer that is inferior. 

 The father's reply:
“’Simply take care of those you lead better even than they would or could take care of themselves. Always put their needs before your own.’”

Jesus said (as recorded in Mark 10):

Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else.

Think leadership that changes things.  Think people like MLK, Ghandi, Lincoln. More recently, we have Steve Jobs who was a bit of a tyrant and was not a slave to others but was certainly a slave to his vision and arguably his customers, or at least his idea of what they would most like.

Original Sin AND BLESSING

From one if my fav blogs - Generous Matters - Excellent post:

” . . . before there was original sin, there was original blessing. And that blessing, aided and abetted by the living Spirit of God, is still a powerful force in the world. Each and everyday, we’re invited to make a choice: we will see lots of things – beautiful and terrible, wonderful and awful, good and bad, encouraging and discouraging. Which will we focus on, remember, and share with others? Which, that is, will we really see? Much hinges on our decision.”

David J. Lose, Marbury E. Anderson Chair in Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary and Director of the Center for Biblical Preaching, from his blog In the Meantime

Living

Living is so dangerous! On the highway today I saw an accident in which a car was drug around by a semi that it got stuck under.

The question is not how will I stay safe but rather how will I live fully?

Elections: Good Samaritan & Zombies.

Last week, my good brother-in-law wrote asking how I understand the elections and the candidates.  A few points from my reply (it should be noted that I haven't followed the pres. race closely or often):

• Does it make a big difference who you vote for this year? It seems Romeny's and Obama's policies are not so different in many areas, as demonstrated in the debates.
• Our presidential election process seems broken:
• It's greatly influenced by whomever can buy the most air time.
• The candidate that gets put forth by their party is the one the party most believes will win, not necessarily the one they most believe will govern best.
• Voting for a third, fourth or fifth party candidate (if they're on your states ballot) may get that nominee up to 2 or 3% of popular vote.  How'd we get to only 2 choices?
• It seems the Democrat bias toward social programs aimed at the poor best line up with Jesus' words in respond to the question: "who is my neighbor?" (of course, typical Jesus, he was speaking about a personal responsibility rather than a corporate one)
• Thinking Obama is turning the country into a socialist nation is misdirected. First, our economy does not employ pure capitalism. Second, there are broad cultural shifts toward blending of various types of economies (much like has happened in Europe).
• As this post points out, Obama hasn't messed it up and we have made some progress under this administration (of course not as much as promised!).

Two videos - an important warning about the Zombie Apocalypse in the second: