Wednesday, November 23, 2005

As I write, I sit.

As I sit, I stare.

I am looking at a wall of books in front of me...nine feet tall, about five-and-a-half feet wide. They sit on white shelves, colorful and silent, inviting and intimidating.

And the best part is...they're in my living room.

About three months ago, a very generous friend of mine made me a giant bookcase for my house. It was made to fit right inside of the wall of my living room. It is made of what my carpenter-friend calls MDF, which I can only assume stands for "Multi-Dimensional Foam," which is odd considering it is nothing like foam and a great deal like wood. It can, however, boast that it exists in all three dimensions.

...that was three months ago.

For the last 90 days, give or take, it has been sitting in pieces in the corner of my living room. The day after I got it, in my new-bookcase zeal, I primed it with white primer paint. (For the uninitiated, primer paint is a lot like regular paint except you can put it on with a great deal less care, as you're just going to paint over it anyway. I think it is less a painting technique and more just a right of passage). Then, I stacked the shelves inside the empty case, and put my painting and sealing materials down below the bottom shelf.

...and then I walked away.

...and I haven't touched it in three months.

...until yesterday.

...(forgive me, but ellipses were on sale again this week, so I stocked up).

Yesterday, I got tired of staring at the barren shelves stacked up inside of the empty bookcase...so I did what any responsible homeowning husband would do with a disassembled half-painted bookcase would do...

I just hung the damn shelves and put books on them.

Sure, sure...I could have painted them. I could have dragged them outside in the 35-degree afternoon, painted one side, waited for it to dry, painted the other side, and re-caulked the half-caulked bookcase in the meantime. Then I could have waited for it to dry. Then I could have sanded it, repainted, waited for that to dry, and then hung the shelves.

And I could have perhaps invented a cure for square-toe, baked a pineapple bundt cake, and called my mom just to chat. But I didn't. I just hung the damn shelves and put books on them.

And, if you don't mind me saying so, they look awfully nice, thank you very much.

At some point I had to be realistic with myself. I'm not going to paint those shelves. Not soon, anyway. I'm searching for time to do the things I love and that I absolutely need to do, and painting my bookshelf falls in neither category. However, my poor wife has had to stare at the half-assembled bookshelf long enough. So, I took a long, hard, honest look at myself, and I saw a man who does not paint bookshelves. At least, not right now.

So, I dug a few boxes of my books out of the basement and stuck 'em up there. I would guess I've got 400 or so up there...just random selections from the boxes...and stuck 'em up there in no particular order at all.

And as I sit, staring at this bookshelf...I am very, very pleased. There is so much potential up there. I haven't read all those books...there are still some left to read. And that is potential. If you'd like to borrow something, let me know...I'll see if I have it.

And if I do, I'm going to just reach up and grab it off of my bookshelf.

Because I can.

Peace,
Justin

Saturday, November 12, 2005

50th blog entry.

Moving on...

Here is a nonsense poem I wrote this morning during a long, long, long meeting.

It sits. Silently. Slipping beneath the slithering words off the tongue,
Thundering, stumbling under its own clumsy lumbering.
It's a misogynist. An optimist.
An offering offered for providents,
Proffered beyond its own aspirations,
Taciturn nations betraying relations
For longstanding vows of promoted vocations.

And then I stopped writing because it was my turn to say something in the meeting. I think it's a poem about sound. Or the war in Iraq. Or summer camp. I'm not really sure. I only kind of like it, but I really enjoyed writing it down. It was a little like blowing your nose...messy and stealthy, but relieving. I'm sure I would have written more nonsense on it, but I had to stop.

The point of this blog entry is threefold: 1) To get over the intimidation of writing entry #50. 2) To share that 5-minute train-of-thought poem with you. 3) To say this:

I've discovered that I learn best when I'm doing something other than listening.

What I mean is this...if I sit down and try to make listening to someone talk my primary activity, I won't hear much. I'll have an overflow of energy...a desire to shift around...a need to look around a lot...a restlessness in my legs and arms and chest. They call it Attention Deficit Disorder. I don't agree. I think it is an over-abundance of attention...it just needs to be multi-directed. I think I've got more attention to go around than I have things to pay attention to. That's not a deficit, it just needs more than one focus.

So...I've discovered that I learn best when I'm doing something else. Here's how I figured it out. I was at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit at the Vineyard back in August. I sat through the first three hours of white men in colorful shirts telling me about leadership...and probably retained about 8-10% for more than a few minutes. And that was the peak...the first 45 minutes or so. After that, I started to go downhill...and my guess is that by the end, though my eyes were locked on the speaker...I was really only hearing about 2% of what was being said, and retaining nothing but the stuff immediately after something loud happened onstage. So...in a moment of martyrdom, I made a tough decision on how to use my time.

I decided to go play X-Box.

I went in the back room, called Robbie, and started a game of Halo 2 with him. In an effort to at least give the impression that we were working, I put the live audio from the Summit on the overhead speakers while we played. I kept on shooting Robbie and he kept on shooting me, and more than a few grenades were exchanged. And...in the meantime...without trying or even recognizing it...I learned a lot about leadership. I absorbed, I would guess...about 80% of what was being said. I'm serious...I'd say I actually heard (sound goes to ears, ears change sound to electrical impulses, impulses go to brain, brain turns them back into words, heart understands words) about 80%. After the session was over, I had retained a good half of what was said. That's huge for me, and I would imagine it beats the heck out of whatever that human average is for that sort of thing. Robbie and I continued to play as we discussed what the speaker said...we went deep, and went comprehensive. And we didn't even mean to...it's just what made sense to talk about...after all, it was what we had listened to for the last hour or so while we bloodied each other up with rifles and plasma guns and the like. We heard it, and we kept it. And it was a secondary activity.

I learn best that way. I am writing this blog while a co-worker presents a bunch of her findings on new opportunities for my company to break into new markets. And I can all but guarantee that, if you ask me two days from now what she said, I'll be able to tell you at least half of it. And, by my standards, that's incredible.

Peace,
Justin

Friday, November 04, 2005

Let me tell you of God’s goodness…

Nevermind. I can’t. I can’t begin to understand what goodness is. Or justice. Or mercy.

But this week I got one thing a little clearer.

Let me tell you of God’s grace.

This week, I had the biggest single business-related moment of my life…and I almost blew it all.

I had a thing for P&G. It was important to me, and to the people who showed up, and entirely irrelevant and unimpressive for your life. So we’ll move on. Suffice to say, it meant a lot to me, and it meant a lot to all the people who paid a bunch of money for it.

And, after a good three weeks or so of working on it for 12 hours a day, the time came to present it…and I wasn’t ready. I stayed up for three days (I’m not exaggerating…if I were, I would have come up with a more impressive number) to get it done…and time came, and I wasn’t ready. I did everything I could, I worked as hard as I could, and I wasn’t ready. I showed up at the meeting with holes in my presentation, missing links in my media, and two entire videos that had gone AWOL.

Then the timer started, the suits started filing in…the countdown got up on the screen…and it was time to present.

And here’s the grace-y part…

Everything went without a hitch.

I’m not kidding. Stuff was there that shouldn’t have been, videos played that hadn’t worked only an hour before, and I swear to you there were slides and video commands I don’t remember putting in. It went brilliantly, and a whole bunch of people who are used to speaking in corporate acronyms told me I did a really nice job and that they wanted me to do it some more. It worked out great…and I have no good reason to believe it was because I did great work.

This was grace.

Don’t get me wrong…I did a lot of work. A bunch of us did…Stacy put a bunch of time and energy in, my brother Brian bravely worked through the night with me…we did a ton of work. But not enough. God showed up and filled in the gaps. Got stuff working that shouldn’t have. Made things go.

I’m not delusional enough to presume that God gives a damn about whether or not P&G sells more of whatever it was I was helping them sell. I don’t think he gives a damn about whether or not Seek gets more work with P&G, either. I do think, however, that he hates to see me hurt. And I was hurting. I was scared out of my mind…crying to my wife at 3:00 in the morning, hadn’t slept in days, and it wasn’t going to get done. I cried out to God, and he listened. And he chose to make it better…to make it go.

I don’t understand goodness. It is too complicated. Somehow, God’s goodness includes both the birth of babies and the death of them. I can’t understand that, not ever. I can’t understand God’s bigness either, nor his mercy. These things are outside of my reach. But this week, I understood his grace in a tangible way. In a simple way. In a way that saved me at a very tough time. In a way I didn’t deserve.

I cried all the way home. I cry now as I write this, four days later. It is unthinkable, and it is wonderful.
Glory be to God; He is Graceful.

Peace,
Justin