Today FamilyLink became the #99 most popular US web property, according to Quantcast:
http://www.quantcast.com/p-86YkM5oSeBMSE#summary

Congratulations FamilyLink for your phenominal growth.  Thank you for letting me part of this amazing ride.

In the meeting Scott shared with the the Millennium Development Goals that were established by 187 nations during the United Nations Convention of 2000.  The goals are as follows:

• Eradicate extreme poverty & hunger
• Achieve universal primary education
• Promote gender equality & empower women
• Reduce child mortality
• Improve maternal health
• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria & other diseases
• Ensure environmental sustainability
• Develop a global partnership for development

Even though these goals have been in existence for about 9 years, I have never heard of them.  However, I am passionate about these goals and hope to do my little part to achieve them with social media.

“It’s possible to become so determined to defend a spiritual place of authority, a doctrine or a way of doing things that you wound and abuse anyone who questions, or disagrees, or doesn’t ‘behave’ spiritually the way you want them to. When your words and actions tear down another, or attack or weaken a person’s standing as a Christian [or standing in any faith]– to gratify you, your position or your beliefs while at the same time weakening or harming another – that is spiritual abuse.”

Characteristics of Spiritual Abuse

According to the “Spiritual Abuse” article from Wikipedia, Spiritual abuse can include:

• Psychological and emotional abuse
• Any act by deeds or words that demean, humiliate or shame the natural worth and dignity of a person as a human being
• Submission to spiritual authority without any right to disagree; intimidation
• Unreasonable control of a person’s basic right to make a choice on spiritual matters
• False accusation and repeated criticism by negatively labeling a person as disobedient, rebellious, lacking faith, demonized, apostate, enemy of the church or God
• Prevention from practicing faith
• Isolation or separation from family and friends due to religious affiliation
• Physical abuse that includes physical injury, deprivation of sustenance, and sexual abuse
• Exclusivity; dismissal of an outsider’s criticism and labeling an outsider as of the devil
• Withholding information and giving of information only to a selected few
• Conformity to a dangerous or unnatural religious view and practice
• Hostility that includes shunning (relational aggression, parental alienation) and persecution

Dr. Ronald Enroth, in his book “Churches that Abuse”, sets forth five characteristics of spiritual abuse:

1. Authority and Power – Spiritual abusers misuse and distort the concept of spiritual authority.
2. Manipulation and Control – Spiritual abusers often use fear, guilt and threats to achieve unquestioning obedience and loyalty.
3. Elitism and Persecution – Spiritual abusers often place themselves in a position of spiritual superiority, which they then use to justify their abusive behavior. Think of the Crusaders who used their supposed superiority as justification to abuse others, because they believed they were fighting for God.
4. Life-style and Experience – Spiritual abusers can create very rigid behaviors and beliefs and try to force others to have unquestioned conformity.
5. Dissent and Discipline – Spiritual abusers often suppress challenges and dissent. Spiritual abusers may discipline through humiliation, violence, deprivation and other forms of punishment.

Victims of spiritual abuse often do not recognize the behavior as abusive because the abusive demands can contain twisted elements of truth, and the victim desires to be obedient and righteous.

Effects of Spiritual Abuse

Spiritual abuse can have a devastating effect on the lives of victims, beginning with diminished self esteem and self worth. Spiritual abuse is often perpetuated by a person of authority, such as a parent or religious leader, who the victim should be able to trust. So, when that higher level of trust is violated, the deeper wound can make it difficult for the person to trust legitimate spiritual authority. The victim may also find it difficult to trust God.

Enroth says that spiritual abusers generally feel that people who question spiritually abusive activities are not being submissive to authority. As a result, victims could suffer extreme character assassination intended to stop the victim’s liberation from the spiritually abusive person or situation.

In more serious cases of abuse, even more serious effects can occur.

Recovering from Spiritual Abuse

The first step to escaping spiritual abuse may be to recognize and understand what is happening. This may involve studying the topic and/or speaking to a qualified expert outside the sphere of the abuse. Many books have been written on the topic of spiritual abuse.

The second step may be to stop the cycle of abuse.  If it is safe to do so, bring the spiritual abuse to light in as loving and non-confrontational manner as possible. The victim needs to identify the abusive behavior to the abuser and establish clear boundaries for abuser if there is to be an ongoing relationship. The victim may need a network of people who can provide the strength and additional support necessary to stop and recover from the abuse. This support network may need to include assistance from a qualified expert.

If the abusive behavior does not stop, the victim may need to leave the abusive relationship. Christ-like forgiveness and love does not include enabling an abuser to continue the abusive behavior. We should love and forgive the abuser, but should not tolerate any form of abuse. THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR ABUSE!

Then, the victim will be in a safer place to learn the true attributes of God, including His love, forgiveness and grace. God is not a god of abuse, and the actions of abusers are not representative of the doctrines or love of God. The victim may need a significant amount of time to learn to trust spiritual leaders and God.

Conclusion

I am not a counselor or a spiritual abuse expert. So, please take this article as merely my unqualified opinion and not expert advice. I am far from perfect myself. This article is not intended to judge or accuse anyone specifically. It is intended to help bring to light a serious type of abuse.

If a friend or family member is healing from abuse, one of the worst things we can do is judge the victim, even if we are unsure about the validity of their allegations. Abuse is often committed in secret, without any witnesses.  So, just because we have not witnessed any abuse does not mean that the abuse did not happen.

When victims of abuse stand up to abuse, they are often not believed. Victims of spiritual abuse who try to leave the abusive relationship are sometimes attacked as being spiritually unworthy or unrighteous. Friends and family members of spiritual abuse victims and abusers may take sides and cause further harm to someone who is already wounded.

If we are a friend or family member of someone who is trying to free themselves of a spiritually abusive situation, one of the best things we can do is to simply love that person, and avoid judging or taking sides.

If you are a victim of spiritual abuse, know that God is not a god of abuse.  You are His child and He loves you.  He would never abuse you, and anyone who abuses you in the name of God will have to answer to God. You don’t have to accept abusive behavior to be worthy of that love.  He wants us to be eternally happy. If you are still a prisoner to abuse, get the help you need today so you can find the freedom and peace you deserve and that God wants for you.  As the apostle Paul said:

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” – Galations 5:1

]]> http://gwilliam.com/nathan/spiritual-abuse/feed/ 3 http://gwilliam.com/nathan/spiritual-abuse/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/NathanGwilliam/~3/irrFpfnHylc/ http://gwilliam.com/nathan/momentum-in-sand-duning-business-life/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 05:27:46 +0000 Nathan Gwilliam http://gwilliam.com/nathan/?p=140 Last weekend Crystal and I went sand duning with our friends Matt and Michelle at the Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park  in southern Utah. The park is comprised of 3,730 acres of breathtaking pink coral-colored dunes, surrounded by red sandstone cliffs, blue skies, and deep emerald forests. Imagine pink sand dunes and lush pine trees.  At first glance it feels like an oxymoron of nature.

This picture shows the four of us in Matt and Michelle’s Sand Rail. This vehicle took the dunes with power and speed and had enough momentum to do whatever the driver wanted to do on the dunes.  (We wore helmets and had 5-point restraint systems in addition to roll bars.)

Later in the day, Matt and I took quads out and Matt taught me the concept of dune “bowling”.  Some of the large sand dunes were shaped as crescents or partial “bowls”.  In sand dune bowling, the quad rider builds up momentum then climbs straight up one side of the sand dune.  As the rider nears the top, and before momentum is lost, the rider turns to one side, and rides along the inside ridge of the sand dune bowl.  However, bowling only works if the rider keeps momentum.  If momentum is lost, the rider must quickly turn the quad down the sand dune to regain momentum. If momentum is not regained, the rider and the quad may tumble down a steep sand dune.

The momentum required for sand dune bowling has made me think of the importance of momentum in business and life, and I have been particularly thinking about the correlation between momentum and hope.  When our lives and our businesses are moving forward and progressing, we have momentum.  As a result of this momentum, we have hope for a better future than our present circumstances.

If we are feeling hopeless, it is often because we don’t have enough momentum in our life, or because our momentum is going the wrong direction.  Conversely, if we want to add more hope into our lives, we can often accomplish this by adding more momentum.

We can add momentum in our relationships by being more selfless, attending marriage education or counseling, spending more time with the people we love, expressing our love, etc.  We can add momentum in our career by improving education, enhancing job skills, reading industry books and blogs, improving the quality of our work, etc. We can add momentum in the physical area of our life by exercising, eating better, etc.   Businesses can add momentum through improving marketing effectiveness, innovation, user experience, viral advertising, etc. We can add momentum in the spiritual area of our life through scripture study, prayer, personal worthiness, etc.  We can even help add  momentum to the lives of others through mentoring, volunteering, helping the needy, making charitable contributions, etc.

We can’t just coast or maintain without regressing in our lives and businesses.  “If you’re coasting, you’re either losing momentum or else you’re headed downhill (source: Joan Welsh).”  

Even though most of us set well-intentioned New Year’s resolutions, studies show that most of us do not succeed in completing those resolutions.  If we really want to achieve our resolutions, we need to effectively convert a desire to change into a system or pattern in our lives.  Anthony Robbins said, “The most important thing you can do to achieve your goals is to make sure that as soon as you set them, you immediately begin to create momentum. The most important rules that I ever adopted to help me in achieving my goals were those I learned from a very successful man who taught me to first write down the goal, and then to never leave the site of setting a goal without first taking some form of positive action toward its attainment.”

As our goals become patterns in our lives and businesses, they add momentum, and the momentum increases our hope.

R.C. Willey is famous for not being open on Sundays.  When Warren Buffett, the world’s greatest investor, purchased R.C. Willey, this home furnishing chain only had stores in Utah.  After the purchase Bill Child, the CEO who remained with the company, wanted R.C. Willey to open a store in Idaho.  Up to that point, the only R.C. Willey stores were located in Utah.  Warren Buffett refused, believing that the closed-on-Sundays policy would make expansion outside Utah unsuccessful.  Bill Child believed in the Idaho expansion so fervently that he offered to front all the cost for the land and the new store personally.  If the store was not successful, it could be shut down and R.C. Willey would not lose any money.  If the store was successful, R.C. Willey could purchase the store from Bill Child at a price not much higher than what Bill had invested.  Warren accepted, the store in Idaho was built, and it was so successful during the “soft” launch that by the grand opening, Warren Buffet jokingly took credit for the Idaho expansion idea.  R.C. Willey has since expanded to Nevada with similar success.

One of the recurring themes of this book that stood out most were the defining moments in the history of R.C. Willey, and Bill Child’s leadership and decision-making during those moments.  R.C. Willey had many situations where the future of the company hinged on a single decision.  Many people look back at success that could have been and say “what-if.”  Bill Child lead the company through many defining moments that could have made or broken R.C. Willey, and traded “what-ifs” for a world-class success.  Here are a few examples:

(1) R.C. Willey was started by a man named R.C. Willey, who was Bill Child’s father-in-law.  Bill Child had gone to college intending to be a teacher.  Shortly after Bill finished college, he received an teaching job offer, and intended to pursue that career.  Before Bill he accepted, R.C. Willey believed he had ulcers and asked Bill Child to watch the store for a few weeks while R.C. took a vacation with his wife.  R.C. returned early from his trip, discovered he had cancer, and passed away soon thereafter.  Bill discovered quickly that the accountant had not been paying the bills and that the store had a huge amount of debt.  Bill and R.C.’s widow met with the company’s banker who recommended the company fold because of the huge debt load and the passing of R.C..  Bill Child refused to quit, gave notice he would not accept the teaching job, and spent the rest of his career building the R.C. Willey business.  If R.C. had made the easy decision to teach and walk away from the huge debt, his business career would have been over before it started.

(2) When Bill Child took over R.C. Willey, the store sold only home appliances.  Bill decided to expand the product line to include home furnishings, and feels if they had not made this decision they would have stayed a single store, and would have been forced to close when “big box” stores entered the market.

(3) In the early days of Bill Child’s success with a single store, a large percentage of his sales came from military personnel who worked on a nearby base.  Bill anticipated government cutbacks on military spending.  Instead of cutting costs and contracting to weather the storm, R.C. decided to expand to a second store in the Salt Lake City metro area.  When the military cutbacks happened, R.C. Willey had diversified and was even stronger than before.

(4) Bill Child invested in television advertising when other home furnishing companies did not see the value in this type of advertising.  Because of this decision, he was able to cut a “remnant” advertising deal to purchase a large amount of unsold advertising space before “remnant” advertising deals became popular.  As a result R.C. Willey received a phenomenal amount of advertising that the company never could have purchased, and experienced growth they could not have otherwise achieved.

(5) When the credit markets made it hard for R.C. Willey customers to receiving financing from traditional sources, Bill Child decided the company would offer financing directly to the customers.  The company’s financing arm became one of the key elements of R.C. Willey success.

When faced with adversity, many business leaders retract.  Bill Child knew how and when to keep moving forward instead of stepping back when times got tough.  In the end, R.C. Willey was rewarded with a $170 million acquisition by Warren Buffett, the brightest investor of our day.

In closing, here are few Bill Child quotes I enjoyed:

“Be motivated by excellence, not money.  You need to be better than all of your competitors.  If you are, the profits will come.”

” Offer customers true value on quality products.  A low price on a cheap piece of furniture is not value.”

• Growing tomatoes to be an anti-viral drug delivery agent.
• Developing an inexpensive device to diagnose malaria.
• Using lasers to enhance immune response from vaccines.
• Infecting malaria-causing mosquitoes with a fungus that inhibits their ability to smell humans.

These grants are given to encourage scientists to pursue bold ideas that could result in breakthroughs related to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases.

The Gates Foundation also announced that it will be spending $73 million to help small farmers in impoverished countries.  This money will be used for a variety of different projects, such as developing drought-tolerant corn, implementing more efficient irrigation, and helping women develop agricultural training programs.

I wonder if God blessed Bill Gates to become one of the world’s richest people because he knew how much good Bill and Melinda would do with the money.

In short, Americans are becoming more fiscally responsible.  We are choosing to spend less on unnecessary items, borrow less on credit cards and save more so that we can make needed purchases with cash and weather rainy days.  This is not a bad thing.  These are the same fundamental financial principles we have all been taught and that we all would teach our children.  The wise man builds his financial house upon the rock of savings and frugal spending. 

This frugal/savings mentality might slow an economic recovery.  However, it would build the economic recovery on a much more solid foundation, and give that economic recovery a greater chance at long-term sustainability.  I would much rather have an economic recovery built on solid financial principles that takes longer to achieve than a quick economic recovery based on debt-fueled consumption that everyone knows can’t last.  We’ve had 11 recessions since World Ward II.  Maybe it’s time we should learn from this recession and make the correct long-term financial decisions that will stop this unnecessary recessionary pattern.

Another client is almost completely dependent on Facebook. This client has seen phenomenal success in building a Facebook application.  However, when Facebook changed their design a couple months back, the prominence of third-party Facebook applications was diminished, and most of the leading Facebook apps have seen a huge dip in traffic.  Because of this recent Facebook strategy, Facebook apps that were too dependent on the Facebook platform must now diversify away from Facebook by building their own websites, and using social media websites such as as Facebook as marketing channels for their own websites, over which they have control.

Being too dependent on a third party who owns or controls a critical element of our businesses, is a recipe for disaster.  It’s like building a skyscraper on leased land.  Sooner or later that lease will come due, and the land owner will have all of the leverage in negotiating the new lease.  Businesses need to be the masters of their own destinies and own or control their key assets.  They need to not put themselves in a position that gives too much leverage to an essential partner.  Businesses in this position need to work quickly to diversify and regain that needed control.

What has been your experience with these type of business relationships that create too much dependence on a third party?

On average, about  16,000 children die from hunger-related causes each day, or one child every five seconds.  About 5.8 million children die from hunger-related issues each year, about double the total population of the state of Utah.  (Source: Black, Robert, Morris, Saul, & Jennifer Bryce. “Where and Why Are 10 Million Children Dying Every Year?” The Lancet 361:2226-2234. 2003.)

If all of the hungry people in the world were combined, the total number would be large enough to be the world’s third-largest country, and more than three times the population of the entire United States.

2007 World Population Rankings

(Source: The Orphan Foundation and State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2008 FAO.”Food Security Statistics”)

Hunger is essentially the most extreme form of poverty, a state in which individuals or families cannot afford to meet their most basic need for food (Source: Are We On Track To End Hunger? Hunger Report 2004. Bread for the World Institute. 2004.)  Hunger manifests itself in many ways other than starvation and famine. Most poor people who battle hunger deal with chronic undernourishment and vitamin or mineral deficiencies, which result in stunted growth, weakness and heightened susceptibility to illness. (Source: Are We On Track To End Hunger? Hunger Report 2004. Bread for the World Institute. 2004.)  Undernourishment negatively affects people’s health, productivity, sense of hope and overall well-being. A lack of food can stunt growth, slow thinking, sap energy, hinder fetal development and contribute to mental retardation.  (Source: State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2008 FAO.”Food Security Statistics”. ) Poor nutrition and calorie deficiencies cause nearly one in three people to die prematurely or have disabilities (Source: “Malnutrition”. World Health Organization.)

Here a a few good websites that are working to fight world hunger:

Action Against Hunger - an international network committed to saving the lives of malnourished children and their families while ensuring access to safe water and sustainable solutions to hunger.

Bread for the World – a non-profit organization focusing on fundraising and lobbying for hunger-related issues.

TheHungerSite.com – by using certain websites, money will be donated to charities that combat hunger issues.

WorldVision – allows you to sponsor a child.

Yesterday Crystal and I purchased the domain name Hunger.net. We would love your thoughts about how we can use digital media and Hunger.net to help solve world hunger.  For example, microlending websites such as Kiva, empower us to help entrepreneurs better provide for their famlies.  Microlending is one of the most effective, sustainable solutions to poverty.  Child sponsorship websites such as WorldVision, help connect great people with and sponsor specific children.  What other ideas do you have about how Hunger.net can make a large-scale difference to help solve world hunger?