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Welcome to the One Word At A Time Blog Carnival – this week’s word is: Disappoint.

No matter how you’ve come to be here or where you’re coming from, you’re welcome and we’d love for you to come back and visit us again soon.

The idea of the carnival is simple. We pick one word every two weeks and all write a blog post inspired by that word. It’s fascinating to see the range of different trains of thought that can come from just one word.

Below this, you’ll find a little widget called Simply Linked. All the participants add their links to the widget and that way, we can all find and read all the entries into the carnival. You’re welcome to join us, the carnival is open to anyone.

To see all of the upcoming words and their dates, visit http://peterpollock.com/category/faith/carnival/

Who Cares What Others Think?… I do!

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I think I care what other people think just a little too much.

I’m turning thirty seven in a couple of weeks and yet I still constantly worry that I’ll do something and disappoint my parents.

I know. Crazy, right.

Christmas, Valentine’s day, Mother’s day, Easter, birthdays, in fact every time gifts might be given or exchanged, I worry. I worry that I’m going to disappoint the recipient of my gift by not getting one that’s ‘good’ enough.

Writing blog posts, designing websites, even making my kids’ lunches I worry that I’m not going to be good enough – that what I do will disappoint.

It makes me wonder… do I care what other people think too much or am I just diligent and caring?

Personally I prefer to think I’m too diligent and caring but the truth is probably the opposite.

So I’m looking forward to reading all of the other posts in this carnival on the word ‘disappoint’ to try to get some perspective and I hope you can do the same.

Frankly, worrying about disappointing others all the time is NOT healthy, I’m sure it’s not.

Isn’t it?

Or is it?

What do you think?

Do I have a talent that I’m squandering? Do YOU? After your death, will people mourn your squandered talent?… I wonder….

This weekend, the world learned of the death of pop mega-star Whitney Houston. This event has made many people think about and comment on her incredible talent, a talent that went to waste in the latter part of her life due to drugs and alcohol.

I find it a sad reflection on our society that less column inches have been devoted to the effect of this lady’s death on her family than on raising up tales of her marriage to Bobby Brown, drug addiction and poor singing performances in recent years, but that’s by the by.

What really struck me is the number of people who have used the phrase “squandered talent” when referring to her – and not without good reason.

Whitney Houston had an incredible singing voice – a talent at a level that many of us would love to have.

I would love to be able to walk up on stage and sing that well. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I’d give anything to be able to sing as well as she could, but I will admit to being just a little envious of that talent.

Yet she wasted it for many years.

Sure, she started out using it and using it well but then a few bad choices pulled her away from that track and so, to us it seems she ‘squandered’ her talent.

Two questions therefore come to mind:

1. If we have a talent, do we have an obligation to use it?
2. What talent do I have that I’m squandering?

Is there any? I don’t feel like I have any specific talents in any area of my life, but is it just that I’m not recognizing my talent?

I think, in general, that if God has given us a talent we have an obligation toward Him to find out what it is and how He wants us to use it.

What do you think?  BE honest with yourself, do you have a talent you’re squandering?

Should you be using it? If so.. how can you start?

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Is our lust for the latest and greatest technology making us abstain from morality? I think it might be…

This is a follow-up post to yesterday’s ponderings about communication online.

In the mid 1700′s through to the mid 1800′s, the first world went through what became known as the industrial revolution.

Starting factories sprung up and there was a mass migration of people into the cities to find work.

The world rapidly became a very different place and society – or even civilization – failed to keep up with the change.

Although the word civilization is used to incorporate an increase in culture, science, industry and government, at it’s root, the word literally means ‘to become more civilized.’

As the dictionary points out, the Romans brought civilization to the barbarians by teaching them to no longer be, well, barbaric.

To be more civil, we have to look beyond ourselves, beyond the attitude of “It’s me or you, only one of us will survive” and reach a mindset of mutual cooperation and living for the greater good of those around us.

The Problems of the Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution forced people out of the fields and villages and into the cities to work in factories. Production moved from individual small businesses to the kind of mass-production that we see today.

The cities rapidly became overcrowded and wages dropped due to a ready supply of workers.

Big business was stealing market share from the old family businesses and forcing the people to go work in the factories for whatever they would pay – which wasn’t much.

The knock on effects were huge – child labor, poverty, disease and all the associated ills rose incredibly high as the age-old systems of community and society from the villages were destroyed by narrow streets, terraced houses and a lack of, well, everything.

Many good men and women saw the plight of the poor and stood up for them, abolishing child labor and bringing in education, minimum wages, paid vacations, welfare, healthcare and a host of other ‘civilized’ systems.

Then, only a hundred years or so later, we entered the new revolution… the electronic revolution.

A New Revolution – a New Set of Problems

All of a sudden, technological advances increased in pace at a rate never seen before.

Now when we buy the latest and greatest technological gadget, it’s obsolete before we have even learned how to turn it on and our desire to own what’s newest and ‘best’ is insatiable.

From what I see, the net result of this rapidly changing world and our constant desire for more is that our morality and thus our civilization is getting left behind.

Bathroom Etiquette

I read just the other day a lady postulating on how common place it is now for people to send text messages or make and receive phone calls from the bathroom.

While I certainly do not want to hear, let’s say, bathroom noises whilst I am talking to someone on the phone, I have no problem with where in the world someone is when they call or text me.

The writer, however, pointed out that the bathroom was seen as a very private place not all that long ago and somehow society hasn’t quite adjusted yet to the advent of portable communications devices and thus we have no ‘rules’ dictating the appropriateness of their use in the smallest room in the house.

Neither have we developed true societal rules about using your phone in a restaurant or a bar or even on a train. Many people frown upon such things but others find them perfectly acceptable… yet society in general has set no rules on the matter because it simply hasn’t had time.

Who Makes Your Technology?

I heard a report from the city of Shenzhen, which you may or may not know is where a third of all electronics products on sale here today are made.

Most of us by now have heard of Foxconn, who make the Apple iPhone and iPad, but did you also know they make products for Dell and HP and just about every other major firm you can name?

Did you also know that the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen has over 430,000 employees, which is roughly equivalent to the population of the thirty seventh largest city in the USA? and did you know that most of the products are assembled by hand?

Seriously.

By hand.

Why? Because it’s cheaper to pay people to assemble the device you’re reading this on than it is to build a machine to do it. Especially when those people get paid less than a living wage and are as young as twelve years old?

Did you know?

Do you care?

Abstaining From Morality

Most of us, like society in general during the industrial revolution, don’t know and don’t truly care.

Sure, we don’t want to think that some pre-teen girl is working twelve hour shifts, six or seven days a week to build the technology we want so badly but we turn a blind eye just so long as it’s not done in ‘our’ country.

In other words, we abstain from morality.

Is that a ‘civilized’ attitude? Is it morally right to buy products from overseas where workers rights are trampled on in a way we’d never allow here?

I don’t believe it is… and I believe as a result, the electronic revolution is destroying our very civilization because by closing our eyes to the truth we are not being the slightest bit civilized.

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Depending on which ‘expert’ you talk to, 60%-80% of all human communication is non-verbal.  A text message on your phone strips out most of that non-verbal communication though – so have we given up 60-80% of our communication?

I’m on a bit of a journey with this post and its follow-up tomorrow – and I’m not certain where it started from or where it is going.

I think it all started after my post about being real online and the natural extension of that which is a discussion about human communication.

Non-verbal communication means everything except the actual words.

When you type a text message or a tweet or even an email, you are communicating almost solely through verbal communication.

We add in some nonverbal elements such as punctuation and capitalization but other than that, we strip out everything but the bare words.

That makes what is being communicated infinitely much harder to understand – for a plethora of reasons.

Bare words on a screen do not portray inflection in the voice or expression and emotion in the face, they have no indicators of anything other than reader’s perceived understanding of the meaning of the words.

Let’s take an example.

Let’s say, for instance, you sent a text message or an IM or an email to someone asking simply, “How are you?”

And their reply comes back saying, “OK.”

Now, what does the word OK (actually it’s an abbreviation of okay, but let’s ignore that) mean to you?

To some, saying you’re OK is actually a bad thing because some people understand OK to be less than good, not BAD necessarily, but less than good.

To others, OK is a perfectly normal response to indicate that everything is good. Maybe nothing fantastic has happened today, but it’s all good.

So in oral forms of communication, you’d look for tone of voice, posture, inflection, facial expression, even the sound of the voice to give you clues as to what the other person means by ‘OK’.

In other written forms of communication, such as hand-written letters, you would expect a longer answer but in our world of 140 character tweets and texts, abbreviation is the name of the game.

If I were standing in front of you and answered by jumping up and down with a huge smile on my face telling you I’m OK, you would probably guess that maybe I had recently NOT been OK but something had dramatically changed and now I was very happy to be able to say I’m OK.

If I mumbled the reply with my head hung low, you simply wouldn’t believe the word because I would non-verbally be communicating something quite different.

If I shrugged my shoulders as I said it, you’d probably take it as a middle-of-the-road ‘not good, but not bad’ kind of OK.

Modern communication strips all of that away though and, I believe, threatens to damage our ability to communicate effectively if we don’t rapidly learn to adjust our communication style to fit the medium.

It also makes it much harder for us to spot lies and deceit.

You have no way of knowing who is actually writing this. I could be a man living in a cave in Nigeria or I could be a teenage girl in China or I could be the Queen of England, for all you know.

How can you tell?

How do we protect ourselves from criminals and those who wish us harm not good when most of the established methods of ‘reading’ people are gone?

I don’t know the answer, but it makes me wonder if we are becoming less ‘civilized’ because of it and shrinking back into an age where evil is allowed to gain a stronger foothold because we simply cannot see it or recognize it any more.

This electronic revolution that we have been in since the 60′s seems to increase in pace and scope every day and often I think that society is failing to keep up with it.

….This series continues tomorrow with a question about abstaining from morality.

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Welcome to the One Word At A Time Blog Carnival – this week’s word is: Romance.

No matter how you’ve come to be here or where you’re coming from, you’re welcome and we’d love for you to come back and visit us again soon.

The idea of the carnival is simple. We pick one word every two weeks and all write a blog post inspired by that word, this week being the word romance. It’s fascinating to see the range of different trains of thought that can come from just one word.

Below this, you’ll find a little widget called Simply Linked. All the participants add their links to the widget and that way, we can all find and read all the entries into the carnival. You’re welcome to join us, the carnival is open to anyone.

To see all of the upcoming words and their dates, visithttp://peterpollock.com/category/faith/carnival/

Renewing Your Romance

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*This post is adapted from a post on my romance site: Renewing Romance*

Relationships are always fragile. They require commitment and dedication from both parties.

If your marriage is suffering, you could be guilty of one of the following:

• not giving your spouse enough of your time
• not paying attention to your spouse
• being stubborn about something in your relationship and not being prepared to compromise to make your spouse happy
• becoming complacent about your relationship and losing focus on it

Think of your relationship like a flowerbed. When you plant it, you spend time tending it and watering it until it grows and blooms. Once it is in full bloom though, you still need to keep watering and weeding it or it will get dry and choked by the weeds and will start to wither. Get your watering can out and your gardening gloves on and start tending that flower. It may be hard, messy work at first but a little dedication will result in a thing of beauty growing again.

Then…. keep tending it. It only takes a little work to keep that flowerbed healthy!

The same is true of your relationship with God.

God is always putting in the work and effort, but very often, we don’t. We let the weeds grow up and we stop watering it and all of a sudden we find that our relationship with him is dry and almost impossible to see for all the weeds.

As we head toward Valentine’s day, why not take a new look at your relationship with God as well as your relationship with your spouse and see what you can do to improve both!

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Times they are a-changing and how people form their opinions of you are changing along with them.

There was a time where the strength of a man’s handshake or the state of his shoes could tell you everything you need to know about him but those times are rapidly disappearing… at least, they are for many of us.

Sure, we all learn a lot about the people around us from seeing how they act in public, but in the twenty-first century we also get more of a look into how they act in private than ever before – and what we see can be VERY revealing.

You see, there’s this wonderful thing called the internet, which is a place where people lay their lives bare for all to see in a way that most people wouldn’t have dreamed of doing even just twenty years ago.

I still know that looking someone in the eyes and conversing with them for a few moments is extremely valuable in understanding and getting to really ‘know’ someone but increasingly, I jump online soon after meeting them to learn more and to verify what I think I already know.

For instance, someone I met once told me that he still holds a record in a particular sport at a certain university. It took me less than ten minutes of research online to discover that he doesn’t, in fact, hold that record and while the university has online records of the members of its sporting teams, his name appears in none of them for the last thirty years.

Hmmmm….

We recently realized we needed a new babysitter because our long-time sitter is now at college and has very inconvenient night classes which really disrupt mine and my wife’s dating schedule.

We identified someone who seemed to be the perfect sitter. The daughter of some friends from church and sister of one of my daughters’ best friends. She seemed on the surface like she’d be a great fit…

But you know kids, you see them at church with their parents but they probably don’t really have any choice but to be there – and like most of us, they probably put on their ‘church face’ on Sunday mornings anyway.

So I decided I’d do a little research, just to check up on her (in a totally non-creepy, non-stalkerish way, obviously ) and a quick visit to Facebook gave me everything I needed to know about her.

You see, she goes to public school, so she has friends who are not just ‘church’ friends.

Seeing how she interacts with her friends online and how she portrays herself there is very telling of her true character.

I have to tell you (and she’ll probably be embarrassed reading this) but I would be PROUD if my daughters turned out like her.

What I know is that ‘Sunday Christian’ teens don’t post their favorite bible verses on their public facebook timelines or post pictures of their favorite bible-based inspirational sayings and they definitely don’t have an ‘about me’ section which simply says:

She knew that she was formed by God’s hands, dreamed up in His heart, and placed in this world for a purpose.

i can’t wait to see what God has in store for my life.

It just doesn’t happen.

Her online presence tells me all I need to know about her… and my kids LOVE having her over to babysit, which helps a lot, too.

So… what does YOUR online presence say about YOU? Does it match up with your offline life? is it truthful?
..Because increasingly, people will believe what they see from you online is your true heart, so is it the true you?

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Over the last few years, I have heard many times (and have said myself) that one of the proofs that the disciples weren’t lying about who they claimed Jesus was is that they were prepared to die for what they believed.

There’s a problem with that though….

People die every day for what they believe, but that doesn’t make them right!

So at first glance it seems that maybe the argument that they were prepared to die for their beliefs doesn’t hold as much water as we think…

Or does it?

You see, here’s the problem: They changed their minds. Why did they change their minds?

Let’s go back to before Jesus was arrested.

Everything was rosy and wonderful. Jesus was healing people left, right and center and the disciples were even sent out to do the same at one point.

Things were going well.

They were never going to get rich off of this gig but with Jesus around, they never lacked for anything… in short, it was all good.

Then Jesus got arrested and what did the disciples do?

They high-tailed it out of there.

They were terrified.

The whole thing had come crashing down around them and they essentially went into hiding until the heat died down.

Even Peter, possibly Jesus’ closest follower, the bravest, most faithful one denied even knowing Jesus.

These were not men who were prepared to die for the cause.

Not at all.

Then Jesus was crucified and the game was over.

There is absolutely no reason that I can come up with why the disciples would then sit around and decide that they would follow Jesus to his own fate. None. Nothing. Nada….

Except one.

Jesus did, as the disciples claimed, rise from the dead.

This is a crucial turning point here.

You see, there’s no benefit to them in claiming that Jesus rose from the dead if he didn’t.

If he didn’t rise from the dead, there would be no incentive for them to change their minds about being willing to die for him.

But history records that they DID change their minds. They decided that this Jesus was someone who they would be willing to be beaten, tortured and crucified for.

They changed their minds, so something HUGE must have happened… Jesus MUST have risen from the dead.

I can’t see any other answer to the disciple problem – can you?

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Welcome to our ‘Marching’ blog carnival.

No matter how you’ve come to be here or where you’re coming from, you’re welcome and we’d love for you to come back and visit us again soon.

The idea of the carnival is simple. We pick one word every two weeks and all write a blog post inspired by that word, this week being the word marching. It’s fascinating to see the range of different trains of thought that can come from just one word.

Below this, you’ll find a little widget called Simply Linked. All the participants add their links to the widget and that way, we can all find and read all the entries into the carnival. You’re welcome to join us, the carnival is open to anyone.

To see all of the upcoming words and their dates, visit http://peterpollock.com/category/faith/carnival/

Time is Marching on!

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I’m old!

I know in the grand scheme of things I’m not old… but I’m just heading for my 37th birthday… and I feel old.

It’s not the aching back and memory loss that’s making me feel old so much as it’s the fact that my life is flying by and I really haven’t achieved much yet.

I was looking at one of my cousin-in-law’s Facebook pages the other day and found it kind of weird a bunch of adults were commenting on this seventeen year old’s page.

Why were all these adults getting in on OUR thing. Can’t they just leave us young ‘uns alone?

Then I realized I AM one of the adults… probably one of the older ones.

I’m old.

… and what have I done?

Maybe I’m having a mid-life crisis…

I wonder, do you feel the same way?

Is your life full of achievement or do you feel like time is marching on and you’ve missed out on something or haven’t done enough in the year’s you’ve had?

… or is it just me?

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My father’s sermon on New Year’s day 2012 defined twelve ‘resolutions’ extracted from Luke chapter six – and I want to challenge you with them today.

I wish I had been there to hear the sermon but he summarized it the comments on the New Song 40 blog.

These are the resolutions:

12 Resolutions from Luke chapter 6 verses 27 to 31 and 37 to 38

1. I will show love to my enemies
2. I will do good to those who hate me
3. I will bless those who curse me
4. I will always pray for people who treat me badly
5. I will always offer the other cheek
6. I will not stop a mugger from taking whatever he wants from me
7. I will give to anyone and everyone that asks
8. I will not demand restitution of anything stolen from me
9. I will not judge people
10. I will not condemn people
11. I will forgive
12. I will do to others as I would have them do to me

Many of these ‘resolutions’ fly in the face of how our society and culture teach us to act… but they are absolutely how the bible tells us we should act.

These ‘resolutions’ really hit to the heart of what being a Christian really is.

I’m not going to waffle on and try to analyze them – I just want to ask you this:

Could you keep any of these resolutions this year? If not, why not?

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Welcome to this ‘Fresh’, first One Word at a Time blog carnival of 2012.

No matter how you’ve come to be here or where you’re coming from, you’re welcome and we’d love for you to come back and visit us again soon.

The idea of the carnival is simple. We pick one word every two weeks and all write a blog post inspired by that word, this week being the word fresh. It’s fascinating to see the range of different trains of thought that can come from just one word.

Below this, you’ll find a little widget called Simply Linked. All the participants add their links to the widget and that way, we can all find and read all the entries into the carnival. You’re welcome to join us, the carnival is open to anyone.

To see all of the upcoming words and their dates, visit http://peterpollock.com/category/faith/carnival/

A Fresh Start

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I left 2011 with a lot of loose ends and a lot of regrets and I really want to make a fresh start here in 2012… although there’s a lot to tie up from last year still.

There were many people I let down last year and I’m REALLY sorry.
There are websites I haven’t quite finished, problems I haven’t quite fixed and emails I haven’t responded to.

I got into the web hosting business wanting to provide a better level of customer service than I’d found at other providers and while some people definitely saw that from me last year, others found the service they received to be less than good.

I haven’t received any complaints as such, but at the same time, those people won’t be shouting about the great service they got from me… and that needs to change.

So I’m making a fresh start.

The biggest single change is that I went to my doctor and told him, “The drugs don’t work, they just make it worse…”, so I’ve just started on some new drugs which will hopefully help me concentrate and focus and will lift me from the fog of depression.

It will take a couple of weeks for them to take effect.. but hopefully things will change soon!

I also suffered greatly from a lack of short term memory. I could read an email then go to my browser to do whatever it was asking me to do and not only forget to actually do it but completely forget I had even read the email. It’s horrible to be so forgetful and hopefully the new medication will help that, too.

I also got into building websites last year which is lucrative and fun but distracts me from my other work and so I’m putting a halt to that this year. I might take on one or two projects a month, but nothing like the four or five I often had on the go last year!

I have just created my first editorial calendar. It’s not complete yet, but I’ve set it up so that I can write three to four days a week and cover all of my writing obligations.

I’m already behind on it, surprise, surprise, but I’m picking things up.

My blog posts will probably be shorter, maybe in the 300-400 word range, but that should help me stay on top of things and hopefully I’ll be able to remove the fluff and say what I need to say in fewer words…. I am rather fluffy though, so we’ll just see how it all works out!

How about you, are you making a fresh start?