Entries from October 2009 ↓

“I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.” -E.B. White.

I love this quote. A simple line like this makes me wish I could have met Elwyn Brooks White for coffee (or maybe a beer?!)… :-)

Been thinking about this a lot, and I guess the options are:

1. The devil really did do it

2. God is disciplining us (we don’t like to include this one much, but it’s there in the Bible)

3. We’re dumb and did it to ourselves

4. Someone else was dumb and did it to us (directly or indirectly)

It was interesting to see the Sydney Anglicans wrestling with their crisis at a theological level (very Sydney-Anglican-like, I guess!). Beyond all that, I can truly say that I fully understand the emotions of Peter Jensen… I know exactly how he feels. One of the few times I can say that I’ve been exactly there, and I know the grief he is talking about.

As a leader, you may not have caused it or had a direct hand in it, but you own it at a deep level, sometimes more than the people who caused the havoc. I guess that’s what makes leaders different. Ownership & responsibility… a deep sense of stewardship.

There’s always a smart alec somewhere who will tell you in the midst of your valleys that “it could always be worse…”

And you usually just feel like smacking them in the snoz.

Last year, we had a very tough year financially as a church, and we really had to dig deep in the faith well to ride the storm. Well, I think I could truly say, things could have been much worse!

As often as any important business has to be done in the monastery, let the abbot call together the whole community and himself set forth the matter. And, having heard the counsel of the brethren, let him think it over by himself and then do what he shall judge to be most expedient….

Now the reason why we have said that all should be called to council, is that God often reveals what is better to the younger…. But if the business to be done in the interests of the monastery be of lesser importance, let him use the advice of the seniors only!

- St. Benedict

After experiencing a couple of random shutdowns on my iPhone this weekend, here’s another example of Apple needing to make a few lawyers redundant and find some more tech types to fix their software problems…

Had to completely restore Nic’s phone for some marginal improvements, but she feels like throwing hers against a wall regularly… that’s crazy talk for someone who absolutely fell in love with her iPhone 6 months ago, only for it to become “like a really old, unreliable computer” (in her words). It makes her work Blackberry look quite stellar in terms of “just working”… c’mon, Apple!!! You’re killing your fan boys here…