The Need to be Inspired

Recently I'd lamented to a friend about how uninspired I'd been feeling. I made comments about needing to be refueled. Two days later I'd note how I'd achieved that fueling, only to, the very next day, complain about needing inspiration again. Need inspiration. Have inspiration. Need inspiration. This is/was an almost daily cycle. He finally turned to me and said, "Do you really need to be inspired every day?"

I don't know the exact intent of the question, but I was stooped for the answer and have been stooped for an answer ever since. It's actually an excellent question, I think. And, I've my mulling over my answer. My inability to come up with an answer has been bothersome.

Last night, I decided to bring the question up to a couple girl friends, who are also in the non-profit development (fundraising) or wealth-management fields. Do they always feel the need to be inspired? Or, perhaps better stated, what is the role of inspiration in their work and personal life? Although working in non-profit sector currently, we all have had past for-profit experience. The combination of experience within the two sectors was what I was looking for. I had a hunch that my work in non-profit development actually made the answer to that original question a "yes, I do".

If the answer was yes, then why? I was afraid my/our answer was because of some self-centered, entitled position, as if I am a glutton for emotional pick-me-ups and feel-good stories. While it is true that sometimes I just need to buck up and get my work done, regardless of whether or not I am feeling "inspired" is there warrant for this need?

Their responses to the question resonated with me.

Development work is inherently highly (highly!) relational. The work is about learning people's story, meeting them where they are at, finding out about another's passions and what energizes people. Then, energizing those people around a cause, around a need, around an injustice. Development workers, typically, love meeting new people, love deep conversation, love conversations that matters, love writing, love speaking, love simply communicating. They know that, in order for their message to have wide appeal, it can't be said the same way all the time. The message has to be tailored to their audience, whether that be one person, two people, or 100. Development workers are always needing to think outside the box. (Admittedly, this is probably also true for those in marketing and sales positions) It's creative work. The skill and personality of creativity and resourcefulness are inherent traits of the job. And this creativity and resourcefulness needs to constantly be fueled.

Our friend, sitting around the table, who works in banking incidentally couldn't relate in the same way. It's not an expectation of her employer on her and it's not an expectation of she has of the bank to be consistently inspired. She does seek out inspiration with the zeal that the rest of us at the table do. When she is inspired it's nice, it's refreshing... it's not a must.

So, I ask you, what is the role of inspiration in your life? Is it something you seek after or, do you find it uncomfortable?

Certainly there are ways that we each are creative and choose to express that creativity. Such is fundamental to our expression of the "imago Dei" stored within us from the creation. This is not the question at hand, though. My question speaks to be energy one uses to rub shoulders with other people's creativity and how that intersects with your vocation.

Lifeline Living

As a fellow blogger said in posting this video, "What is the first thought that comes to your mind after watching this video?"



Mine...perfect Love casts out fear.

What Messes You Up?

The e-zine "Wrecked for the Ordinary" turned me on to this video from Bill Hybels:



and it reminds me a phrase that often gets thrown around the office. Whenever an office mate says, "Man, it messed me up!" my ears perk. There are two rules for using this phrase in the office. 1.) Use it with care and caution; flippancy in using the phrase is like the boy crying wolf. And, 2.)to be "messed up" is a positive thing. It's cue to go out and buy this or that book, or watch this or that movie. It's a promise that the book or movie or what have you is so impactful, so disturbing, resonating to the core.

The positivity of being "messed up" stems from the assertion that, as the e-zine blogger put it, "we, as Christians, are called to step into circumstances that wreck us. As Hybels points out in the video, going into these places is what our hearts desperately yearn to do. In other words, we want to be wrecked, because we somehow innately know that the healing of creation is, at least in part, hinged on how broken we are for it."

Could it be that God desires to use our discontent to bring about redemptive change, to bring above His kingdom on earth?

Hybels' latest book "Holy Discontent" has also been on the lips of a few people in the office. This latest endorsement has pushed me over the edge; I now think I'll have to go out and buy the book.

Hilarious and True: Everything's Amazing and No One is Happy

Relative Excusability

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable." - G.K. Chesterton

My Second Blog

I wish I posted to this Thoughts Transposed blog more often, but perhaps you didn't know that I actually write two blogs. Yes! As part of my role as Communications Coordinator, I update a blog of the developments of collaborative work in the south side neighborhood of Chicago called Woodlawn. I spend the majority of my blogging time updating my second blog. Check it out! Click HERE. and become a follower today!

Islamic Creationist Stirs Up Controversy

This morning's Wall Street Journal cover story, "An Islamic Creationist Stirs a New Kind of Darwinian Struggle" caught my attention. The subsequent article was a provocative one.

This piece tells the story of Adnam Oktar.

As scientists around the world celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's seminal work on evolution, Adnan Oktar, a college dropout turned theorist of Islamic creationism, is working on the fifth volume of a 14-part masterwork that he says will bury Darwinism once and for all...

"Darwin and his theory are dead," says Mr. Oktar, founder and honorary president of the Science Research Foundation, an Istanbul outfit dedicated to debunking the Victorian-era English naturalist. Darwin, says his 52-year-old Turkish scourge, is "Satan's biggest trick on humanity."

I suppose it's not a big surprise that Oktar's work and influence has pushed the buttons of the outspoken atheist & Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins, who has worked with child-like fervor to ban websites that publish the work of Oktar, etc., etc. etc. The truth about their interpersonal dynamics is one in which you have to read between the lines.

I'm used to the Christian Creationist - Atheist Darwinist battle that is covered by the media each time a bigwig from either camp comes out with a new book or late night TV spew. For me, (and now I point to my own ignorance) my fascination with the dialogue was slightly renewed by the article. A light bulb went on as I realized the magnitude of this interfaith conversation - a conversation that is no less heated when you bring in other faith traditions.

While I am not, necessarily, a six-day creationist, I will admit (for better or for worse) to some strange satisfaction in knowing there are those of other faiths ganging up Darwinians like Dawkins, chiding the other camp to present more proof that this world isn't millions of years old and that divine, creative design was the generator of it all. I could let the whole how-the-world-began discussion go if it wasn't for all the other inherent convictions that spill forth from this one conversation.

What is your reaction to the article?