Tag Archives | wisdom
May 22, 2012

5



What's It Worth?

The Dying Art of Thinking

Got this from my friend Mark Baretto. It’s by Ravi Zacharias, one of my favorite writers. I highly recommend that you read this. When our thinking remains shallow, we end up  attracted to shallow things, pursuing shallow desires, and living shallow lives. It’s easier to do what everyone else is doing or approves of. It’s easier to like what everyone else likes. Don’t be simple minded. Think. Study. Learn. Commit.

The Dying Art of Thinking
The 17th-century French philosopher Rene Descartes (pronounced Day-Kart) is best known for his dictum, “I think, therefore, I am.” A cynic may well quip that Descartes actually put des cart before des horse, because all he could have legitimately deduced was, “I think, therefore, thinking exists.” I do not intend to defend or counter Cartesian philosophy; I only wish to underscore that thinking has much to do with life and certainty.

One of the tragic casualties of our age has been that of the contemplative life—a life that thinks, thinks things through, and more particularly, thinks God’s thoughts after Him.

A person sitting at his desk and staring out of the window would never be assumed to be working. No! Thinking is not equated with work. Yet, had Newton under his tree, or Archimedes in his bathtub bought into that prejudice, some natural laws would still be up in the air, or buried under an immovable rock. Pascal’s Pensees, a work that has inspired millions, would have never been penned.

The Bible places supreme value in the thought life. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” Solomon wrote. Jesus asserted that sin’s gravity lay in the idea itself, not just the act. Paul admonished the church at Philippi to have the mind of Christ, and to the same people he wrote, “Whatever is true . . . pure . . . if there be any virtue . . . think on these things.”

The follower of Christ must demonstrate to the world what it is not just to think, but to think justly. But how does one manage this in a culture where progress is determined by pace and defined by quantity?

What is even more destructive is that the greatest demand comes from neither speed nor quantity, but rather from the assumption that silence is inimical to life.

The radio in the car, Muzak in the elevator, and the symphony entertaining the “on hold” callers add up as impediments to personal reflection. In effect, the mind is denied the privilege of living with itself even briefly, and is crowded with outside impulses to cope with aloneness.

Aldous Huxley’s indictment, “Most of one’s life . . . is one prolonged effort to prevent thinking”, seems frightfully true. The price paid for this scenario has been devastating. T. S. Eliot observed:

“Where is the life we have lost in the living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information ?
The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries
bring us farther from God and nearer to dust.”

Is there a remedy? May I make some suggestions for personal and corporate benefit?

Study God’s Word
Nothing ranks higher for mental discipline than a planned and systematic study of God’s Word, from whence life’s parameters and values are planted in the mind. Paul, who loved his books and parchments, affirmed the priority of Scripture: “Do not go beyond what is written.” Psalm 119 promises that God’s statutes keep us from being double-minded.

Read Great Books
The English-speaking world is endowed with a wealth of books. But much contemporary literature comes perilously close to a promiscuous religion with an appeal for the “feel better” syndrome, rather than the impetus to “go deeper.”
Read authors who stretch you and introduce you to other writings as well. Great writers stimulate your capacity to think beyond their ideas, spawning fresh insights and extensions of your own. Good reading is indispensable to impartation of truth. An expenditure of words without the income of ideas leads to conceptual bankruptcy.

Challenge the Mind
The church as a whole, and thepulpit in particular, must challenge the mind of this generation, else we betray our trust. The average young person today actually surrenders the intellect to the world, presuming Christianity to be bereft of it. Many a pulpit has succumbed to the lie that anything intellectual cannot be spiritual or exciting.

Thankfully there are exceptions. When living in England, our family attended a church pastored by Roy Clements, one of the finest preachers in the western world. Every Sunday at two morning services he preached a one-hour sermon to a packed auditorium.

Cambridge, being rife with skepticism, demanded a meticulous defense of each sermon text from the assaults of liberalism. An introduction of a technical nature would take up to 15 minutes of his time before he entered into the heart of his message.

I mention this to say one thing. When we were leaving Cambridge, Nathan, who was nine years old, declared the preaching of Roy Clements to be one of his fondest memories. Even as a little boy he had learned that when the mind is rightly approached, it filters down to the heart. The matter I share here has far-reaching implications. We do a disservice to our youth by not crediting them with the capacity to think. We cannot leave this uncorrected.

This is our first issue of Just Thinking. It is our hope that this newsletter will challenge your mind and stir your heart. After all, it is not that I think, therefore, I am, but rather, the Great I Am has asked us to think, and therefore, we must. And we must serve Him with all our minds.

May 15, 2012

0



Thoughts of a Lost Boy

Love Means…

“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”
- G.K. Chesterton

April 19, 2012

0



Thoughts of a Lost Boy

What is the Wise Way?

What is the wise way?
Run from hardship if the goal is comfort
Run from sacrifice if the goal is have
Run from pain if the goal is pleasure
Run from risk and doubt if the goal is security
Run from the fight if the goal is safety
But if the goal is to fly, I must face the edge and launch myself, and trust on wings of faith and hope.

February 22, 2012

2



Thoughts of a Lost Boy

Just Because

Just because someone’s young doesn’t mean it’s too early
Just because someone’s old doesn’t mean it’s too late
Just because someone’s small doesn’t mean he has no strength
Just because someone’s big doesn’t mean he has no weakness
Just because someone’s smart doesn’t mean he’s always right
Just because someone’s dumb doesn’t mean he’s never wise
Just because someone thinks so doesn’t mean others have to agree
Just because someone disagrees doesn’t mean they’re evil
Just because someone said so doesn’t mean it’s fact
Just because someone posted it doesn’t mean it makes sense
Just because everyone retweets it doesn’t mean it’s true
Just because it sounds good doesn’t mean you should listen
Just because it tastes good doesn’t mean you should eat it
Just because no one supports you doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try
Just because no one’s done it doesn’t mean you can’t be the first
Just because you’ve never won doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight
Just because it’s dark around you doesn’t mean you can’t shine bright

January 21, 2012

0



Thoughts of a Lost Boy

Two Wolves

A Native American grandfather talking to his young grandson tells the boy he has two wolves inside of him struggling with each other. The first is the wolf of peace, love and kindness. The other wolf is fear, greed and hatred. “Which wolf will win, grandfather?” asks the young boy. “Whichever one I feed”, is the reply.
- Native American Proverb

May 6, 2011

8



What's It Worth?

Spoiled

“There’s more to fighting than rest, sir. There’s character. There’s strength of heart.”
- Colonel Robert Gould Shaw

Spoil
v.
a. To impair the value or quality of.
b. To damage irreparably; ruin.
c. To become unfit for use.
d. To impair the completeness, perfection or unity of; to flaw.
e. To do harm to the character, nature, or attitude.
f. To plunder.

I just finished watching Glory, a movie about American Civil War Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and one of the first African American regiments. Its haunting theme lingers in my head, along with a thousand floating thoughts. I remember watching this as a boy with my dad, and I remember him explaining to my brothers and I the importance of treating everyone equally, of bravery and courage, of persevering against adversity, and of sacrifice for a worthy cause – even until death. I remember asking my dad why the title was “Glory”, and he just said, “because that’s what it is.”

More than a decade later, I understand what my dad meant. The movie Glory, which really comes from a word meaning “the splendor of God”, was a depiction of lives offered up. The glory of life is not in our finding ourselves and all we want, it’s in losing ourselves to something greater.

But we’ve become spoiled that we don’t understand this anymore. We value comfort, security (which usually turns out to be false security), and prominence over hard work, sacrifice, and humility.

Simply put, spoiling something means to make it unsuitable for its purpose, to ruin it. We see this word used for food. Spoiled food is no longer fit for consumption. We see this with things such as paint. Muddied paint is unfit for coloring brilliant hues. We see this in the environment. Polluted water is unfit a habitat for fish and plants. There’s many more examples, but of all the things that can be spoiled it’s most dangerous when it is about people.

Spoiled people are those who have become unfit to face realities and recognize the beauty of life.

A spoiled person will be unfit to contribute positively to society. Spoiled people will fail at being good fathers or mothers, they’ll make terrible partners, they will be selfish friends and relatives, and they won’t live fulfilled lives – all the while blaming someone or something else.

I’ll be writing more on what it means to be unfit to face the realities of life and to be unfit to recognize the beauty of life in the following posts but I want to make something clear:

Being spoiled is not about having a lot of things, there are many wealthy people who aren’t spoiled and many poor people who are. It’s about the attitudes and mindsets we adopt that make us unfit to fulfill the purpose of God in our lives.

The reason why parents spoil their kids when they injudiciously give them anything is not because the kids have a lot of stuff, but because they rob them of the chance to learn the patience and perseverance needed to win in life. They become unfit to achieve their dreams. Leaders spoil their people by again injudiciously giving them what they want to appease them, instead of guiding them through the slow but character building processes necessary of sustainable development. They become unfit to progress.

Spoiling is not about giving. It’s about giving with a lack of judgment.

November 22, 2010

0



Thoughts of a Lost Boy

James 3:17-18

But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness.

August 12, 2009

0



What's It Worth?

Our Father

This is a long one. But I hope you take the time. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a gem. Maybe you’ll find a gold mine.

Founding Fathers
Every Sunday evening, before settling to go through the stack of books on my bedside table, I review the activities for the following week and try to make everything fit, which, I find, is never an easy thing to do. Between for-profit work and non-profit social work, study, sports, my piano and violin practice (which has shown no improvement), painting (also has shown no improvement), writing, and the equally important rest and re-creational activities that include my quiet time with God, I’m never out of things to do. At the end of each day it’s nice to be able to take a sleeping pill (a natural one of course) and go to bed fulfilled. Usually my mind is still going, sometimes still thinking, but mostly dreaming, and that leads to my idiosyncratic sleep talking.

Thanks to Wallace Panlilio, who now runs Victory Christian International School (VCIS), I have been sold to the idea of mind mapping, and have gone through the exercise of mind-mapping my life’s activities. I encourage anyone who is looking to organize himself or herself to try mind mapping or some sort of visual model.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I really want to talk about fathers.

Because as I looked through everything that I am doing, I realized that at the beginning of every activity, whether spiritual, physical, intellectual, or emotional, was a father – or a mother – but someone who helped plant the seed, who helped define me, and laid a foundation. Nothing was completely original, all was taught, and even in my “do the opposite of everything your parents say” childhood, somehow, certain values and behaviors were transferred.

The Wisdom of Fathers
I make it a point to invite much older and much wiser men to meet over breakfast, lunch, or dinner just to seek advice, pick their brain, hear their stories, and learn. With me come my omnipresent Moleskine, a black pen, and a yellow highlighter. Sometimes they talk really fast, sometimes it’s painfully slow but there’s always so much wisdom they can share simply from being alive for so long. Besides the senior citizen’s discount makes them practical dates.

One of the privileges of not being too smart is that you realize earlier than the smart people that you need to listen to others. I needed fathers who had gone ahead and knew more. When I was a kid, I had tutors, sometimes three at a time, because I didn’t pick things up too fast. I actually picked them up slow. I needed people to explain to me over and over and over until I understood. But that taught me you don’t have to know everything all the time. If you don’t know, ask someone who does. If you don’t know anyone who does, look for someone and cold call him or her if you have to. And this practice, this combination of deliberate growth, of study and seeking out mentors, has really helped me out. I find that the only thing I discover from all this discovery is that there’s so much more to discover. That was redundant but you get the idea.

My Father
When people wonder why I do certain things and think a certain way, I like to tell them a few stories of when I was growing up. When I was younger I had asthma, and it was bad enough to get me confined. The doctor told me to stop swimming, but the very next summer, and every summer after that, my parents enrolled me in swimming camps. I’ve not had an asthma attack since. There was also Joshua’s detention. Josh had some of the most creative reasons for getting detained, including “stripping” and “dancing with the teacher and spanking his butt”. On one of his detentions he was made to face the wall, and guess what my dad did, he stood facing the wall in detention beside my brother. Then there was the time Joe crashed the car. The next day my dad threw him the keys to his car and said, “You drive.” My father just had a weird way of teaching us to keep fighting, face our consequences, and rise after failure. It many ways it was contrarian, and there’s probably a better way of teaching lessons, one that doesn’t produce performance oriented individuals, but this was our way and it’s something I’m grateful for because it defined how I approach everything from bad reports, to sickness, to adversity, to punishment. It defined how I approach life.

I could go on about my dad but this piece is long enough as it is.

Besides we’ve gotten to the point.

Our Father
I can’t forget one morning, when a painful truth was delivered to me. I was consulting with a man who has become a business mentor, and has very kindly given me a lot of his time. I was telling him about what I was facing and what I was attempting to accomplish, and he looked at me and said, “David. I think you’re in over your head. You’re a bright boy, but this one is too big for you. You’re in over your head.” He was not being discouraging, or negative, and I appreciated the honest assessment. Because when I thought about it, he was absolutely right. And I would rather have the true picture than some illusion.

But that didn’t make things easier to bear.

After our meeting, I thanked him, and walked to the car a deflated child. I remember thinking to myself, “I’m screwed. He’s absolutely right. I’m in over my head” followed by a series of four letter words I’d rather not mention.

Then I felt a familiar impression, and I heard a familiar voice in my head, a voice I have been hearing since I was a child, followed by a familiar peace beyond all understanding that became so real to me in my short stay in Afghanistan.

“YOU are in over your head. But YOU and I, we’re not.”

And that was my take home for the day. It was my take home for the week, for the month, for the year. It’s my take home for life. That while earthly fathers are great, we have someone who is greater than anything we may face. He is the one who paints the dreams in our minds and plants His purpose in our hearts. And no matter how deep the pit, how dark the nights, or torn our soul, we can find rest in the One who loves us, because we call Him Our Father.

April 16, 2009

2



Brothers Bonifacio

Knowing Better

For Dummies
I love For Dummies books. Whenever I’m interested in a certain field and want a basic foundation on the concepts and items connected to it I go to a bookstore and buy a For Dummies book. If I were like Joe who has photographic memory and can memorize things, or like Josh who is eerily prophetic I wouldn’t need so many references. But I’m not. So I need them. I remember overhearing someone saying, “Why should I buy a book for dummies? I’m not a dummy!” I wanted to whisper nicely, “You’re a dummy for not catching the humour in their presentation of a reference book.”

As I get older, I realize more and more, that we all have living “For Dummies” references at our disposal, people, such as our parents, mentors, a friend, or anyone, who can tell us, “Don’t do that. Or “I’ve tried that”. Or “That road ends in a cliff”. Or “Stay the same and you’ll throw every good thing you have away.”

Looking back, I could have avoided a lot of mistakes if I had listened, if I had paid attention to the references available to me, to the wisdom I have access to, and especially to my parents.

But many times I didn’t – and at times still don’t.

And that’s why I’m the dummy who needs For Dummies books.

All Wrong
My very good friend Benjo once asked me about this female I had gone out with. I told him that was the past, “I know better now.” He then asked, “Enlighten me. What wise lesson have you learned this time?” I told him:

“I now know what I knew.”

We laughed at that thought. Both understanding that many times we stubbornly pursue paths that we KNOW will lead to painful endings. Proof that no matter what we know, or have achieved, or how much money we make, or positions we hold, or lovers we take, or accolades we receive, or talents we unveil, or whatever, we can be lost– very lost.

And I’ve realized it’s not so much because we choose to be with the wrong people, though that is connected to the problem, but more because we, including myself, especially myself, many times forget love. And in a world that has forgotten love, anyone and everyone will be wrong for each other.

Moving On
A few weeks ago while driving my grandparents home from Sunday lunch, my grandmother and I had this conversation:

Lola: So David, you’re the only one among your brothers who hasn’t introduced his girlfriend to me.
Me (kidding around): That’s because there are too many.
Lola: I’m serious!
Me (still kidding around): Seriously, they’re all over. I’m moving on.

And that triggered the She-Hulk.

Lola: I HATE HEARING THOSE WORDS “MOVING ON”! I hear that from so many people. In my day we worked on our issues!
Me: Could women vote in your day? Ah… we’re here!

After dropping them off, I could still hear my grandmother’s words ringing in my brain, “In my day we worked on our issues!” And the more I thought about it, I realized that in general, society back then was stronger because the family unit was stronger. The family unit was stronger because people “worked on it” instead of moving on like relational nomads. True, there was injustice and pain suffered in secret by many back then, especially by females, and today we don’t have to put up with anything but I can’t definitively say that people are suffering less today because of the many options we now have. Whether people are trapped and suffer in secret or suffer in the consequences of selfish choices – people are still suffering. I can’t even say people are at least happier today. Freer? Yes. More empowered? Yes. But happier? Can’t say.

Ok let’s move on… hehe…

The Funnel of Love
Now I’m taking a page from one of my greatest references, my father, a lesson he called the Funnel of Love. Depending on the color of your brain you might find the concept of a love funnel sick but let me continue. Wait a minute, I think he said “filter” – not “funnel”. Ok let’s use “filter”. Funnel is kinda inappropriate. Here’s what he said:

“Here’s a simple way to do the right thing. Filter everything with love. Before you do anything, ask yourself: Is this patient? Is this kind? Am I envious? Am I boasting? Am I proud? Am I being rude? Am I self-seeking and selfish? Am I being easily angered? Am I keeping a record of wrongs? Am I delighting in evil? What truth can I rejoice in? Will this protect? Am I trusting others? Do I continue to hope? Am I persevering? Filter all your thoughts and actions this way and you will know that you love.”

I remember listening to him, blank faced with a slight smirk, thinking to myself, “You have got to be kidding me. Do you realize how difficult your filter idea is? I’m going to end up not doing anything.” He read my thoughts in that way only fathers who have laid their life down for their children can and continued, “That’s why you have to seek God every day. Because it’s impossible without Him.”

And that’s why I go to God every morning, because I’ve realized, with this whole loving thing, I don’t stand a chance.