I got a chance to go hear Erwin McManus in Tempe yesterday. I have been reading Erwin’s book, listening to his podcasts, and interacting with members of his staff at Mosaic for a while now. This setting was some sort of business seminar for entrepenuers on wealth making and related things. The first guy who spoke was the quintessential motivational speaker – almost verbatim from the movies You Me and Dupree or Yes Man (only they were more funny and engaging). When this guy finally got down, Erwin came up and spoke for 45 minutes – no notes, no PowerPoint, and I think everybody was engaged. He then took questions for another 45 minutes. When he had to leave to fly out, 1/2 the people in the room left with the motivational guy calling out to us “we aren’t done yet”. Yeah, dude, WE are!
Some thoughts from Erwin yesterday to chew on (most stuff came from his newest book Wide Awake (avaliable on Amazon). I have come to sift more of Erwin than I used to, but I still find that much of what he talks about resonates with me.
Erwin talked about his relationship with his wife, Kim, and how they make marriage work when they are very different people.
“On being married to someone who is opposite you and trying to work with your spouse on changing directions or chasing a dream: “I don’t have to agree with your idea but I have trust who you are.”
This idea was really powerful for me as I am married to someone who is very different from me. I was encouraged to know someone else has found a way to make this work. Dani and I disagree a lot, but I know who she is and I know who she is – and I trust that.
Erwin also talked about how we have a hard time saying “thank you” from those who give us a compliment for something we did well, saying “Oh it was God not me”. But then he said, “We refuse to blame God when we screw up, so we say ‘yeah, my bad.’” He talked about how we begin to believe that we are incapable of doing good – it’s all God. Therefore, all we can do is neutral or bad, which leads us to live passively and wait for “well, if its God will, then….”, instead of stepping out and pursuing the dream God has awakened within us with courage and vision.
I recommend everything Erwin writes and the Mosaic Podcast – which does not mean I agree with it all. But I don’t think you will be worse off for letting Erwin and others at Mosaic challenge and encourage you about what it means to be a follower of Christ moving through our world.
-Scott
I agree that Erwin Mcmanus is inspiring. I was introduced to him through friends who attend Mosaic in LA. I read The Barbarian Way and I remember thinking that picture of what it means to be a Christian made more sense to me than my legalistic upbringing.
I think he’s one of the most influential people in the church right now – he is helping define what church is becoming. I don’t agree with him theologically all the time but I love the spirit behind it.
Scott,
Ever fished on the side of a river bank? You toss out your line and the current slowly pushes your bopper back to shore and you have to do it all over again. Regardless of how much weight you put on the line the end results are always the same or even worse, because of the longer line with weights your line and hook gets tied up in the debris on the bottom of the river. My dad use to tell me this as I would wander off looking for advice. He would say, “boy are you fishen for an answer?”
How many answers did you really get that you already didn’t have but just needed some re-enforcement? Or is this an event to get you thinking? So before the event you where thoughtless? Or after the event where you more confused? Okay, I’ll get to the point. You toss out that hook and wait for it to return to the river bank and of course what you didn’t do was catch and idea or your own. And when we do catch an idea of our own how many times do we toss it back because it wasn’t big enough? (maybe we tossed back God’s idea)
I had a difficult time swallowing this little ditty, “We refuse to blame God when we screw up, so we say ‘yeah, my bad.” Since when is God to be blamed for anything? To say that means to me that we are equals.
Wanna go fishing Scott?
Michael
I think the point that Erwin was making was not so much about blaming God but more about us not taking credit for having a part in the successes of our lives. After all, we were given the gifts and talents we have so we could use them with success. I think his point was more about living in passivity and maybe perhaps laziness (that’s my interjection) while we wait for God to magically hand down the next task or direction in our lives.
You mean, “don’t do what I say do what I mean?” I understood that he’s saying the God won’t do it for you….you have to pick your own apples. I believe that there are divine interventions each day by God’s hand but for the most part we where create to labor in his name. I have a name for Christians who don’t want to roll up their shirt sleeves and get to work, “bureaucratic Christians.” A bureaucratic Christian is like standing next to a hog farm in Iowa and taking a deep breath and saying, “don’t you just love the fresh air our here?”
Michael
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well so much for spell checker…
thanks for all jumping in today!
Melinda, I agree with you wholeheartedly on Erwin. I went through a phase where I didnt engage much of his stuff for about 6 months or a year and came back to it recently. Are you still attending Crash? I would love to meet you sometime.
Michael, I didn’t go the event thoughtless and the event was both affirming and provoking. I had read the book that much of the content emerged out of it, so that stuff was affirming to hear it spoken in a talk rather than on a page in a text. I love your mental pictures. I think to blame God does not mean we are equals. God is creator and I am creation. That’s a pretty big difference, and as we have discussed on many occasions, the whole “What’s me/what’s God” dialogue is still a great deal of a dance for me. The way Erwin put that part you struggled with just summarized something I had been trying to get at for a while on my own – he just expressed it differently than I had.
And I think I keep a lot of the God ideas I catch – they form the talks I give at Crash every month.
Tony – i think you nailed it. The challenge is to reject passivity and lead and live courageously with hope.
Scott…I didn’t mean to say you where thoughtless but it brought to focus that I have a class to teach this Friday and when I asked the GM to have her students send me questions and never got any this is a clear symptom of thoughtless students.
You can think Iowa and my father for all of those witty sayings…guess there isn’t much else to do in Iowa. I’ve tossed so many of God’s ideas back into the water because they weren’t home run ideas that I had forgot that home runs isn’t what makes the game exciting it’s base hits.
Michael
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