tim keel

some things that stood out to me from the last part of his book, intuitive leadership:

"The heart is not engaged or satisfied in the same ways the mind is. It cannot be domesticated, or at least if it can, it is only at great cost and is often the result of violence. To engage the heart, your own and others', you must be present, and that can be incredibly hard for many of us because it means engaging pain. When we give ourselves permission to engage our hearts (usually with the help of another), what we find there is often scary to us. But far scarier is what happens when we don't engage the heart: we pay a price personally and our churches miss out on an intergral part of what it menas to be a disciple of Jesus Christ."

"There needs to be more tension than...previously allowed. We must abide in the tension between questions and answers, between the head and the heart, between spoken words and living words. It is not an either/or option. It is both/and. Why? Because there is no long-term life to be found in abandoning and marginalizing one set of competencies or leaders with traditional skill sets for an emerging set of leaders or skills, no matter how life-giving they initially appear to be. When we hold these twin realities in dynamic tension, life emerges as we depend on God."

then he quotes buechner in one of my favorite passages and then goes on to say:

"'If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.' --Frederick Buechner

"The opaque and open-ended nature of what he is inviting us toward can produce anxiety. Just tell us what to do, we say. We'll execute it. We are accustomed to discovering God and his life out there. We can observe it and go and lay hold of it. Listen to my life? Can you be more specific?
I believe a great many of us have forgotten, or maybe we never knew, what it is like to relate to God, each other, and ourselves in this manner. We have sought answers from experts who promise success rather than postures that would allow us to be integrally engaged in the discovery of life ourselves. Now we are discovering that laying hold of other people's answers no longer provides the promise that we once thought it might. We must reckon with our environment and with God in a different way. The answer lies in God, in us, and in the engagement between God and us. We must listen to our lives and engage."