The Hole In Our Gospel

In exchange for a review, the folks at Thomas Nelson were kind enough give a me copy of the book, The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns. Richard is the president of World Vision,  a Christian charity dedicated to helping the poor across the globe.

 

The beauty of this book is in the delicate weaving of World Vision's mission with  Richard's personal story of his road  to  becoming  the organization's CEO.

 

The book begins with Richard telling his story. He describes his journey from CEO of Lenox to CEO of World Vision. Along the way,  he recounts how many times he said "no", only to have that door stay firmly and completely open. The story compares Richard's unwillingness to embrace his role with our inability to see the suffering of those across the globe.  As he finally catches the vision we get a glimpse of what can be done to truly change the world with Christ's love, one person at a time.

 

World Vision is involved in the nitty gritty work of Christ. They dig wells for water, provide micro loans, help improve crop yields and assist with disasters. In short, they bring Christ to the need.  The book is full of stories of hope. There are stories of  villages saved by a World Vision well and enterprises funded by micro loans. There are stories of  tribal elders still confused about why Christians would come halfway around the world to help them after a tsunami. In short, they are stories of works opening the door to faith.

 

If you're hardened to the poor, if you think they are uniformly lazy, read this book. If you think the third world is without hope, read this book.  If you can finish The Hole in Our Gospel without being moved to compassion, call the coroner. You're already dead.

TSA

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Comic: Namespace

I have a (very) few comic strip ideas rattling around in my head so I decided to get them out. Don't expect much in the way of high brow humor and I've probably got a pretty shallow well but here's the first one.

There is No Divine Right of Success in Business

There is no divine right of success in business. It used to be that if you got a Chrysler or GM dealership and were moderately competent (okay, even moderately incompetent) you could pretty much guarantee a nice living. It used be that lawyers and CPA's at big firms didn't get laid off. It used to be that becoming a doctor would guarantee success if you didn't screw up too often. If litigation hasn't killed that idea, universal health care will. It used to be that was hard to lose money owning the sole newspaper in a major city. Phone companies and yellow pages yellow pages have also joined the list of slow death industries.

It seems like the mean time between unstoppable and out of the game is getting smaller. It took a long time for newspapers and phone companies to be irrelevant but MySpace has already rocketed, peaked higher than the value of a slew of newspapers and is sliding down the chute toward irrelevance. ebay managed to kill newspaper classifieds (with help from Craig's List), put a dent in phone companies with Skype and is now hitting big bumps. Don't be surprised to see ebay slowly slip from the from the average person's radar pretty fast.

There is no divine right of success in business. It takes constant creativity and flexibility. Now more than ever complacency will kill a business. Fast. Andy Grove was right. Only the paranoid survive.

On Twitter and Facebook

Paul Randal does a better job than I can on explaining why Twitter and Facebook are useful.

http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/PAUL/post/How-Twitter-and-social-networking-changed-my-life.aspx