C.S. Lewis on Giving

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures exclude them.”

–C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity

Does this step on anyone else’s toes a bit? I am convinced that the greatest sin of American Christianity is the way we spend our money.

Christians and the Sanctity of Marriage

A Chick-fil-A in Huntsville, Alabama on August 1. Photo by Glenn Baeske/AP Photo

So a couple of weeks ago there was a pretty big political/cultural/religious firestorm concerning gay marriage and Chick-fil-A. Perhaps you heard something about it.

I didn’t write anything about it at the time because (a) I was traveling, (b) Everybody in the world seemed to be writing something about it, and (c) When it comes to emotionally-charged issues, I think it is sometimes less helpful to talk about them when we are so fired up. So I have waited until now to post a brief thought for reflection.

I have no problem with a company executive expressing his views on marriage. I happened to agree with his views, but even if I didn’t, I support his freedom to express what he believes—that’s one of the neat things about our country. And speaking of freedom, I also support the freedom of those who disagree with him to boycott his company, and the freedom of those who agree with him to Eat (even) Mor Chikin than usual to show their support.

But here is what I wonder: in a society plagued by divorce, where Christians don’t do that much better than non-Christians at staying married,¹ what is the most effective way for Christians to protect the sanctity of marriage? Is it by eating at Chick-fil-A (or getting in debates on the internet, or holding up picket signs), or by actively cultivating healthy, God-glorifying marriages with our spouses?

Of course, it doesn’t have to be an either/or decision—you can affirm the value of biblical marriage by working hard to make yours conform to those standards and at the same time, you can also use your political and economic voice to support it as well. Unfortunately, I think that the tendency is for a lot of people to follow the latter options (which, admittedly require less effort and less sacrifice) instead of the former rather than in addition to it.

By all means, let’s protect the sanctity of marriage—but let’s also admit that homosexuals aren’t the only ones who are bringing damage upon it.

• • •

1This article talks about how the oft-quoted fact of Christians divorcing at the same rate as non-Christians is a myth. However, even this article puts the divorce rate among American Christians at about 42%, while that of non-religious Americans is about 50%. As Christians, are we really going to pat ourselves on the back about that level of difference?

Friday Summary Report, August 10

I’ve read several blogs where, at the end of the week, the author will post an assortment of links and/or random thoughts that didn’t really merit their own individual post. After resisting the impulse to do something similar for quite a while, I finally decided to just go ahead and do it.

During a given week, I do a lot of reading (both on the Web and in books), and come upon several things that I would like to share, but I hate to write posts that are just 8 words long. So primarily, these end-of-week summaries will consist of links and quotations that I thought were interesting, but will also include random items that didn’t fit elsewhere. I’m not promising to do this every Friday, but I bet it will happen frequently.

(1) Although this article has been out for a while, I just came across it this week. Basically, a couple of ethicists (apparently it doesn’t take much to be an ethicist these days) have proposed that after-birth abortions (i.e. infanticide) should be permitted on newborns, because a newborn is not a person in the sense of being a “subject of a moral right to life.” This is obviously repulsive, but not surprising, and is really just an extension of the arguments that are already made to justify pre-birth infanticide. At least these people are honest enough to admit that no great change happens in the state of the infant at birth.

(2) Here is a somewhat scary article about a tech guru who had his online identity mercilessly hacked and had his iPhone and laptop wiped clean as a result (losing all the pictures of his infant daughter in the process!). I recommend reading the entire article, but a couple of takeaways: (1) Be very careful about linking online accounts together (using same usernames and/or passwords); (2) Back up all of your computer data on an external hard drive; (3) hackers are jerks.

(3) This week, I successfully finished translating 1 John from Greek (the word successfully is used somewhat loosely here). I do feel some minor sense of accomplishment in doing this, but mostly, I feel a great debt to those who have gone on long ago and translated Scripture from original texts into the vernacular.

(4) As this post remains one of my most-read, most-commented on, and most-disputed from this year, I updated it at the end, to make my intentions in writing it as clear as possible.

(5) Over the last two weeks, I’ve been watching as much of the Olympics as I possibly can. Perhaps I will have a post related to that next week.

Reflecting On A Busy Summer and Managing Time

We are now a week into August, which means that soon school will start back up, and my hectic schedule will calm down to some degree. As a minister who works with teens, my summers are always very busy, but this summer has been even more crammed full of activity than most—really, dating back to about April, I haven’t hardly had time to catch my breath!

In general, I think it’s good to be busy, but there’s also such a thing as being too busy. And the problem with being too busy is that it often leads, at least in my case, to things like burnout, irritability, and neglected relationships (in addition to much less frequent blogging!). I’ve already been thinking about some specific things I can do or not do to ensure that next summer is a little less crazy than this one, but in a general sense, I’ve also been thinking about Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix. 

Covey presents his Matrix in his famous book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. As a disclaimer, I haven’t actually read the book, but I have been exposed to this part of it in a couple of different settings and have found it to be quite helpful.

Considering the different activities that occupy our time (and which, added together, constitute our busyness), Covey categorizes all activities according to how urgent and important they are. An urgent task is something that is inherently time-sensitive and must be dealt with quickly, while an important task is basically something that carries lasting value.

When these two qualities are charted, you end up with Covey’s Time Management Matrix (see below), which groups all tasks into one of four quadrants.

(My thoughts on these quadrants are based on Covey’s, but are somewhat different because my observations come from a ministry context rather than a business one.)

Quadrant 1: Important and Urgent– Items in this category are of crucial importance and must be dealt with right away. This would include things like:

• When you get in a car wreck (even a minor one), contacting your insurance company and seeing about repairs becomes a major priority.
• When two teenagers (or adults) are having some sort of conflict which is causing disunity or division within the youth group (or the church congregation as a whole), you deal with the problem sooner rather than later if you know what’s good for you.
• When you have a term paper to write that is worth half of your overall grade and it is due in a week, you budget whatever time you need to get it done in time.

Quadrant 2: Important but Not Urgent– Items in this category are of great importance, but because they are not time-sensitive or attached to deadlines, a lot of times they end up getting neglected:

• Talking to a teenager about problems he is having at home or at school.
• Taking the time to sit down and plan a quality youth group event or church-wide fellowship activity.
• Immersing yourself in the study of the Word of God.
• Spending time with the most precious baby girl in the world.

Quadrant 3: Urgent but Not Important– Tasks in this category are really not important, but they are time-sensitive or somehow attached to a deadline:

• Phone calls are inherently urgent, because the phone rings right now, and it’s hard to leave a phone call unanswered because it might be important. But so many times they are not important at all—“Would your youth group be interested in doing our fundraiser?” “Can I sign you up for a free trial ______?”
• When you are in the middle of studying for a sermon or Bible class, and a church member comes in and interrupts just to shoot the breeze. Invariably the conversation starts with, “I know you’re busy, but…” (To be fair, sometimes church members stop by to talk about things that are actually important instead of just checking in on you out of boredom or curiosity. When church members are giving you important information or are in need of some sort of counsel, that would fall in a different category.)

Quadrant 4: Neither Important nor Urgent– Items in Quadrant 4 are not important, and don’t really have a deadline attached to them either:

• Reading promotional mail about an activity that “maybe I should look into someday.”
• Playing solitaire on the computer.
• Checking Facebook or Twitter a dozen times a day.
• Watching reruns of The King of Queens.

The reason that all of these categories matter is that where you spend the majority of your time determines, in large part, how effective and even how happy you are.

Some people live almost exclusively in Quadrants 3 and 4, spending time on things that are essentially unimportant. Covey says that people who live this way are basically irresponsible. You know people like this—they can’t hold down a job and you cannot rely on them for anything. It isn’t a good way to live.

If we have any feelings of responsibility at all, we have to spend some of our time in Quadrant 1, because there are certain things in life that pop up that you just can’t plan for. However, what happens to a lot of us is that we spend too much time in Quadrant 1, constantly shifting from one crisis or deadline to another. As I have discovered (again) this summer, that is a stressful way to live, and can easily lead to burnout.

And it’s also a vicious cycle—when we spend so much of our time dealing with matters that are urgent and important, that typically leaves us too exhausted to use our remaining time wisely. So, rather than spending that time planning for future events (and thereby preventing those events from becoming frantic, last-minute crises that we have to deal with), we tend to just sit down and watch TV, or doing something else that requires no effort (Quadrant 4).

According to Covey, the key is to spend the majority of your time in Quadrant 2. You deal with Quadrant 1 problems as they emerge, but you minimize the number of those problems by planning ahead (for example, knowing the deadline of your paper several months in advance, you budget your time so you are not working on it at the last minute). You recognize Quadrant 3 and Quadrant 4 activities as being essentially unimportant, so you seek to either delegate or eliminate as many of them as possible.

By spending the majority of your time in Quadrant 2, your relationships with other people are strengthened, important tasks are still tended to, and your stress level goes down.

All that’s left now is to put all that I just wrote into practice. :)