The "world" that we so love to judge, condemn and criticize is not moved by our knowledge of the scriptures or the lack of it, whether we follow or reject a particular doctrine, whether we pray in tongues or flow in the gifts of the Spirit, or not, if we are churched, unchurched or home-churched, whether we fast or feast, whether we follow certain rituals or not, whether we give or not; if we cannot love unconditionally, then we are nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.
But who said we don't love?
Sure, we do love the birds of the same feather. We love those who speak in fluent Christianese, we love those who dress, look, act and think like us. But that would be conditional love. In other words, our love is towards the standards that we expect to see in others - it is not towards the actual person, which leads to the natural conclusion, that there is zero love in conditional love.
If we were to die tomorrow morning, what would we be known for? That we were self-important, hate-filled, judgmental, Bible-thumping bigots?
Or will be known as vessels of unconditional love, because that is exactly how Jesus loved us and Who he is. The only groups of people who upset Jesus, were the religious ones, not "the world".
Well, who cares how we are known for?
That may partly be true, considering the fact that no one can make everyone happy. The goal here is not to be more 'likable'. The bottom line is, God is Love, and as his ambassadors, may we be known as conduits of that Love. If not, what "the world" sees is just another empty label.
Few scriptures to meditate:
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life." - John 3:16 NKJV
"For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." - John 3:17 NKJV
"But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." - Romans 5:8 NKJV
"...love is the fulfillment of the law." - Romans 13:10 NKJV
The Bible is an ocean that
cannot be limited by one interpretation. When we think we have the
handle on the truth, what's usually happening is that we are merely
backing one interpretation of the truth.
The Christian world
is littered with interpretations. The last I checked, there are close to
40,000 Christian denominations. 40,000 groups saying, "I'm right". And
each one of them base their positions from the same manuscript.
Interpretations are often mistaken for the truth. Yes, there may be
nuggets of truth in them, but, in my view, it can never be the complete
picture. God will never be contained in our favorite doctrinal bowl. We won't see the full spectrum until we cross over.
Most of us love cars. When we see a Ferrari, our reaction is instant. We drool. We do not have to work up an emotion or need two upbeat songs to get to the joy frequency.
But when it comes to worshiping the King of kings, we need two songs just to get warmed up. And then the Worship Leader has to cajole us to raise our hands or praise Him.
Why is this so?
Simply because we haven't seen who Jesus is. Yes, we are familiar with all the Bible stories and the formulas to work the Kingdom principles. We are thorough with the doctrines and have memorized a ton of scriptures. We know a lot about Him, but barely know Him.
But the more we meditate on Him, the more we get a revelation of Him, no one will have to coax us into praising Him. The reaction will be natural. True worship is natural, and not a legalistic requirement. We worship Him, not because He is insecure, but simply because it will be a natural reaction as we behold Him. And it won't necessarily be limited to a "worship session" or while listening to a "worship music".
I briefly experimented with the idea of open comments. That is, I do not verify the comments before approving them. I may not necessarily agree with a wide variety of Christian interpretations out there, but that does not mean that I cannot have an open discourse.
The only thing that the experiment showed me was that it was a magnet for Anonymous comments. First of all, I do not understand why someone has to to hide behind the Anonymous mask, considering the fact that I am not posting about matters on national security here. Regardless, I ignored and allowed it. As long as the content was relevant to the posts, it did not matter. But what I do not have, is the time or the inclination for plain judgmental negativity.
Case in point. This is the comment that I received from an Anonymous poster for the post on Steve Jobs:
"“I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why…” Steve Jobs
I am sad for Jobs’ children.
And
I am equally sad for a nation who praises and glorifies a man simply
because he achieved much in the world of business and technology.
That’s a polite way to say it, I suppose. Maybe it would be more
accurate, or at least more pointed, to say it this way: I am saddened
that we worship a man simply because he gave us phones with touch
screens.*
How I wish our society honored those men who love their families with a love that is second only to their love for God."
Farewell, Steve. Thanks for the inspiration. You were an icon!
Steve Jobs: 1955 - 2011
This is
a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs,
CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of
the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college.
Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college
graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's
it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then
stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really
quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young,
unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for
adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college
graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a
lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the
last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a
waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an
unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My
biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated
from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.
She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few
months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to
college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a
college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my
working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition.
After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I
wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me
figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had
saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it
would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking
back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped
out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me,
and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the
floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to
buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday
night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved
it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and
intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one
example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy
instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every
label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had
dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to
take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif
and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between
different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.
It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science
can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh
computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac.
It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never
dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never
had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since
Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would
have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in
on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the
wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to
connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was
very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only
connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will
somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your
gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me
down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I
started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and
in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a
$2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our
finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned
30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you
started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very
talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things
went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and
eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors
sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had
been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had
let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped
the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and
Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very
public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley.
But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did.
The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been
rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple
was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness
of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner
again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most
creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another
company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would
become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer
animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most
successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of
events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we
developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And
Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been
fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the
patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.
Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going
was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And
that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is
going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly
satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to
do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep
looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know
when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better
and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it.
Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live
each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be
right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33
years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If
today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about
to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days
in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've
ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because
almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of
embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of
death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are
going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you
have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not
to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30
in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't
even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost
certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect
to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go
home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to
die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd
have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to
make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as
possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a
biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach
and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few
cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told
me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors
started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of
pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and
I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the
closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can
now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a
useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want
to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share.
No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death
is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change
agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new
is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the
old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite
true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other
people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out
your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow
your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want
to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,
which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a
fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he
brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's,
before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made
with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like
Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was
idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog,
and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It
was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final
issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you
might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath
it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell
message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have
always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I
wish that for you.
