The blogs bearing the IgneousQuill name will remain live online, at least for the foreseeable future, but will no longer be updated. I’m now blogging at “Missional Journeyman,” and invite you to join me there.

If you are a blogger and have me in your blogroll, please update the link.

Thanks for your continued readership.

It’s been a good run.

As I write this I’m in Jamaica on a volunteer trip with HOPE worldwide. Something that’s been on my mind for a while but is becoming clearer is the importance of churches seeking to have a healthy diaconate that does more than pass communion and possibly run the benevolence ministry. Deacons and deaconesses can be and do so much more.

Many Christian Churches and Churches of Christ value having “biblical” leadership — elders in particular — but treat the role of deacon as secondary and somehow a step before the eldership. I disagree.

Deacons and deaconesses are servants who minister to the needs of the church first, and then the wider community. To prepare them and discern the best leaders for this role, what could be better than look to volunteers working with a ministry like HOPE worldwide?

More on this later.

By the way, in just a few short days I’ll be flying to Jamaica on a trip with the HOPE worldwide Central Jersey Chapter. For those of you who pray, please pray for me, the team I’m going with and the children we’ll be serving in an orphanage there.

Thanks.

Although the small amount of dialogue is in Portuguese, the overall message should be intelligible to anyone who watches, regardless of language.

In my second year or so of college I made a trip to Brazil through CMF International’s REACH program (for college-age youth). It was a life-changing experience. This month (Thanksgiving week) I’ll be taking another trip, this time to Jamaica as part of HOPE worldwide Central Jersey Chapter‘s outreach. I recommend this type of volunteer service for anyone, but especially for young people. HOPE Youth Corps in particular is a great opportunity for high school and college students to serve the poor locally and around the world.

Check out the video below and click here for more information about HOPE Youth Corps. A description of this work from the website is included as well.

HOPE Youth Corps (HYC) is a faith-based program designed for high school and college students to serve the needy both domestically and abroad. In service groups of approximately 10-30 people, students receive leadership and spiritual training while participating in special projects to help the underprivileged. Among the many personal benefits students obtain while on HYC are lifelong friendships and memories, a heightened sense of purpose, and by traveling at home or overseas students are able to become more independent and gain a greater perspective of the world’s current conditions.

Earlier this year I wrote a review of the Poverty & Justice Bible (PJB). It wasn’t very favorable. This is an edition of the Bible that I’d love to love, but can’t bring myself to like.

My main problem with the PJB was the translation used, the Contemporary English Version. Reading it I found not only questionable translation, but a loss of meaning with key terminology muddled or lost entirely that helps unlock the meaning of Scripture.

This edition of the Bible highlights in orange the passages of Scripture that pertain to poverty and justice issues. Reading it is eye-opening, as the heart of God for justice is plainly revealed. More than any other topic in Scripture, poverty and justice are discussed. This can be surprising to many Christians, particularly in the United States, where sexual morality and “reclaiming” America’s “Christian heritage” have been at the forefront for years.

It’s easy to predict that this edition of the Bible will find a ready audience in Brazil, where social responsibility has been a value esteemed for quite a while, even finding a place in the operation of corporations in that country. The translation used is the Bíblia na Linguagem de Hoje, analogous to the Contemporary English Version. Having not read this translation, however, I can’t say either way whether it will be an improvement over its English counterpart. I have a copy of this version on my phone in the YouVersion app, so I’ll try to look it over and see what I think.

Next year I plan to travel with my family on vacation in Brazil, and I’ll try to obtain a copy of the PJB in Portuguese. If it looks good, it could be a help in advancing the work of HOPE worldwide through churches and into communities in that country.

See Also:

Book Review: The Poverty & Justice Bible (IgneousQuill.org)

Bíblia Pobreza e Justiça é ferramenta para entidades do Terceiro Setor (Cidadania Evangélica)

The Poverty and Justice Bible (American Bible Society)

Bíblia Sagrada Pobreza e Justiça (Sociedade Bíblica do Brasil)

The following is the video and text of Mr. Jobs’ 2005 Commencement address at Standford University. A lot of great thoughts here, but perhaps my favorite:

“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.” - Steve Jobs

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.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Every year on Vocations Sunday at the Catholic parish I grew up attending a guest priest, almost always a missionary, would give the homily. One year in my early teens a missionary priest to Peru really caught my attention. In recent years I’ve observed a strong, generally new interest among evangelicals in a fuller approach to missions that involves really taking Good News to the poor. Although some of the evangelical organizations involved in this work have been around for a while, “social gospel” work was — for the most part — eschewed and left to the “liberal” mainline Protestants. The evangelicals were too busy saving souls to be bothered with the issues of poverty and inequality. Things are definitely changing (check out my review of The Whole in Our Gospel), but I can’t help feeling that evangelicals in general are a bit “johnny-come-lately” to this area. Better late than never, I guess.

One group (divided in three parts) from within the Roman Catholic Church that really exemplifies an emphasis on holistic mission is Maryknoll. Check out the inspiring video below for more on their work, at least with regard to the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers.

The fellowship of churches of which I am part has HOPE worldwide as an outreach organization seeking to minister to the poor. If you are part of a church family, how does your denomination approach this issue? Anything similar to Maryknoll, HOPE worldwide, Compassion International or World Vision?

See Also:

Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers

Maryknoll Sisters

Maryknoll Lay Missioners

See Also:

In Chains: The Art of Freeing Girls from Sexual Slavery (The Pangea Blog)

UPDATE: The webpage indicates that this project is now funded! (9/9/2011)