Category Archives: Contemplate

EH Leader Podcast:Practicing Sabbath Delight

What does it mean to lead out of your Sabbath? In this month’s Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast, Pete Scazzero and Rich Villodas share their thoughts on Sabbath and its impact on their lives and leadership. Pete and Rich discuss Sabbath as a counter cultural concept and core spiritual formation discipline which has direct impact on how we lead. You can read more in depth on Sabbath and leadership in The Emotionally Healthy Leader book. Watch the conversation by clicking the image below. We encourage you to share with others.

The Great Temptation of Social Media

The great temptation in social media (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) is to exploit every experience as material to teach others, to speak of truths we don’t live, to present ourselves as someone we are not. This shrivels our souls as we stray further from what is authentic and true. It damages our integrity, widening the gap between our outer and inner lives. It is easy to “remain all our lives on the threshold, never entering into the banquet, but always running back into the street to tell the passers-by of the wonderful music (we) hear coming from inside the palace of the King” (Thomas Merton). How then do we guard against this temptation? We want to lead (e.g. tweet) out of a deep place of being with God, saying like David: I love the house where you live, O Lord The place where your glory dwells. Ps. 26:8 One thing I ask of the. Read more.

My 10 Top Lessons on Writing

The Emotionally Healthy Leader was my most challenging writing project to date. It required 6 ½ years of journaling, pondering, and prayer, and 1½ years of intensive writing itself. By the time it was over, I wondered if I would ever write again. (My first draft of over two hundred pages, for example, ended up mostly in the trash. So I reread two of my favorite books about the art and vocation of writing– Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing and The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard. Their insights offered me, once again, both perspective and vision. They put words on the complexity of the writing experience for me. My top learnings: Why do I write? I write to become clear (Merton, 10). I find that it (writing) helps me pray because, when I pause at my work, I find the mirror inside me is surprisingly clean and deep and serene. Read more.

The World’s Most Inaccessible Church

Located in the Tigray region of northeastern Ethiopia is the Abuna-Yemata-Guh Church, rightly called the world’s most inaccessible place of worship. (I also call it “the world’s least seeker-sensitive church” as well). My daughter and son-in-law visited there last month and returned, like many before them, struck with wonder at the vitality and richness of the church and her ministry. The church is carved into the rocks (from around the 6th century) and located at the top of a mountain. The 2-hour hike involves climbing barefoot and walking along narrow cliffs. (I am told, however, that people from the village can do the hike in around thirty minutes). Consider the pictures below: Evangelical Protestantism has a very short history compared to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church that traces her history back to Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-40). Perhaps you can help me with the question I am holding before the Lord: How. Read more.

God’s Ways are Little and Slow

A fundamental kingdom of God principle is that God’s ways are little and small. This smallness has been a scandal since Jesus’ day. Next to Herod’s massive Temple, the intellectuals of Athens, and Artemis’ temple in Ephesus, Jesus didn’t look like much. I can understand why Judas quit. I am learning this principle in a new and deeper way these past 12-24 months as the EHS movement has expanded remarkably around the world. I write from Asia where Geri and I are conducting 3 different EHS conferences for very large audiences in Singapore and Malaysia with participants from 19 countries. Last month we were in South Korea partnering with Onnuri church, an amazing global ministry with 75,000 members. And just a couple of months before that we were in Brazil with an outstanding Willow Creek Brazil team who are conducting EHS seminars around their country. Add to this the release of The Emotionally Healthy. Read more.

Turning Vacations into Sabbaticals

Each of us takes a vacation every year, for one, two, three, or more weeks. The problem, however, is that we take on the culture’s view of “vacations,” treating them simply as days off away from work. Let me suggest a larger biblical perspective, one that sees them as Sabbatical gifts from the Lord our God. Once Geri and I began to do so 12 years ago, it completely transformed the way we prepared and planned. We began to receive our vacations as annual gifts from God that resembled the ancient Jew’s participation in the festivals of their day (the three national feasts of Pentecost, Booths, and Passover). We simply applied the four characteristics that defined our weekly twenty-four-hour Sabbaths – stopping work, enjoying rest, practicing delight, and contemplating God – to our vacations. Remember, the purpose of all earthly life and matter is to lead us to communion with God. The entire cosmos. Read more.

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