Dodging the bullet

We lived in a war zone in 1992, Liberia. Now in 2018, we are living 45 minutes drivefrom one, caused not by war, but Hurricane Michael. Surprised by my tears at our church, A Simple Faith, this morning, I realized I was overcome by the simple thought, that just because the wind changed direction just before landfall, we and the place we love and now call home, was spared. We dodged the proverbial bullet. But bullets keep going and this one hit our near neighbors only 40 miles to the East, big-time!

We just visited Lynn Haven, a hard hit suburb of Panama City,  taking water, toothbrushes, food and in return saw the devastation, and upside down lives of those most affected- many who were poor anyway. Before the devastation, 17-20% of the people in the 3 counties worst hit, lived below the poverty line. We were gratefully received, gave hugs, heard traumatic stories and said we’ll be back.. and would keep coming back, beyond the time when the newsmen move on.

If you want to give there are many options, but I have one I can personally recommend as a ex-relief worker and Chairman of a Philanthropy Consultancy organization.  A local charity called RENEW, who has experience in local fires, Puerto Rica restoration and work in El Salvador are planning both a short term and long term response to the tragedy. In the short term, like many others, they are joining in distributing the emergency goods and services that people need so desperately. But in the longer term, they plan to fund a project manager, teams.. and be there for the long haul. Ronnie McBrayer, Pastor and head of this local charity, RENEW, ‘happens’ to have run and coordinated projects in past hurricanes for Habitat for Humanity and other agencies. Would you consider contributing financially to RENEW’s ability to help our Florida neighbors both survive (power is out for an estimated 2 months, no sewage, no cleaning facilities, jobs lost, many houses uninhabitable, businesses decimated etc) and then rebuild their lives?

This is Ronnie McBrayer’s press release as of last Friday. If you would like to contribute through Anna and myself, then get in contact with me at dbalfour@genevaglobal.com.

RENEW: Mobilize Localize StabilizeHurricane Michael October 12, 2018 One year ago this week, I appealed for help to aid the people of Caguas, Puerto Rico. Through your generosity, RENEW was able to invest $50,000 to rebuild Gosen Iglesia de la Familia (the Gosen Family Church) and the surrounding community. Today, I’m asking for your help again. This time, it is closer to home. RENEW is in the earliest stages of creating a plan to assist the hurricane-decimated areas of Panama City, Mexico Beach, Port St. Joe, and Apalachicola (referred to as the Forgotten Coast). The damage is catastrophic, and the recovery will take years. RENEW plans to follow the model used in Puerto Rico: Find a local partner (a church, business, or municipality) that needs help; handcraft a plan to restore and rebuild with this partner; and remain until this task is complete. Here is how you can help. GIVE. The Hurricane Michael project is reliant upon funding, and the initial need is $100,000. This will employ a full-time director for a year; purchase the initial rebuilding materials; and provide a presence and staging area in the damaged community. GO. Once the director is in place, communications have improved, and partnerships have been established, the need for volunteer teams will be almost unending. The work will involve tear-out, clean-up construction, framing, and painting. GUIDE. Become a leader who will organize, recruit, coordinate and lead a mission team to the Forgotten Coast. This can be from your church, work, school, friends or family. RENEW will assist you in this process. All donations to RENEW for this project will be used for charitable purposes within the meaning of section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (Federal EIN: 82-2916148). Giving can be done by traditional and/or online means. The link and mailing address is below. Thank you for your help – Ronnie and Cindy McBrayer DONATE TO RENEW FOR HURRICANE MICHAEL RELIEF HERE. You can contact Ronnie McBrayer directly here. ReNew of Northwest Florida 16400 US Highway 331 South, Box 275 Freeport, FL 32439 Federal EIN: 82-2916148

Coffee and Brexit?

Vienna is renowned for its coffee. Even almost too strong for me- and I like strong coffee! It found it’s coffee tradition supposedly when the siege of Vienna in 1683 was lifted from the Ottoman Turks and they found bags of coffee left behind. Thus the Viennese coffee house tradition was born!

However, it was another piece of Viennese history that I have found both sad and compelling. About 200 years before, in 1420, Duke Albert V of Austria submitted to the church authorities and envious commercial competitors and and decided to persecute and outlaw the Jews of Vienna – some 800 people -who lived in the old city. Many were imprisoned, starved, tortured and 212 burnt alive. The rest were banned, their possessions and houses confiscated. It wasn’t for another two centuries until Jews were free to set up a second Jewish community outside the old city. I visited the heart of where this old community lived yesterday. In the Judenplatz is the Jewish Museum, which tells the story of this community and you can go underground through a tunnel and reach the stone foundations of their synagogue in which the remaining Jews died in fire to avoid capture, slavery and compulsory baptism.

Very poignently, directly above this subterranean ruin of the synagogue, lies a new memorial- to the 120,000 Jews, who in 1938, were again turned out of their houses, lost their businesses, were forced to scrub the streets and then were sent to the camps by the Nazis. 65,000 Viennese Jews died in the concentration camps. 

But it’s not just the Jews who can point to violence, persecution and terror. Two days ago a bomb went off in Istanbul airport, killing 44 and wounding 230. People who were arriving, departing, welcoming, greeting and innocent.

I am reflecting on all this only a week after we arrived in London to be shocked by the outcome of the Brexit vote. As I tried to understand this historic decision, I saw the connections and similarities of some of the Leave rhetoric to Istanbul and the fate of the Viennese Jews. The fear, envy and hatred of the “other”, the dissimilar, the alien , the immigrant. I could understand why those who felt alienated, marginalised and left behind by globalization and saw their traditional industries and jobs outsourced elsewhere had voted to Leave the European club. A club they already felt excluded them from any member privileges. But the sad and scary outcome in the UK is that it has increased the fear of the “other”. The Pole in a shopping queue who is told to go home. And worse.

And now we see this trend to demonise the alien, immigrant, refugee, other religion, other culture all around the world. Patrick Dixon, a well known futurist warns of rising tribalism as we see this xenophobic rhetoric employed by politicians the world over to gain easy votes. It’s a very successful strategy as Donald Trump and many European nationalist parties have found.

But it’s scary. As we create an atmosphere, a mindset and a worldview that we cannot then control. One similar to that thinking that killed those Viennese Jews, bombs innocent travelers, was responsible for the Rwandan genocide and allows normally law abiding people to countenance doing evil things, because the other is ultimately seen as sub-human and therefore out of the boundaries of normal, human restraint.

As I enjoy a ‘Wiener Melange’-some say the best coffee that Vienna can offer-I am trying to remember to approach life with faith, hope and gratitude for my cultured, civilized, abundant life; but part of my European tour has made me nervous of the shadows I see, the discontent and hopelessness I hear and the potential future that we will all share.

 

A Franciscan Blessing

May God bless you with discomfort,

At easy answers, half-truths,

And superficial relationships

So that you might live

Deep within your heart.

 

May God bless you with anger

At injustice, oppression,

And exploitation of people,

So that you might work for

Peace, freedom and justice.

 

May God bless you with tears,

To shed for those who suffer pain,

Rejection, hunger and war

So that you may reach out your hand

To comfort them and

To turn their pain to joy.

 

And may God bless you

With enough foolishness

To believe that you can

Make a difference in the world,

So that you can do

What others claim cannot be done

To bring justice and kindness

To all our children and the poor.

Amen

 

 

( Taken from John Maxwell’s book “Intentional Living”, sourced from http://www.franciscans.ie/news/83-news-scroller/485-a-franciscan-blessing)

 

 

Something borrowed, something Lent.

Lent started today at the same time as Valentine’s Day. And we were on holiday. Basking in the gorgeous Caribbean sun, whilst everyone at home in Philly was freezing with record cold temperatures. It was very confusing.

We walked across the island (its a very small island) to church in Gustavia, the capital of St.Barth’s (French, but named after a Swedish King) and went to the Anglican Church there. Older, well matured couples filled the pews and it was difficult to tell the difference between the snowbirds and the tourists. Saint Valentine was recognized and demonstrated in couples as they held on to each other as they struggled down the aisle to the communion rail. The start of Lent was celebrated with the reflection of Jesus’ three temptations in the wilderness- the triple seductions of consumerism, power and fame- and the preacher reflected on what we were on earth for anyway. A good question really- his best and most memorable take on the subject was stolen from a New York subway admonition for courtesy- ” Be someone who makes it a better ride for everyone else”. And birds in the warm sun flew in and out of the wide open shuttered ancient windows.

Food for thought. I often give something up for Lent. Just a small discipline. This year Lent had crashed into my sabbatical. And then I realized I needed a couple of disciplines I change for my future, post-sabbatical life forever, not just for Lent.

The big one was Fear. N.T.Wright in his little, explosive book “Following Jesus” had convinced me that God, rather than being the biggest, cosmic killjoy ever, actually unlike me, seemed to be much more interested in me being unafraid, than anything else. Jesus and most other messengers from God’s most frequent command being -‘Don’t be afraid!’ I reflected on how afraid I am most of the time. Afraid of what others think of me, of not fulfilling my own objectives, of sickness, of running out of money, of getting old and sick or dying suddenly! I’m a bag of fears and it sucks the joy out of life. The antidote- a mystical, life changing encounter with the “God who raises the dead” everyday. So my Lent/ Valentine/ Life first resolution is to practice being full of faith and not of fear.

The second one I owe to Dallas Willard, via John Ortberg from his great new book “Soul Keeping”. Dallas’ quote answering the question of how to stay spiritually healthy was dynamite- “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life”. So I have decided to try to give up being consistently hurried. To live slower.

My two seductions- Fear and Hurry. Both rob me of peace, satisfaction and fulfillment. So I’m trying to take my life back. For forever, not just Lent.

Running on Empty

I sat in October in Doha airport worried about the lack of hearing in my right ear. I was just about to take the ninth flight in as many days and I was all too aware of my fragility. My normal attitude of invincibility had slipped and behind the facade was someone who had reached his limits, as much as I hated to admit it. I reflected on the one trip too many in 2015, but the truth was I had had quite a few trips too many, too many speaking engagements and too many challenges to deal with. Last year I clocked up 99 days out of the country- a record by even my standards.

How did I get into this mess? A good question I thought, as I sat waiting for the 14 hour flight in economy that would take me home. Like most good questions, it had multiple answers. The immediate one was the crazy notion of flying to the Middle East from the USA, back to Europe and then hopping over to Dubai and Saudi again before flying back to the US. And of course, getting sick the night before I set out. The more considered response was my foolishness in adding exploring the Middle East for clients at the same time as starting a new book speaking tour, on top of an already busy schedule for 2015. My somewhat self-pitying answer was that it was cumulative- 8 years of building my own business was like pushing a very large boulder up a very steep hill for a very long time! As I told anybody who cared to listen! As I reflect now, the answer was that I simply chose not to respect my physical and emotional limits. I pushed too hard for too long and reaped the natural consequences.

As my wife reminds me, the proof of insanity is to keep doing the same things and expect a different result. I think Einstein may have said it first, but probably not as frequently! Eventually, faced with my unreasonable irritation, my avoidance of any emotional encounter and a feeling that all I wanted to do was hide, I reluctantly accepted the fact I was nearing burnout as a leader and I needed to recognize this and find a responsible way of handling this fact. So many stories I had heard involved leaders not confronting their own limitations and getting into very destructive behaviors as a result- drinking too much, affairs, bad decisions and unwise confrontations-the opposite of the responsible behavior the people we lead deserve, but strangely seen as more macho and somehow better than the “weaker” response of admitting our fallibility.

So I started to plan my recovery. Firstly I needed some first aid. Fortunately for me, a scheduled UK trip had been cancelled, leaving an inviting hole in my diary. I seized it- taking a four day instant retreat at a spiritual center straddled across the Appalachian trail. I spoke to almost no one, went for long walks and read two books. One about recovering from burnout and the second, reminding me about my long term responsibility of looking after my soul. I came back refreshed and with plans for the medium and long term aimed at not allowing myself to get myself into this situation again. Unfortunately, we typically feel a bit better and then imagine that a situation we created over months and years can be alleviated in days. It was not to be. I have learnt that recovery from over-extending our natural resources works like a trickle charge and that takes time. I kept going using the occasional day retreat to recharge the battery a little- enough to get to Christmas.

I couldn’t do anything about my packed schedule in the rest of 2015, but I could change the way I lived 2016. I could take a month out in 2016 and in three years,felt I could afford to take a three month sabbatical. I would have been running the company for a decade by then. We mentioned this plan to a friend in Mexico, who laughed and asked me how I felt about that plan. ‘Lousy’ I reflected. Why didn’t I take the sabbatical next year he asked? Wow, it was as if the lights came on and hope (which felt it had left for the duration) re-emerged ! Could I really do that? I came to realize the better question for me and the organization was ‘what was I doing if I didn’t?’ Limping along, leading sub-par and hoping to keep it altogether for another two and a half years? Seemed like madness. I got my leadership team together, related them some of this account and how I felt and told them I would be taking a three month sabbatical from February onwards. In the end, it felt the only responsible thing to do.

I recognize I am incredibly fortunate on a number of counts. I am my own boss and could decide to do this. The business is doing well and can afford it and I have a superb leadership team who will take this in their stride and this will probably open new creative opportunities we might not have recognized, had I just kept going. I intend to come back and lead differently, I will not pick back up all my current responsibilities and I hope the time of refreshment, re-creation and reflection will open the doors to a new era of growth and rich creativity for us as an organization, as well as in my family and my marriage. I am only on day 7 of the sabbatical so far and so I’ll let you know how it goes!

Advent

Isaiah 61 1-2 

“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,

because the Lord has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
² to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn”

I always loved this passage of scripture. This and the corollary when Jesus quotes it in the synagogue in Nazareth as he starts his ministry (Luke 4.18-19). I am a fairly pragmatic guy. My attitude on becoming a Christian was “ OK, tell me what to do and I’ll try and go do it!” But with so many different and differing preachers, writers, interpretations, traditions and streams it often seems so difficult to know what to believe and what is the priority! So it was with relief that I read this and thought- well at least this seems clear. The marginalized, the vulnerable, the poor, those who have no control over their lives- these are the people that the Lord seems preoccupied to help.

And so when I came to my “rubber hits the road moment” in life around 30, this became my mandate too. I felt called to serve the poor communities of the world as best I can. But over the last three decades, I have realized that this passage has a twist in its tail. Because as I have been granted a grandstand seat over my heart and soul and watched its selfish and sometimes plain evil ways, I have come to realize that I have the heart that needs binding up; I need to be freed from the captivity of my limited faith and shackles of consumerism and other false gods; I need to be released from my fear and anxieties. I need comforting and someone telling me there is good news for my soul in a clamoring world of climate change, relational breakdown and ISIS.

I desperately need the Lord’s favor to rescue me, so that I am in a position to reach out to the materially, physically, psychologically and spiritually poor and needy around me. It comes back to God talking to Abraham: “I will bless you so you can be a blessing to others- all the nations of the world.” Jesus says this is why I have come- to enter the world as a Christmas baby- to proclaim good news to the poor. And this is His good news. He binds up our hearts, so we are in a position to love and care for others.

Mind the Gap!

Mind The Gap!

Trying to be centered- to be full of peace.

How hard that is around Christmas time.

I feel caught in the mental gap between idiotic songs about Frosty the Snowman, silly sentimental renditions of the nativity story and the idealism of a Christian wonderland; verses the messy, violent, difficult reality of the headlines and our family experiences.

 

 

The glitz meets the tears and I feel stuck, struggling to reconcile these two realities.

                                                                              Then I reflect: that is our whole Christian experience – to live between the times. The Age To Come when Jesus returns and there will be no tears, no pain, no illness and the Present Age, where Satan wars with God for the souls of men and we all become collateral damage.

The gap between faith and hope – and reality and experience.

Christmas time, feels to me, particularly difficult. The longing for a peaceful, fulfilling world of order, beauty and justice and the reality that our world is none of this for most people.

I struggle to focus on the arrival of the Incarnational God-With-Us – amidst the conflicting cares of life and death – and am glad he still comes to meet me in my messy and sometimes marvelous reality.

 

The Maple

We bought four new trees to replace three that had to be cut down over this last year. When they arrived they were potted in the big, black plastic buckets that encompassed their roots.

We stood them in the places they were to go, checking out angles and where they looked best. As I looked out the window into the back garden I saw that the maple- regal in its orange-brown leaves had already fallen down in the wind. I was concerned and went out to right it – only for this to happen again only 10 minutes later.

I thought about my life at the moment and in a burst of empathy I felt like that maple. Somehow the last few months I had felt uprooted, transported and potted – top heavy, fragile and prone to mental and emotional collapse at what seemed to be small zephyrs of circumstances, inconveniences and minor setbacks. I lacked being rooted in something larger, expansive and solid.

This metaphor strengthened as we dug the hole, watered and fertilized it and tamped down the new soil around the root bole. I knew I needed to be more rooted. Not in a pot, where I could be upended by the slightest thing going wrong. Rooted deep in the soil with strong roots providing me stability and resilience in these current winds.

It reminded me of a Psalm from the Old Testament wisdom literature. “He is like a tree planted by streams of living water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. Psalm 1 v 3.” I have always loved this picture. I long to be prosperous in the holistic sense. For my life to be fruitful. But one is not fruitful in every season. I knew I had to dig deep again into rich soil if I wanted to weather the storm.

And our maple? Well, it has now lost all its leaves and looks stick thin and bare. But I guess that’s okay, as it is securely rooted, watered every day and should be developing a larger root structure through winter, even if to us it looks like nothing is going on.

Then when Spring eventually comes, our maple can yield its fruit in season and illustrate the hope we have in our hearts about the outcomes of our lives.

 

 

The Cosmic Con

I watched “The Book Thief” last night. Reflected on a world that feels as if it is falling apart. War is such a terrible idea, and yet it entices us in. It makes us believe that winning will solve everything – yet it demonises others and creates such terrible pain, heartache and relational destruction. So evil. Our tribalism, ethnicity, religion, nationalism- I feel it myself , rooting on the news for this side or that…so divisive and so insidious….

The Cosmic Con

I feel the tentacles, insidiously tempting me to judge, to condemn, to distinguish, to take sides-

Shia or Sunni,

Palestinian or Israeli,

Dictator or Freedom Fighter,

Terrorist or Government,

Pro-Russian or Pro-European?

The world itself feels at war with itself. Senseless, violent, self-righteous, self-certainty that divides into us or them.

A sword that separates into “good guys” and “bad guys”- that pierces the soul of objectivity and moderation and demonises the “other”.

And now we shot down a plane in the Ukraine of innocents- Dutch, Malaysians, AIDS researchers- that had no other guilt than being at 33,000 feet in the wrong airspace at the wrong time.

Will this finally wake us up to the evil, the pain, the terrible suffering we inflict on each other? One atrocity fueling the next in a gruesome cycle?

I have no more confidence of the world regaining its senses, than the Americans restricting firearms after yet another tragic school shooting.

“The Book Thief” sets this crazy, satanic urge to kill in the relatively comfortable context of Nazi Germany; but we could transport this sad, heroic story to so many parts of this beautiful earth today- Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, Iraq, Nigeria, Israel…This list is long and bloody, the leaders promising the wonder of tomorrow at the price of lost loved ones and tortured souls today.

Never a good trade. Always a cosmic con.

And in the end , we are all deluded. The dictators, the torturers, the freedom fighters, the zealots. Evil, Satan, the demons inside, Death- are the only winners of this one-sided contest.

There is no “happy ever after”- once you have had your heart broken or stolen someone’s soul, all you can hope for is to recuperate, to block it out or to die to your own humanity.

We never win. We only suffer. But we never stop.

Financial Sustainability

Financial Sustainability- a phrase in development circles much used and often with more heat than light! We are often not clear in our usage what we really mean by Sustainability, apart from the fact that everyone now agrees that it’s a “Good Thing”. Often the uninitiated simply assume that financial sustainability used by development practitioners means designing granting projects that can financially continue after the current funding stops. But if we are honest, we know that is nonsense. At the very best, unless another donor comes in to replace our funding, the project activities will diminish drastically. So, often then this is what we mean by “financial sustainability”- the act of swapping donors! I have a client – a financial investor- that has another name for granting- ” capital destruction”! Most grants by definition cannot be financially sustainable vehicles, because intrinsically, unless they have some sort of revolving fund component, they just destroy capital.

Income generation and revolving grants though, can make your grants work harder and in some cases really reduce the unit cost significantly, but they still do not mean an organization dependent on grants is fundamentally financially sustainable. I have two good examples of extending the sustainability of granting from a recent trip I did to Malawi and Zambia in March. In Malawi, we are running a Early Childhood Development program for 7000 3-5 year olds at a cost of $38 per year per child. Thats the same cost as a child sponsorship program for a child for a month. It aims to help teach the children vital socialization skills to prevent school dropout, life skills, like hygiene and also gives the children a nutritious lunch. The sustainable part is the maize flour grinding mills that are run as businesses by the community -one has been running for 7 years- and then the food is donated to the children’s meals out of the profits. Likewise in a Zambia Preventable Blindness program for the “valley of the blind”, we set up a revolving drug fund that sells eye drugs to the poor for a minimal fee to replenish the drugs and this means we estimate it can operate for another two years with no more granting needs.

But still in the end, granting means the resources run out. Thus enter the attractive notion of Impact Investment- investing in businesses doing some type of social good. This seems to me to be the Humanitarian version of having your cake and eating it. (Which after all, is what we all do on birthdays, don’t we?) We make loans or take equity in a for-profit or not-for-profit enterprise and get our money back with hopefully more besides! And with a triple bottom line, the environment and society benefit at the same time. If our long term goal is economic development that benefits the poor by providing them jobs and appropriate products and services then this has to be a good thing. But if your short term goal is significant social transformation at scale in one particular place, investing in businesses hundreds of miles apart just does not cut it. In 2007, we learnt with granting that you need to focus all your resources in one place (with the geography only as large as your resources can still be significant), if you want to see a social impact greater than the sum of the parts.

So we are taking that lesson and applying it wider- to a innovative experiment which is trying to accelerate positive social change in Gulu in Northern Uganda, in a region recovering from the horrors of the LRA. We are focusing in one place, integrating and coordinating Economic Development, Education and Health initiatives using a Blended Capital approach. The latter means we are happy to use grants (where there is no revenue model), loans (where there is a possibility of paying back the loan) and even taking equity in social businesses. The point is to make the initiative as financially sustainable as possible and our attitude is to be agnostic as to which type of capital to use.

This is not the only type of sustainability that we value. We believe working with and building local leadership, local organizations and local communities are all sustainable investments. But in a time when the focus is on how do we accelerate effective positive change and find tipping points in poor communities, it only makes sense to make our finite and valuable resources work as hard as they can. After all, every master craftsman knows that it’s always a question of using the right tool for the right job!