Several years ago my friend and someone I admire greatly, Rick Warren, told me I should write a weekly letter to my friends and just call it “From the Mind of Bob.” Well, several years later and technologically enabled, I am humbled that you count yourself as someone who might want to listen to what I have to say…so here goes.
 
From the Mind of Bob--Musings for Friends
 
Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, has long been one of my favorite authors. She’s always poking around in the dark and remote corners of the world to discover paradox and wonder. I will let her own words, in this piece typical of many found in her 1999 book, For the Time Being, speak for themselves:
 
“In Cana lived a Palestinian merchant who gave wine to all comers. ‘Wine for everyone,’ he cried into the street. ‘On the house.’ He wore an open jacket and a blue shirt buttoned to the top. He brandished a silver tray full of tiny wineglasses. My friends would not enter his shop. They thought it was a trick. It was a trick: Put a man through life for sixty years and he is generous to strangers. I took a glass of red wine from the silver tray and drank it down. In my ordinary life, I don’t drink wine. Fine: This man was supposed to be selling souvenirs to tourists, which he was not doing, either. We ignored his merchandise. Leaning in his open doorway, we talked: we traded cigarettes and smoked.

“Across the steep street we saw the church at Cana, built where Luke’s gospel says Christ turned water into wine for a wedding. Like 130,000 other Palestinians in the Galilee, this shopkeeper was a Christian. His two brothers were priests, as it happened; his two sisters were nuns. His bit was giving away wine.”

As I found in my Finishing Well interviews, there are a lot of different ways of doing significance.
 
 
 
So What About You?
 
Peter Drucker told me not long ago, "You don't write for information or entertainment. You write for action."
 
Here are two questions that may lead to action:
  • How do you make sense of the shopkeeper’s gesture?
  • What is your “bit” in this world?
 
 
What is God Doing Now? with Bob Roberts
 
I was fortunate to have spent the better part of a day last year with one of the most influential figures in American Christianity, Henry Blackaby. In his widely read work Experiencing God, Blackaby advises us that the way to find our Halftime and Life II significance career is to "find out what God is doing and join him." Blackaby says that’s the place to start. With this in mind, I have undertaken a series of interviews with people who have a unique perspective on what God is doing now. In this section of ActiveEnergy, I'm doing a version of the "Let's Do Lunch" approach I used in Finishing Well, inviting you to listen in and to respond. Join the conversation by emailing your reaction.
 
Bob Roberts is founding pastor of NorthWood Church in Keller, Texas. He started the church in 1985, and has seen it grow to more than 2,200 members. Bob teaches courses on church planting, church growth and nation building at seminaries and universities across the country. Having started more than 50 new churches in the past two years, he is also a frequent lecturer to church leaders and strategists, both nationally and internationally. He has done active work in nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan and, more recently, in Indonesia. Bob’s email address is texplant@aol.com.
 
Bob answers the query, What is God doing now? “He’s calling the church into the world in ways like no other time in history but it’s not through religious infrastructures. It’s not through preachers. It’s through laymen; it’s through the domains in life, the infrastructures of society. He’s rising up people and putting in a radically different DNA that sees the whole -- not just the little slices, if you will.
 
“Four years ago, a man named Ray, vice president of some communications company and an agnostic, started visiting our church. A very successful, very wealthy man, he starts attending. It takes a year, but he accepts Christ. He then goes with us to North Vietnam where we’re doing some humanitarian work, and he literally writes the check for some projects that he wants done. He gets on fire for God.
 
“Six months ago, he came into my office and said, ‘I need to talk to you.’ I said, ‘What’s going on, Ray?’ He said the company that is putting in all the telecom in Baghdad has called, and they want me to head that whole project up for the government. I think God is calling me to go. Ten minutes earlier, a man, who is a Christian and doing work in Baghdad, had been in my office and wanted to know if I knew anyone in Baghdad. I said no, and then I was able to connect those two. So Ray goes to Baghdad. He’s been in the same area for six months. Three weeks ago, he e-mails me and said, ‘Bob, I’m going to do some kind of a church here in the green zone, using some of your stuff.’ Well, to top it all off, on Sunday, one of our men in the Fort Hood division was deployed to be a chaplain in the green zone. I’ve connected them through e-mail and the Internet. And so we’re starting First Baptist Baghdad.”
 
 
 
Insights from the Classics
 
Over the past four years I have been “coached” in classical literature by the director of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. The instruction I gain and my own love of learning has developed a love of the classics—I hope you can gain some insights from these brief but powerful thoughts.
 
“A man who considers himself the master of his own life can never be humble, because he thinks that he has no obligation to anyone. The man who considers service to God to be the purpose of his life is always humble, because he feels that he has never fulfilled his obligations”. – Leo Tolstoy
 
 
 
Recommended Resources
 
I believe the resources found in this section are worthy of further exploration. I will work to maximize your time and give you the best tools to enhance your experience.
 
For some time Annie Dillard has been one of my favorite authors. I highly recommend two books by Annie.
 
For the Time Being -- by Annie Dillard (go to her book on Amazon.com)
 
Over the last three decades, Annie Dillard has written about an uncommon number of things--predators and prose, astronomy and evolution, the miraculous survival of mangroves. Yet the sheer range of her interests can be deceptive. Whatever the subject, Dillard is always (as she wrote in Living by Fiction) practicing unlicensed metaphysics in a teacup, always asking the fundamental questions about life and death. And this epistemological interrogation continues in For the Time Being. Here Dillard alternates accounts of her own travels to China and Israel with ruminations on sand, clouds, obstetrics, and Hasidic thought. She also records the wanderings of paleontologist and spade-wielding spiritualist Teilhard de Chardin, whose itinerary (geographical and philosophical) has certain similarities to her own. But as she ties together these disparate threads with truly Emersonian eloquence, it becomes clear that God's presence--or absence--is at the heart of her book. (this description is found on Amazon.com)
 
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek -- by Annie Dillard (go to Pilgram at Tinker Creek on Amazon.com)
 
An exhilarating meditation on nature and its seasons-a personal narrative highlighting one year's exploration on foot in the author's own neighborhood in Tinker Creek, Virginia. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays -King of the Meadow' with a field of grasshoppers. (this description is found on Amazon.com)
 
Visit Northwood Church via their web site. As you can see it is a local church with a global view. www.northwoodchurch.org
 
Read about different ways of doing significance in Finishing Well.
 
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