Stress

I wrote down this quote a long time ago, came across it today and I'm not sure if I ever put it on my blog. It's from the book Emotional Intelligence:

"When emotionally upset, people cannot remember, attend, learn or make decisions clearly. As one management consultant put it, 'Stress makes people stupid.'"

It is incongruous, then, that I have seen so many job advertisements looking for people who can perform under stress. That is starting to be a major warning sign for me when looking at job ads. Looking for people who can work in high stress conditions indicates an employer that is regressive. I want to be employed by an employer who seeks to make the workplace a less stressful environment, who seeks to give employees the ability to balance work and the rest of life.

More ranting

I was thinking some more cynical thoughts about the church when I came across this post from Australia in which the writer puts it so well, I'd rather just quote him:

I began pondering why we crave this revival experience and I wonder if it
because we are too lazy to get off our own butts and get involved with the
people in the communities we live in and do the hard yards of making
connections, knowing that many of them will never lead to a person coming to
faith? I wonder if we don’t just want God to do the ‘hard work’ of mission (we
will hold prayer meetings - until we get bored because nothing has happened) and
then when he has done his thing people will flock to our churches to join us…
and become like us… and we won’t have to change one bit… we won’t have to
experience any discomfort at all. Of course we only want ‘appropriate’ people to
join our churches so it would need to be a selective revival of the middle
classes.
In many churches the people pray and send God out on mission, when
in reality it is us he has commissioned to the task.
Revival as I hear it
depicted takes the responsibility off us to be salt and light. Its as if the
people pray and send God out on mission, and then complain when he doesn’t get
the job done.

I can't count the number of times that I heard about revival and the miraculous and prayer warriors and such during the time I was in charismatic circles. I do believe that God is doing something in our world, in part because I feel him doing something in me and what I've seen him doing in the lives of others. Although crazy charismatic theology drives me crazy sometimes, I still see more of the character I am drawn to in crazy charismatic Christians than I do in the average secular atheist. However, I think it is through us, through our change of character, through our becoming more loving, more sacrificial, less selfish, that true change comes. It is hard work. And I honestly do wonder if the amount of time some people spend in prayer meetings could be better spent doing what God's already asked us to do.

Yep, we're all getting sick around here, so the kids were exceptionally good. Now they're feeling better, and I'm feeling crappy but I can't yell at them when they're being bad.

(Of course, I never really yell, perfect specimen of parenting that I am).