A "difference that makes a difference"

On Careers and being a Kohathite

I found myself in the book of Numbers today... not, I confess a book of the bible that is etched on my memory but I'm trying to read through the whole bible a few pages at a time and round about now I'm in Numbers and I read about the Kohathites.

"Very good Caroline, so what?" I hear you ask

Well, to explain, the Kohathites were a clan of the Levite tribe of Israel and they had the special task of clearing up the mess after the priests had done their bit.  Very important I'm sure but not what I'd call a great career move. And that was when it struck me... their work was chosen for them because of their birth not because of some career choice plan. How far removed we are from parts of the bible.  Could you imagine young people today accepting that their role in life was determined by their birth - no get out clause, not career progression, no professional development...

As I write that, of course I'm reminded that the great majority of the world are condemned by poverty or oppression to live out one particular role.  But that's part of my point, I suspect that most of the people reading this post would see being consigned to one particular role because of their birth to be an oppression, to be a negative, to be something wrong.  But the Kohathites were called to be the clearer-uppers, whilst other clans were called to be the carriers of tent fabric or tent poles.  This wasn't a negative thing this was just their place within the economy of God's people.

Today, we all have careers.  They may not be very exciting careers, in personal hygiene, social or healthcare but no matter how lowly, we are encouraged to see our work as a part of a career, and to seek opportunities for training, developing and bettering ourselves.  We are to seek progression, moving up the ladder, achieving ambitions, fulfilment.

The Kohathites, on the other hand, just had their place within the economy of God's people, they cleared up after the priests. I guess they were 'paid' for their work, maybe some of them became leaders of clearing teams. Might they have had shifts? "Oh good grief, it's Eleazar on duty tonight; he always makes more of a mess with the sacrificial lambs than his father does"...

and a question starts to wrestle it's way to the front of my mind

if the economy of God's people is based on people being in their place, and doing their work because of their calling (and not because of some desire for bettering themselves and progressing their careers) might we occasionally damage the church when we go about developing our careers?

Castaways

My friend Jim spent a few years on the Island of Contro Lesautres, which is just off the coast of Francophone West Africa.  On this Island lived two tribes who were in continual conflict with each other.  The Askaz lived in the hill country to the north whilst the Gettas lived to the south of the central swamps.  For, quite possibly, millennia these two tribes had been separated by the geography of the island and had developed quite differently.  Only the advent of modern transport systems had brought them into contact in a way that had led to the current conflict. Jim, an anthropologist, went there on a research project.

The Askash culture was formal and ceremonial; relationships were governed by polite requests.  Jim had had to learn the strict Askash social etiquette of Request in order to be able to understand and be understood.  The Gettas, on the other hand, were more straight forward. There was no hiding of feelings or intent behind formality or apparent civility.  They just took what they could, it was accepted that those who were weaker had less and a lower place in the pecking order.  Mitigating this 'law of the Jungle', Jim told me, were unwritten responsibilities of the strong to provide for the weak. This did not mean any form of equality but families were very strong and looked after each other; gangs were bound by strict, perhaps frightening, codes of sharing.

The problems arose from the two tribes' total incomprehension of the other's way of life.  To the Gettas, Askash ways were elitist and arrogant. "They look down on us" said one Getta gang-boss to Jim and the Askaz were appalled by the aggressive, almost perpetually angry ways of the Getta gangs.  Jim, perhaps because he was English, tended to find the Askaz easier to work with. He told me that there had been times when he was scared and intimidated by in-your-face ways of the Gettas.  There was not subtlety to the Gettas, they just demanded or took. There were no explanations, no reasons given, no attempt at persuasion. If they didn't get what they wanted first time, they would just push and push until they got their way or sensed that they had lost.  There was no compromise with Gettas and, especially when gangs were involved, a conflict could escalate quickly as other gang members crowded around. Talk was not so much about meaning as about volume and intensity.  On more than one occasion, Jim told of fearful screaming riots over quite trivial issues. If you stood your ground and refused to give in, then you had to be prepared to fight, but if you held your ground and your 'opponent' gave in first then you had won.

Much of the conflict between the two tribes centred over the one thing they had in common; the pursuit of control.  For both tribes, to be able to control others was what counted as leadership.  The Askaz achieved control by persuasion and intrigue; the Gettas by assertion and aggression.  Jim found this shared pursuit of control thoroughly unattractive in both tribes.  Following the end of colonial rule, the two tribes (of about equal size) had struggled for control of the unified island nation.  It was not a pretty or safe place to live, Jim told me.  Control switched between the two tribes, perhaps the Askaz (with better connections to the wealth of the ex colonial power) had longer on top but this made the struggle all the more bitter.  The two tribes could find no way of connecting with each other, they could find no way of understanding each other and gradually the mutual contempt, hatred and fear increased.

Strangely, as an aside, both tribes spoke in awe of a semi-mythical race that had once lived in the central lowlands and who had managed to live at peace with both tribes.  These people were called the Gheevas. They had died out, nobody knew exactly when or how.  Both the Askaz and the Gettas told stories of Gheevan grace and generosity and claimed to be the inheritors of the Gheevas' beauty and majesty.  The Askaz talked about how they were peaceful and made no forceful demands upon others whilst the Gettas pointed to their sharing, close community and open honesty.

Jim used to captivate me with stories of these three tribes. The myths of the Gheevas, in particular, intrigued me.  "How?" I asked.  Jim just shrugged his shoulders.  "Do you think that the Askaz and the Gettas will ever be able to heal their differences?" I would ask.  Jim always shook his head sadly, "No, I don't think so."

Growth

There were once four young friends; Polly Python, Roger Rhino, Elinor Elephant and Harry Hippo.  They were very young and quite different but they managed to find games to play that they all enjoyed and they talked and talked about what it would be like when they grew into adults.  Then one day it was time for them all to join the 'Growth Club', "Now we shall find out the answer to our questions" they agreed.

And, sure enough, they started to grow.  Roger, Elinor and Harry grew tall and round with strong, sturdy legs. Polly got longer.  Roger, Elinor and Harry were concerned about Polly.  She didn't seem to be growing in the 'right' way.  They looked at each other and, of course, they were different in some ways but what seemed pretty obvious was that growing involved getting tall and round and having sturdy legs.  Polly was doing none of these things.  Polly wasn't growing.

Initially, being friends, they all encouraged Polly but as time went on and Polly got a bit longer but not tall, round or with sturdy legs.  It seemed to the others that she wasn't trying hard enough.  Polly, knew what her friends were thinking and she so wanted to grow tall and round with sturdy legs, just like the others but she only got a bit longer. 

As time went by; Roger, Elinor and Harry found other growers like themselves, some (like Gerry) were even taller whilst others, like Wally, were even rounder, although it has to be said that few had quite as sturdy legs as the threesome.  Roger, Elinor and Harry could really respect and learn growth from growers like Gerry and Wally.  These were animals who could lead them, teach them.  These were animals to imitate.  And as good growers they also tended to avoid the less good growers. It was a case of keeping in with the A-team, so that they didn't pick up bad habits.  Polly, as far as they could see, was not growing. She wasn't getting tall and she was really a very sorry thin, sort of round and as for her legs? Well...

Polly noticed what was happening, and was sad to begin with but then she thought "Well I am growing longer!" But the others in the "Growth Club" only saw that she hadn't grown tall, she hadn't grown fat and round and she hadn't grown sturdy legs.  She wasn't growing in any recognisable way. And, as the growth counsellors said, "If you're not growing you're sliding backwards".  The threesome stopped talking with Polly and Polly stopped talking with them.

Her sadness turned to anger "I am growing... longer! Can't you see it?" After a while, she started to find the growth club a lonely place, a disapproving place.  She found that the growth club was going out into the plains so that they could grow and so that the trees didn't get in the way. Polly liked trees, she could curl around trees. The Growth club were suspicious of trees, which, as they pointed out were full of small animals and birds - not the right place at all for a growing member of the Growth Club.  It wasn't that Polly stopped going to the Growth Club, just that they tended to be in different places to where she was spending her time.

One day, Roger, Elinor and Harry were chatting, remembering the old days and their friendship with Polly.  They reflected sadly about their lost friend, commented (sadly) about how she just hadn't grown like them and how, she wasn't even coming to Growth Club any more.  If you don't grow, you'll slide backwards they agreed sadly. Polly had backslidden, but then... what would you expect of a snake?

Learning to become a manager or just better at...

I've noticed recently that nearly all my posts since I restarted blogging have been about church and spiritual matters.  So I thought that it was time to ramble on about some other matters that matter to me.

I've just won some money to fund a small research project looking at how people learn in their professional careers, especially within organisations. Too often, it seems to me we offer people something called 'management development' which really means that we try to teach them some ideas about being a manager and about what the business world is like.  There are several problems with this approach.  First, we really don't know what makes a good manager - we kind of know one when we meet one but then we meet another who is totally different.  It's very difficult to work out what the key principles are, even if there are any!  Secondly, fewer and fewer people are in what conventionally were called management roles - we have 'flattened' organisations and, increasingly, we are in teams, often with very flexible boundaries.  As an example, I don't know who my boss is.  Jane is my Centre Head, but most of my teaching is done in Mike's undergraduate programme,  I work closely with Mark (head of taught programmes and interested in practice based learning) and then there's Pam who heads the Centre of Teaching Excellence for whom I'm doing this research project.  OK, so Jane is notionally my line manager but it really isn't that simple.  I suspect that many readers will be in similar situations. Finally, the vast majority of management development and business programmes assume Free Market Economics as the basis for business behaviour.  Do we really want to promote that? Is teaching it one of the ways we create the myth that 'markets' really exist and "that's just the way it is"? 

So the question comes, how can we help people at work who want to do their job better or want to do a different job?  Well that's the basis of my research.  I've been working with managers and professionals in a coaching or mentoring type way for about 8 years now and I've noticed that there are three areas that affect how they can improve what they do.

They Play with New Ideas

If we want to improve the way we work then it's probably not going to help that much if we just try harder - we've been doing that for ages and it really doesn't work.  So if we want to improve, then we're going to have to look for new ideas about how to do our work.  And once we've found some new ideas we're going to have to evaluate their worth to our work context and then test if they're making any difference when we put them into practice.

So, in my project I'm going to be exploring ways of engaging with new ideas; how we find them, how we relate them to our work and how we reject or choose the ideas we'll try out in our work.

They inquire constantly

into what's going on and whether their actions are making a difference.  We need to ask questions about what our work context is like and what difference new actions are making.  And we need to be thoughtful about how we ask those questions. There are loads of 'research methods' out there that can be very helpful.

So, in my project I'll be exploring which inquiry methods are useful and doable (not many of us have time to do a full survey before the next meeting!).  I'll be exploring with some colleagues how we can make serious inquiry a part of our daily lives.

They attend to moment-by-moment relations

This has been one of the big emphases of managers who have worked with me in projects. They have found that noticing, or more deliberately attending to, how relations create futures makes a difference to their effectiveness.  Central to this has been a realisation by those managers that relations are negotiated. I'm afraid that the Jean-Luc Picard (Star Trek) school of management "Make it so" just doesn't work.  Our instructions, guidance and suggestions contribute to what others do but don't complete it.

So, I'm going to be exploring how we can act in a ways that notice what's happening in moment-by-moment relations, notice ways of acting that give more space rather than less to colleagues and look for ways that we influence, but also are influenced, towards improved performance.

******

well that's the project, loads of questions to ponder. As much as confidences allow, I'll post about what I'm learning over the next few months.

Two Teenagers

This last week in Britain the news has been dominated by two teenage lads.

Both were in 'gangs' and both, it seems likely, were messing around with drugs.  For one this ended up with some of his friends being expelled from school and him getting punished. For the other lad it ended with him getting shot.

The first lad has gone on to turn his life around and achieve significant influence.  The second lad died.

The first lad may well become Prime Minister of Britain.  We'll never know what the second lad might have achieved.

Today in church, we sang a song that ended with the reprise of praise to God: "You rescued me".  I thought of those two young men.

and we were informed of next week's service about Jonah.  How this was a man who ran away from what God called him to do.  And I thought about those two lads and wondered what it would have taken to rescue the second lad...

Today in church, we sang a song that ended with the reprise of praise to God: "You rescued me".  I thought of those two young men.

... and as I thought about God rescuing and thought about that second lad and so many like him I felt helpless, "What can I do?" I'm a middle aged, middle class university teacher who hasn't a clue about what life's like for people like that second lad.  It would be patronising for me to say that I have any answer

Today in church, we sang a song that ended with the reprise of praise to God: "You rescued me".  I thought of those two young men. 

How can God rescue without our hands, feet, hearts and voices?

and I'm just wondering if Jonah felt as helpless as me when he ran away to Tarshish

There is no 'I' in managing

I am, hopefully, heading off to a conference in September called "The Art of Management".  My plan is to read some of my poetry and before that to write some poetry!

Those of you who've suffered my blog for most of the year will be aware that I have a somewhat 'different' approach to management. In particular I dislike what I call the subject-object relations of most management theories where it is assumed that there  is some, special person who is able to manage the rest of us.  If I manage you then you are left passive, dependent upon me to get you to do anything.  I don't think that equates to what I find in the 'real' world, nor do I think that it fits with a Christian worldview.  So, can we find alternative ways of thinking about managing?  Writing about/around/through a topic in poetry allows me to play with ideas, let poetic forms (such as rhythm, rhyme or metre etc.) take my writing away from what I first thought about.  Poetry provides a new vantage point from which to explore ideas.

Anyway, as I start putting a collection together, I thought that I'd share them with you and ask for your responses.  I'm less worried about whether they're good poems (I rarely write good poems, some good lines but few good poems) but do they give you a surprise as you think about what management might mean?

Here's the first one (It's a first draft, loads of revisions and word-twiddles to come)

There is no 'I' in managing

There is no 'I' in managing
I'm too dependent on you around.
For all I do will make no sense
until you or others make the grade

There is not 'I' in managing
no I that I can find
in a moment's talk
    or action made.
Only two or three or more
who make what's what
2 or 3 who make the grade.

There is not 'I' in managing
I tried to act but was ignored
and so the plans and goals
that I had framed
came to nought,
ceased to exist
and so I never made the grade.

Liquid or Relational Church II

Imagine that you and I are asked to improvise a scene in a shop; you are the sales rep and I am the customer.

You see me come in and say "Hello"

Does this help me to improvise? Of course I can say hello back, but if you had said "Hello, welcome to my clothes shop." then that would have been much more helpful, you would have given me some guidance as to what to talk about.

Knowing, now that it's a clothes shop scene, I say "oh I'm just looking around"  again, is that very helpful?  What if I had said "Oh, I'm looking for an outfit for my daughter's wedding."  Now that would have really given you something to work with.  You could talk to me about daughters, weddings, this year's fashions, how expensive every thing is etc. etc.

Do you see how we can say different things that will be more or less helpful to others in going on in relationship with us?  In the same way, in the body of Christ, we can say things that can be helpful to discipleship (learning) or we can say things that are less helpful. 

What might be an unhelpful way of talking?  Well, one way would be to say things that 'complete' a story.  What can someone else add if you offer the final word on any topic?  What else can they contribute? Nothing, you've completed all there is to say!  I would suggest that much of our ways of going on in the gathered church are about completion.  Creeds, lectionaries, sermons (oh, especially sermons) all encourage people to say completion type things; what is true, what is necessary, what is required, what is happening.  Of course all these activities can be done differently, but generally a gathering is led and the structure of it is (more or less) completed by the people up front.

So what do we pew fillers do?  Well, I guess we receive it and act upon it.  I suppose some chemical reaction happens inside us when the preacher's words hit our ears.  Wonderfully, magically we are changed by what we hear so that we can "go and do likewise" err is that your experience?  Let me backtrack a little: I'm not saying that gatherings are irredeemably bad.  Of course good things happen at gatherings; what I am saying, however, is that the tendency at gatherings is for talk to be 'completion' talk, where the final word on God's, my, his or her reality is shared.  I don't think that this is helpful to discipleship.

Are there other ways of relating?  You'll be surprised to find out (given that there are more words below) that the answer is yes.  We can talk in ways that invite response and contribute to the trajectory of our relationship.  Notice here, I wrote contribute rather than complete.

So we can talk in ways that open up spaces or close them down

we can talk in ways that invite addition or acquiescence

we can talk in ways that intrigue, surprise, point towards or we can talk in ways that finalise

Now, I would suggest that one of these styles of talking (let's call it dialogical talk) will promote a discipleship of exploration, experimentation and the learning of new life whilst the other style of talk (let's call it monological talk) will lead to passivity and acceptance.

I would, furthermore, contend that the very dynamics of larger gatherings will tend to promote monological talk and smaller, informal relational settings will give space for dialogical talk.

It therefore only makes sense to me to up the potential of the body of Christ to meet in ways that promote learning and minimise the number of times we meet in ways that promote passive acquiescence.

and a logical consequence?  Reduce the gathering and explore ways that we can develop mutual, generative conversations.  I.E. cut the church services, cell (or home) groups and look for ways to make ourselves available to each other, look for ways of focusing conversations in such a way so as to contribute to a trajectory that leads to more faithful following of Jesus.

hmm, that's the trouble with half baked blogs, there's always more to say!

See, Hear ...

I spent last weekend with my friend and academic mentor, Dian Hosking. Di is one of the most profound and scholarly thinkers I've met (if you want a seriously demanding but worthwhile reads head over to her website, here). In the last few years Di's thinking has be significantly affected by what she calls a secular Buddhism and some of this is starting to show in her work. Her latest work is to do with the senses.

Now, I haven't read the resultant paper yet but we did have a lengthy conversation about it and one point has intrigued me over the last few days.  For various reasons we have come in the west to be incredibly reliant on our sight: "Seeing is believing".  This has consequences. Amongst them, for academics, is our constant reduction of our research and scholarship into text (that we can read/see).  So, for example, Discourse Analysis or Conversation Analysis seek to take what we call "naturally occurring talk" and represent it as text on a page.  Other forms of social scholarship seek to capture actions, attitudes, behaviours in questionnaires, experiments, interviews etc.  Underling all these methods is an assumption; that there is 'something' that is lasting that affects or creates these actions etc.  I.E. there is an assumption of stability, that something I capture in a text today will continue to affect what will happen tomorrow.

But is the world, are we that stable?  is it our experience that there is coherence?  Don't you find that your actions owe much to odd things that happen in an instant?  I suspect that our answer to those questions is "yes" and "no" (not very helpful :-)

But if we follow Di's idea and start to give greater importance to senses other than our seeing, our sense of smell, hearing, touch, even intuition (?) something crucial happens.  We can not adequately record it (ok sound, but tell me that a recording ever captures the fullness of being at a concert!  Why do I find jazz so boring on CD but so exhilarating in live performance?).  We can never capture a moment, and our emphasis on what we can record for sight directs us to attend to that which is stable and lasting and blinds us to the ephemeral or transitory. 

"But does our value of the test of time
blind us to moments in life's onward rush?
the smile that lifts, or affirming touch:
the human are of living in the now.

We value what will stand the test of time:
structures, strictures, standards
and in so doing; give no worth
to the transitory art of becoming"

We tend, as a result of our emphasis on what we can see, to give less importance to that.  But what would a scholarship - so strongly based on the written word - look like if we took our other senses more seriously?  What would Christianity - a religion of the Word - look like?  And then we arrive at the exciting realisation; that Jesus was the "Living Word" .. as Christians we have this resource that can shape us, our beliefs our theology into a living .... 

But there are problems because of that transitoryness, because of that livingness. Considerable amounts of our practised, intellectual tools (for example truth, reason, evidence) will have to change.  As we move our scholarship away from the study of what is towards the moment by moment relations where touch, smell, hearing and sight combine to create and re-create people and worlds we will have to learn to rely on different ways of making sense, appreciating and justifying our actions.

And where will that leave those of us who follow and worship the living Word.

Umm, I don't know! But I suspect that it'll be exciting to find out and I'm looking forward to reading Di's paper, 'cos I think that it'll help.

On being lead by the nose

Well I said that I wouldn't post on leadership for a while, but

a couple of things written by Jason in his comments and followed up by Wes and Susie have intrigued me and lead me to write again.  Hmm, was that leadership?  And if you don't think so, why not?  I wasn't going to post but something someone else wrote has changed my plans..

Jason mentioned the metaphor of a machine and I think that he's identified an important point.  An important point of a machine is that it needs someone to operate it, someone who is outside the system who can affect the way that a machine works.  Now the majority of theories of leadership and management assume a machine/operator relationship.  The organisation, church whatever is the machine and the leader is the operator of that machine.  Notice here the subject-object relations I mentioned in my last but one post on leadership (here).

Now, of course, many apologists for leaders will say that the machine metaphor is only one that is used to talk about the way we run organisations (metaphors of organisation have been an important influence for 20 years or more, you can see more by reading a book by Gareth Morgan "Images of Organization") but that is not the point, yes some images of organisations (including churches) talk more of political networks, brains, organisms, cultures etc. etc. but in every case these metaphors are used to give a manager/leader more insight the better to manipulate the organisation; the machine/operator relation remains.

In contrast Jason, Wes and Susie offer us 'presence' the engagement with others in the moment.  Now presence is not an image that I've worked with before but it seems to point us in the same direction as my writing on improvisation.  (By the way if you're reading this from the States you can learn more of an improvised leadership from friends of mine in New York - link here). The key point of all the points made about presence is that they emphasise relationship and the moment and emphasising them they point toward a co-construction of leadership, a shared agency where together we make things happen.  It is NOT that I do things because of a particular leader but that actions become possible, intelligible and sensible in a relationship at a particular moment.

What was interesting to me, however, was that all three of my correspondents continued to talk about leaders. They each made comments about the relational creation of presences but then kept intact the leader-follower relationship, where agency is implicitly given to the leader and the follower does as they are told, lead, commanded, persuaded, coached, empowered etc. etc. etc. to do.

But if I am present in a moment so are others and in that moment their conversational contributions will make some new actions possible for me and other actions will become less plausible.  They are relating with me to lead our conversation our shared performance.  The leadership is in the moment-by-moment relating not in any individual.

It's a bit like this post. I didn't want to write it but in a moment of relating with others it became a sensible contribution to make.  It makes no sense to identify who has been the leader all we can see is relational activity within which is leadership and it is to that relational activity that we should attend not some mythic metaphor called leadership and leaders.

On Leading today

I think that this should be my last blog on leadership for a while, but I do want to pick up on some issues that have been raised in earlier conversations. (of course having written that if the conversation zooms off then .. who knows :-)

Let me state a few positions I work from, then I'll look at what followers can do, finally I'll look at what those with a leadership status can do.  So, first a summary of a relational perspective on leadership:

1. There is not such thing as leadership.  Leaders are not born, made or individuals.  All we have are relations, and within relations are two (amongst many) aspects: action and persuasion.  We will seek to persuade people to undertake certain actions,
2. Perhaps we are uncertain of our ability to persuade others and so don't try.  Or perhaps we find that other people are skilled at consistently persuading us?  We might find that some folk aren't persuadable but seem happiest when we do what they say/suggest.  Where's leadership in these sentences?  There might well be some good and wise leadership.  We don't know until we are in a relationship at a particular moment. 
3. We have a tendency in the west to locate power and other attributes in things rather than in processes of relating (we even create things called relationships!).  This means that we have a tendency to make relational processes like influencing, persuasion or leading into a thing  called a leader. Instead of looking for what persuades us, what assumptions guide us, what values shape our hearing and acting; we look at what a leader looks like, what a leader does, how a leader can be successful.  We tend to ignore the relational processes involved.
4. Many of the comments in the last conversation started from a premise that are leaders, I don't want to start from there (although later, I'll have to address the current situations and hierarchies we (re)create daily).  I want to start from the process of relating and look at how we persuade and are persuaded, how we can tune our ears to hear wisdom from areas we don't expect, how we can work in a way that gives space for others and ourselves.

OK, so that's my starting point.  How should we followers act in order to play our part in co-constructing our worlds?  We should be active and strategic.  Our values, hopes and desires have a value, they are worth something, but they are part of a larger picture and our actions should have that tentativeness and openness that I spoke of in 'Creative Followership'.  You see, my answer to Maggi's point about poor followers not just being the fault of leaders is "Yes, if we are to co-construct our worlds then we can't just leave it up to others"  This is the curse of our consumerist world where we pay in our cash, vote or tithe and say "get on with it".  It might be part of the slavery I spoke about here yesterday.  What do you think? 

And what about leaders, those people who hold a status of leader; what should they be doing?  I might not want to start with assumptions of leaders but if the rest of the world is passively going along with leaders then for me to ignore that would be folly and alienating! So how could leaders contribute to co-constructive relations?  Some ideas:

• frame your words and actions in such a way that they need someone else to supplement and complete them
• choose your conversational contributions in such a way as to provoke/invite a response rather than compliance
• look for ways that illustrate how you are growing from others' ideas
• focus your words and actions on the next moment, how can what you say give more space for others rather than define what is to be done
• contribute to conversations rather than complete them

.. and the rich young ruler said "All this I have done since my youth" and Jesus looked at him in love and said "One thing you still lack ..."