By: Digby Wilkinson on March 16, 2019
This comes as less than my best reflection on a book. I find myself mired in a mass shooting that should never have happened on our unique shores. A man from another world came to kill refugees and migrants finding sanctuary from fear in Aotearoa, a land far from their own lands. It seems we…
By: Nancy VanderRoest on March 15, 2019
My heart is heavy this week. It has been a week filled with trauma and crisis, which has made it a little overwhelming for this small-town girl. The week started with a shooting in Kalamazoo of a police officer and cumulated with the tragedy in New Zealand. So, my heart has been hurting, and the…
By: Mary Mims on March 15, 2019
Today’s world is known as the internet age. Children at an increasingly young age navigate electronic devices with ease. Soon we will have a generation that will not know what it is like to live without electronic devices to communicate. This use of electronic devices to communicate has created what is known as a “network…
By: Sean Dean on March 15, 2019
Running is my exercise of choice. Aerobics classes frustrate me lifting weights is fine and biking is nice, but nothing has captured me like running. I also happen to be a data guy. More data equals better results – in that way I am very much like Berger and Johnston from last week’s reading. As…
By: Karen Rouggly on March 14, 2019
Last winter, I completed my first Whole30. If you aren’t familiar with the Whole30, it’s like “pushing the reset button on your health, your habits, and your relationship with food”[1] It’s more than just a diet and a cleanse. Essentially, you remove certain food groups (like sugar, grains, dairy, and legumes) from your diet for…
By: Andrea Lathrop on March 14, 2019
I opened my laptop after reading Digital Minimalism and noticed the clutter on my screen in a new way. Before opening Microsoft Word, I minimized the following; 10+ website tabs from yesterday’s business and surfing; Evernote with several windows; email app; Nozbe task manage; Messenger; and iCal. And I consider myself a bit of a minimalist…
By: Rhonda Davis on March 14, 2019
The digital declutter has been a real struggle in the Davis house this year. With jobs that seem to demand constant connection and three sons ages 14, 13 and 7 years old, my husband and I have been searching for ways to simplify our lives. We long to be more present in a world that…
By: Harry Edwards on March 14, 2019
I still remember vividly the time when one of my colleagues looked at me with derision when I mentioned nonchalantly that I did not have my phone with me. She had texted me just a few moments prior and had expected a quick response. I do not recall the content of the message but to…
By: Mario Hood on March 14, 2019
Reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World[1] this week could not have come at a timelier spot. Thirty years ago, in March, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who at the time was working at CERN, invented the foundation for the World Wide Web after he took hypertext and connected it to…
By: Jenn Burnett on March 14, 2019
For Lent I took Facebook off my phone. Before I had even started Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism I knew I needed what he describes as a “digital declutter”[1] . I resonated with Newport’s identification of the good intentions we (let me own this, I) have to simply use technology to stay connected to friends overseas…
By: Rev Jacob Bolton on March 13, 2019
The past year has been one focused on an intentional and personal “slowing down.” I was feeling very harried after a long church transition and needed to make some changes. I started last January to intentionally make my coffee every morning using only a French Press. No Keurig, no buying it at the bagel place…
By: Tammy Dunahoo on March 12, 2019
Recently a screen popped up on my iphone telling me the amount of screen time I had used that week. Instantly, I went into denial mode, “No way! That has to be wrong.” Unfortunately, it was quite right and had tracked my unconscious habit of digital use. I have spent my entire adult life decluttering…
By: Shermika Harvey on March 10, 2019
Confucius once said that “life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”[1] Not sure if this statement is entirely true, but it does have truth to it. In today’s world, most lives are filled with a degree of complexity that challenges our straightforward approach to it. For instance, a single mother working…
By: Mary Mims on March 10, 2019
Churches were once the anchor of many communities. Today, things have changed and many churches are languishing and on the verge of dying. Often, older churches are close to dying and ignore many of the symptoms associated with their illness. Thom Rainer in his book, Autopsy of a Deceased Church: 12 Ways to Keep Yours…
By: Wallace Kamau on March 10, 2019
This was the conclusion of a long worded statement of a newscaster on a popular television station in response to a story trending in the media of the misdeeds of a well know preacher, who has been christened “The mighty prophet of God” by his followers. The newscaster was angry at the “man of God”…
By: John Muhanji on March 10, 2019
It is common sense that we do change in life from birth to adulthood. However, we hardly realize that we change as time goes by. In her book “Mindset: The new psychology of success” Carol Dweck wrote, Whether human qualities are things that can be cultivated or things that are curved in stone is an…
By: Nancy VanderRoest on March 9, 2019
People are creative, imaginative survivors. Yet, human emotions can cause havoc in our lives. We all have individual personalities which affect our focus and the direction of our lives. Society also plays a powerful role with regards to our belief systems while biases expose us to a darker side of human nature. Often, these systems…
By: Rhonda Davis on March 8, 2019
“If most of our body is made of water, why don’t I just fall to pieces when I get in the bathtub?” “Why is it so hard for people to decide things? When we go out for recess, we just play the game that seems the most fun. We don’t spend too long deciding because…
By: Harry Fritzenschaft on March 8, 2019
Digital Minimalism covers a different way of approaching technology. Newport defines it as a philosophy in which you “focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.” Digital Minimalism describes a process for how to get there.…
By: Tammy Dunahoo on March 8, 2019
When talking to leaders I often attempt to have them identify what fills and drains them. What energizes them to lead another day and what causes them to want to write a resignation letter? As I read Garvey Berger and Johnston’s, Simple Habits for Complex Times I was able to articulate one of my…
