Minnie Louise Haskins was born May 12, 1875, to Louisa and Joseph Haskins, a grocer. One evening, while standing at her home’s upstairs balcony window and looking down the illuminated driveway to the gate, Minnie was inspired to write a poem she titled “God Knows.” After awhile, she put it away and forgot about it.

Minnie studied at the London School of Economics, earning degrees in Social Science, Sociology, and Philosophy. She joined the staff of LSE’s Social Science Department in 1920, became a tutor in 1934, retired in 1939, was reappointed and continued teaching until 1944. In the late 1920s, she published some of her poems privately, and a portion of “God Knows” ended up printed on a Christmas card. One card was sent to the Queen of England, who shared it with her husband, King George VI.

George had not expected to be king; his older brother Edward had been groomed for that role his whole life. But Edward gave up the throne, and George was thrust into world politics. Hitler was gobbling up Europe, and Britain stood at the brink of war. When George addressed the British Empire by radio at Christmas 1939, he quoted “God Knows.”

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

When George VI died in 1952, those words were engraved on brass plaques and fixed to the gates of his Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle. Queen Elizabeth was also buried there in 2002, and the poem was read at her state funeral.

A grocer’s daughter’s words, spoken in a nation’s darkest hour, were carved on the grave of a king.

Minnie didn’t hear the King’s broadcast and was astounded to learn her poem had been quoted. Afterward, it earned substantial royalties, which she donated to charity. She never married and is thought to have died in Sussex in 1957.

You may be a grocer, a teacher, a poet, or a nation’s leader. Whatever your situation, every day you tread into the unknown. What light will you use? Whose hand will you hold as you go out into the darkness?

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Andrew Carnegie was a fabulous little Scotsman. He started in poverty and built one of the world's greatest business empires. Once, someone asked him what he believed about the future of his businesses.

He said, "You can take from me all my plants. You can take from me all my money. You can take from me all my equipment. But if you leave me my men, I will build it all again." Carnegie's genius was that he knew an organization is not finances or techniques or equipment. It is human resources.

God's method is always a person. When God chose to speak to human history decisively, to get under the load of human weakness and sin, his method was a person, Jesus Christ, God in flesh and blood.

But the principle of incarnation was not just used during the lifetime of Jesus on earth. It is the principle by which the church operates today. The church is the body of Jesus Christ. God works through flesh and blood, men and women who are committed to his cause. This is the reason that the laity is called today to be God's people wherever they are, whatever they are doing.

One of the critics of Abraham Lincoln's administration of the Civil War once said, "Mr. Lincoln you must throw General McClellan overboard." Lincoln asked who he should put in General McClellan's place, and the critic said, "Anybody." Lincoln coolly replied, "Anybody will do for you. But I must have somebody."

Who is going to do the work of Jesus Christ in deed and in word? You might say that anybody can do it. No, my friend, God must have somebody.

And God intends that somebody be you and me.

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The basic need of any enterprise is human resources. Similarly, the first essential for any program or ministry is human resources. As G. Campbell Morgan put it, "God's method is a man." God's message was a man, Jesus Christ, God in flesh and blood.

The incarnation is the unique genius of the Christian revelation. But the principle of incarnation was not abandoned when the earthly ministry of our Lord was concluded. It is the eternal task of the church to reproduce the incarnation, to clothe the spirit of the living God in human flesh. The Holy Spirit must live in the human clay of the Christian's experience and life.

God works through human resources.

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Incarnational evangelism is sometimes called friendship evangelism. That's the phrase Young Life uses. Think about that for a minute.

Jesus said we are . . .

1. the light of the world
2. the salt of the earth
3. the yeast that makes the whole loaf rise
   

All three—light, salt, yeast—work by penetration, by permeation, by their influence spreading out. None of these call attention to themselves—they just silently transform, flavor, and lift their environment.

Think about your daily work. What are you doing to transform, flavor, or lift your workplace?

 

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Yandall Woodfin, a seminary professor friend, introduced me to biblical importance of pursuing beauty. In the New Testament, two different Greek words are used for "good." Agathos means "good" in a plain vanilla sense. Kalos means "beautiful in form or beautifully good, physically or morally good." Kalos beauty comes from harmony and right proportion. Kalos is pleasing, lovely, and admirable.

The King James version of the Bible (on which I was raised) makes no distinction between the two words. Both are translated as plain vanilla "good." But the original Greek of the Gospels uses kalos—emphasizing beauty as inherent in goodness—substantially more often than agathos. Why? I think the Bible teaches us to appreciate beauty. And to practice it.

Consider Matthew 5:16. Jesus says, "In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your kalos [your beautiful deeds, my translation] and praise your Father in heaven." In most translations, the passage reads "good deeds," but that misses the writer's original emphasis on deeds that reflect God's beauty and the beauty of God's creation.

If deeds and actions can be beautiful, then beauty must be something more than a type of pleasant feeling. The Scriptures' use of kalos for righteous conduct connects beauty with the source of all righteousness, God himself. Beauty must be seen then as an aspect of God and God's creation. Beauty is the light of God shining from within the created world. The fact that one person sees beauty where another doesn't has to do with people's different capacities, not the nature of beauty itself.

Why does all this matter? Because if we want to be followers of Christ, we need to join Christ in his work. Through his incarnation, public ministry, passion, resurrection, and ascension, Christ initiated a cosmic renewal. His victory over death began the restoration of God's entire creation to a state even better than its original "goodness."

In fact, we are invited to be cocreators with Christ in this work, as part of his living body within the world. That means performing kalos, beautiful deeds . . . from anointing the Savior's feet with expensive perfume to building exquisite church sanctuaries; from shaping a beautiful clay pot at the Cody Center to helping widows, orphans, and prisoners; from constructing excellent architecture to putting together vital organizations; from decorating our homes attractively to creating a harmonious workplace.

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My assistant’s friend sent her this great quote from John White's book Parents in Pain.

Some of us have broken hearts over our children or grandchildren; some of us have furrowed brows; and some of us have come through the worst of the struggle. But I thought all of you would appreciate this encouraging word.

Catherine Marshall in her book Adventures in Prayer mentions that she wrote the precise requests she made for each of her children's futures on a piece of paper the shape of an egg, which she would then leave between the pages of her Bible. There was no magic in the method. The egg shape reminded her that prayers, like eggs, do not always hatch as soon as we lay them. If a sitting hen was to be preoccupied with the appearance of her eggs, unchanged and unchanging day after day, she would be very unhappy. We, in a similar way, tend to be unhappy if, having committed to God the requests which seem to be conformed to his will, we see no change. Prayers must mature before yielding their contents, and our impatience will do nothing to help.

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Someone on my staff shared this blog post by Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU. (You can read about Clay Shirky here.) His essay is long but worth sharing. Here are some excerpts:

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times [said] something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.

[...]

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.

[...]

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

[...]

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

Read the rest of the article here.

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I read this interesting article by Lucy Kellaway in The Financial Times and sent it around to my staff. It's worth reading:

One subject that songwriters labour to avoid

Last week the Guardian newspaper published a list of the 1,000 best pop songs ever written. There were songs about love, sex, heartbreak, protest, life and death. Yet on the subject of work there was almost nothing: Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” got a mention, but that was about it.

Read the rest of the article here.

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In the last year, our focus as an organization has become even more unified and purposeful.

If you visit this site (or any of our programs) and come away with only one thing, I hope it’s this:  What you do, each and every day, matters to God—whether it’s in a board room, behind a desk, in front of a computer, around the dinner table with your family, out in the community, or at church, God cares about it.

You see, there are two foundational truths about the human spirit that drive our working philosophy.  First, just like the Trinity, we are relational beings.  But since humanity’s fall, we’ve been in the business of messing up our relationships.  The good news is that God can heal them even as he heals us by his grace.  Those relationships affect who we are and how we navigate the world.   

The second foundational truth is this:  We’re created to glorify the Creator.  And our understanding of the Creator will certainly dictate the way we lead and direct our lives—at home, at work, in church, and in the community at large.

I’ve devoted my entire life to encouraging Christian lay people to see themselves as part of the “priesthood of all believers.”  God has given all of his people the “high calling” of serving him in every aspect of life.  For years, we’ve broadcast this good news to hundreds of thousands of individuals in our Canyon ministries, through radio messages, over the Internet, and through gatherings of business men and women. 

Yet, what we’ve done is not enough.  God is asking us to stretch ourselves.  We are taking bold steps over the next five years to strengthen what we’ve always done.  We’re also expanding into new territories.  And with help from friends and leaders, we’ve created a strong plan that outlines how we will accomplish these mighty tasks.

Ultimately, together, we will work to encourage civic and business leaders, employers and employees, parents and children, clergy and laity to embrace their high calling as a visible, incarnational witness to Christ.  As servant leaders, using the Trinity as our guide, we’ll help contribute powerfully to the realization of a Kingdom that affects far more than just Sunday—where God is a vibrant, powerful, gracious beginning-middle-and-end of everything we do each and every day.  The Message translation of Paul’s letter to Philippi says:  “Celebrate God all day every day!” (Phil. 4:4).

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The best move I ever made was picking my parents. They were just both fabulous people. Dad with his business genius and mother with this great social sense and the initiative to do something about it.

At the H. E. Butt Foundation, we've worked hard to keep ourselves stretched. Human needs are all the same. There is no such thing as a life of faith without pain and anguish. The essentials are patience and endurance.

The main thing is to let enough quiet soak in.

You can read more about the broad work of the H. E. Butt Foundation in a recent feature article in the San Antonio Express-News. As a bonus, the article has a companion slideshow with pictures from our Foundation Free Camp program and old video footage from the construction of Laity Lodge.

 

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