California is a fine place to live in - Fred Allen

California is a fine place to live in - if you happen to be an orange

Fred Allen 1894

Desiring God: If We Love God Most, We Will Love Others Best

JUNE 24, 2016 If We Love God Most, We Will Love Others Best

Article by 

Jon Bloom

Staff writer, desiringGod.org

The most loving thing we can do for others is love God more than we love them. For if we love God most, we will love others best.

I know this sounds like preposterous gobbledygook to an unbeliever. How can you love someone best by loving someone else most? But those who have encountered the living Christ understand what I mean. They know the depth of love and breadth of grace that flows out from them toward others when they themselves are filled with love for God and all he is for them and means to them in Jesus. And they know the comparatively shallow and narrow love they feel toward others when their affection for God is ebbing.

There’s a reason why Jesus said the second greatest commandment is like the first: if we love God with all our heart, we will love our neighbor as ourselves (Matthew 22:37–39). It functions like faith and works; if we truly have the first, the second naturally follows.

But if God is not the love of our life, there is no way that we will truly love our neighbor as ourselves. For we will love ourselves supremely.

He First Loved Us

The reason we will love others best when we love God most is that love in its truest, purest form only comes from God, because God is love (1 John 4:7–8). Love is a fundamental part of his nature. We are only able to love him or anyone else because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). We are only able to give freely to others what we have received freely from him.

And as God’s image-bearers (Genesis 1:26), we are designed to love God and others in the same way that God loves God and others. God, being the most pure, perfect, powerful, and precious entity in existence, must love himself most in order to love everything else best, since everything else is “from him and through him and to him” (Romans 11:36). If God loved something or someone else more than himself he would be violating the first commandment (Exodus 20:3) and the foremost commandment (Matthew 22:37–38). For God to love something or someone more than himself would be inappropriate, perverted, immoral. Like God, we must love him supremely in order to love everything else best.

The Horrible Result of Not Loving God Most

When we (or anything else, if that’s possible) become our supreme love instead of God, love becomes distorted and diseased. Love ends up devolving into whatever we wish for it to mean.

This is a great evil, greater than we often realize. This is the world as we know it: everyone loves in the way that is right in his own eyes. Which of course means that everyone hates in the way that is right in his own eyes. They become supreme “lovers of self” (2 Timothy 3:2) and live “in the passions of [their] flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind,” since they were “children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3). It is not hard to understand why there is so much confusion and conflict and heartbreak and violence in the world. We live in an anarchy of love resulting in much of the horrifying things we hear in the news.

The Greatest Love Ever Shown

But God, being rich in mercy (Ephesians 2:4), “so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). The author and perfecter of love, Love himself, stepped into our horrible evil anarchy to redeem us (Romans 5:8), his people, and give us new life (Ephesians 2:5), and transform us from children of wrath back into children of God (John 1:12) who are able to love him supremely and therefore love each other rightly — the way he has loved us.

And how has he loved us? With the greatest love there is, the love that moves one to lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13). But this doesn’t mean that Jesus loved us, his friends, more than his Father. It means that Jesus loved us best because he loved his Father most (John 17:26; Mark 14:36). And “if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11).

What May Be Our Most Loving Act Today

So we see that if we love God most, we will love others best.

I find this to be a convicting and uncomfortable truth: How we love others, particularly other Christians, reveals how we love God. The apostle John puts it bluntly: “He who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen (1 John 4:20). Our love for each other is an indicator of the place God is holding in our hearts.

God is very good at designing things this way: our faith is revealed by our works (James 2:18), our creeds are revealed by our deeds (Luke 6:46), and our love for him is revealed by our love for others (1 John 4:20). He makes it very hard for us to fake it. And this is a great kindness (Romans 2:4).

Since the greatest and second greatest commandments are involved in these things, we know they are important to God. So perhaps the best thing we can do today is take an honest, lingering look at the way we love others, allow what we see to have its Philippians 2:12effect on us, and ask God what he would have us do in response.

We may find that this is the most loving thing we will do for everyone else today.

Jon Bloom (@Bloom_Jon) serves as author, board chair, and co-founder of Desiring God. He is author of three books, Not by Sight, Things Not Seen, and Don’t Follow Your Heart. He and his wife live in the Twin Cities with their five children.

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Lyons Carrot Cake

Lyons Carrot Cake

   2 - Cups Flour
1.5 - Teaspoons Soda
   2 -  Teaspoons Baking Powder
   1 - Teaspoons Salt
1.5 - Teaspoon Cinnamon
   1 - Teaspoon Nutmeg
   2 - Cups Sugar
1.5 - Oil
   4 - Eggs, beaten
   1 - (8.25 ounce) Crushed Pineapple, Drained *
   2 - Cups Grated Carrots
0.5 - Cups Raisins
0.5 - Cups Walnuts
Cream Cheese Frosting

Sift together the flour, soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and sugar.  Add oil, eggs, drained pineapple, carrots, raisins, and walnuts. Mix well and turn into a greased and flowered bundt pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour. Ice with Cream Cheese frosting.

Cream Cheese Frosting
  1 Pound - Powder Sugar
  1.5 Cups - Sugar
  1(8 Ounce) Package Cream Cheese
    1 -  Teaspoon Vanilla

For best flavor let sit for two days before serving

*  - A little bit more Pineapple is not bad and will make the cake moister include some juice
 - Adding a little bit of the pineapple juice will intensify the flavor.
 - Mix carrot grating with fine and heavy creates a lighter texture using half whole wheat will create a bit heavier but delightful cake.
 - Half Brown sugar brings out a richer flavor.
- Coconut - flakes or grated is terrible in texture and never desired though replacing the oil with coconut oil might be enjoyable.

- Using grape seed oil has proven to improve flavor and density

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Albert Einstein

The one-and-a-half page letter, written in 1954 in German and addressed to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, contains reflections on God, the bible and Judaism.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/albert-einsteins-god-letter-reflecting-on-religion-up-for-auction/ar-BBQtzAp?OCID=ansmsnnews11

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Planner Pages - sheets

Difficult People

https://www.netcredit.com/blog/

How Smart People Handle Difficult People

Difficult people defy logic. Some are blissfully unaware of the negative impact that they have on those around them, and others seem to derive satisfaction from creating chaos and pushing other people’s buttons. Either way, they create unnecessary complexity, strife and worst of all stress.

Related: 10 Habits of Unlikeable People

Studies have long shown that stress can have a lasting, negative impact on the brain. Exposure to even a few days of stress compromises the effectiveness of neurons in the hippocampus -- an important brain area responsible for reasoning and memory. Weeks of stress cause reversible damage to neuronal dendrites (the small “arms” that brain cells use to communicate with each other), and months of stress can permanently destroy neurons. Stress is a formidable threat to your success -- when stress gets out of control, your brain and your performance suffer.

Most sources of stress at work are easy to identify. If your non-profit is working to land a grant that your organization needs to function, you’re bound to feel stress and likely know how to manage it. It's the unexpected sources of stress that take you by surprise and harm you the most.

Recent research from the Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany found that exposure to stimuli that cause strong negative emotions -- the same kind of exposure you get when dealing with difficult people -- caused subjects’ brains to have a massive stress response. Whether it's negativity, cruelty, the victim syndrome or just plain craziness, difficult people drive your brain into a stressed-out state that should be avoided at all costs.

The ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance. TalentSmart has conducted research with more than a million people, and we’ve found that 90 percent of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions in times of stress in order to remain calm and in control. One of their greatest gifts is the ability to neutralize difficult people. Top performers have well-honed coping strategies that they employ to keep difficult people at bay.

While I’ve run across numerous effective strategies that smart people employ when dealing with difficult people, what follows are some of the best. To deal with difficult people effectively, you need an approach that enables you, across the board, to control what you can and eliminate what you can’t. The important thing to remember is that you are in control of far more than you realize.

1. They set limits. 

Complainers and negative people are bad news because they wallow in their problems and fail to focus on solutions. They want people to join their pity party so that they can feel better about themselves. People often feel pressure to listen to complainers because they don’t want to be seen as callous or rude, but there’s a fine line between lending a sympathetic ear and getting sucked into their negative emotional spiral.

You can avoid this only by setting limits and distancing yourself when necessary. Think of it this way: if the complainer were smoking, would you sit there all afternoon inhaling the second-hand smoke? You’d distance yourself, and you should do the same with complainers. A great way to set limits is to ask complainers how they intend to fix the problem. They will either quiet down or redirect the conversation in a productive direction.

2. They rise above. 

Difficult people drive you crazy because their behavior is so irrational. Make no mistake about it; their behavior truly goes against reason. So why do you allow yourself to respond to them emotionally and get sucked into the mix? The more irrational and off-base someone is, the easier it should be for you to remove yourself from their traps. Quit trying to beat them at their own game. Distance yourself from them emotionally and approach your interactions like they’re a science project (or you’re their shrink, if you prefer the analogy). You don’t need to respond to the emotional chaos -- only the facts.

3. They stay aware of their emotions. 

Maintaining an emotional distance requires awareness. You can’t stop someone from pushing your buttons if you don’t recognize when it’s happening. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in situations where you’ll need to regroup and choose the best way forward. This is fine and you shouldn’t be afraid to buy yourself some time to do so.

Think of it this way -- if a mentally unstable person approaches you on the street and tells you he’s John F. Kennedy, you’re unlikely to set him straight. When you find yourself with a coworker who is engaged in similarly derailed thinking, sometimes it’s best to just smile and nod. If you’re going to have to straighten them out, it’s better to give yourself some time to plan the best way to go about it.

4. They establish boundaries. 

This is the area where most people tend to sell themselves short. They feel like because they work or live with someone, they have no way to control the chaos. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Once you’ve found your way to Rise Above a person, you’ll begin to find their behavior more predictable and easier to understand. This will equip you to think rationally about when and where you have to put up with them and when you don’t. For example, even if you work with someone closely on a project team, that doesn’t mean that you need to have the same level of one-on-one interaction with them that you have with other team members.

Related: 9 Phrases Smart People Never Use In Conversation

You can establish a boundary, but you’ll have to do so consciously and proactively. If you let things happen naturally, you are bound to find yourself constantly embroiled in difficult conversations. If you set boundaries and decide when and where you’ll engage a difficult person, you can control much of the chaos. The only trick is to stick to your guns and keep boundaries in place when the person tries to encroach upon them, which they will.

5. They don’t die in the fight. 

Smart people know how important it is to live to fight another day, especially when your foe is a toxic individual. In conflict, unchecked emotion makes you dig your heels in and fight the kind of battle that can leave you severely damaged. When you read and respond to your emotions, you’re able to choose your battles wisely and only stand your ground when the time is right.

6. They don't focus on problems -- only solutions. 

Where you focus your attention determines your emotional state. When you fixate on the problems you’re facing, you create and prolong negative emotions and stress. When you focus on actions to better yourself and your circumstances, you create a sense of personal efficacy that produces positive emotions and reduces stress.

When it comes to toxic people, fixating on how crazy and difficult they are gives them power over you. Quit thinking about how troubling your difficult person is, and focus instead on how you're going to go about handling them. This makes you more effective by putting you in control, and it will reduce the amount of stress you experience when interacting with them.

7. They don’t forget. 

Emotionally intelligent people are quick to forgive, but that doesn’t mean that they forget. Forgiveness requires letting go of what’s happened so that you can move on. It doesn’t mean you’ll give a wrongdoer another chance. Smart people are unwilling to be bogged down unnecessarily by others’ mistakes, so they let them go quickly and are assertive in protecting themselves from future harm.

8. They squash negative self-talk. 

Sometimes you absorb the negativity of other people. There’s nothing wrong with feeling bad about how someone is treating you, but your self-talk (the thoughts you have about your feelings) can either intensify the negativity or help you move past it. Negative self-talk is unrealistic, unnecessary and self-defeating. It sends you into a downward emotional spiral that is difficult to pull out of. You should avoid negative self-talk at all costs.

9. They get some sleep. 

I’ve beaten this one to death over the years and can’t say enough about the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough -- or the right kind -- of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present. A good night’s sleep makes you more positive, creative and proactive in your approach to toxic people, giving you the perspective you need to deal effectively with them.

Related: Why Smart People Don't Multitask

10. They use their support system. 

It’s tempting, yet entirely ineffective, to attempt tackling everything by yourself. To deal with toxic people, you need to recognize the weaknesses in your approach to them. This means tapping into your support system to gain perspective on a challenging person. Everyone has someone at work and/or outside work who is on their team, rooting for them and ready to help them get the best from a difficult situation. Identify these individuals in your life and make an effort to seek their insight and assistance when you need it. Something as simple as explaining the situation can lead to a new perspective. Most of the time, other people can see a solution that you can’t because they are not as emotionally invested in the situation.

Bringing It All Together

Before you get this system to work brilliantly, you’re going to have to pass some tests. Most of the time, you will find yourself tested by touchy interactions with problem people. Thankfully, the plasticity of the brain allows it to mold and change as you practice new behaviors, even when you fail. Implementing these healthy, stress-relieving techniques for dealing with difficult people will train your brain to handle stress more effectively and decrease the likelihood of ill effects.

A version of this article appeared on TalentSmart.

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Apple did a couple things really, really well. Focus. Make it as good as you possibly can, and have confidence in your engineering decisions and expertise.

When I talk to I*** engineers, the expertise here is great, but they're talking about asking customers what they think about this and that — as opposed to coming up with the best possible thing.

There's a lot of trying to figure out what the market needs, and what's the best trade-off between performance and cost, as opposed to what the best thing is we could possibly do. The interesting thing about the best you can do is that helps you push the envelope.

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An alternative to university education(from ZOHO.com)

A larger proportion of students than ever attend college in the United States, yet the top colleges have become more and more selective. It’s an age of scarcity and an age of plenty. College is also an increasingly more expensive proposition, with tuition alone around $10,000/year at state colleges and over $30,000/year at private institutions. It’s a huge leap of faith; to take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt as a teenager, to study something that may or may not still prove interesting to you four years down the road, let alone relevant in a world where technology “disrupts” industries on a regular basis. This choice doesn’t impact the student alone. For many parents, having “boomerang kids” has become the new normal, delaying their retirement so that they may support the (now fully grown) baby birds that have returned to the nest.

Of course, the arguments for attending college are well-worn axioms. College graduates experience significantly lower levels of unemployment; the pay gap between college grads versus those without a four-year degree has risen every year since 1980. Some studies have even shown that the decision not to go to college has an opportunity cost as much as $500,000 over the course of a lifetime. When compared to the average debt a student assumes (now hovering around $37,000), the cost becomes negligible.

And there are the less tangible benefits that also play a role in the decision to go to, and stay in, college. There is a pervasive cultural narrative that college is the only way to acceptably enter the middle class, a narrative propagated by higher-ed PR campaigns. Colleges also provide an easy opportunity to socialize and network, a must when personal referrals make you twice as likely to be interviewed and 40% more likely to be hired. College graduates are also more likely to vote, have better health, and report higher levels of happiness than those who have only a high-school degree. There are also the experiential factors to consider; college can be transformative for some students, allowing them to discover new passions and instilling a life-long love of learning.

Of course, college is not a magical panacea. Colleges often fail to train students in the real-world skills they will need at professional jobs, with as many as 4 in 10 students graduating without the higher-level reasoning skills required to be successful in white-collar jobs. Even in booming areas such as software programming, college Computer Science curricula have the effect of driving away a lot of potential programmers. As a consequence, the industry then meets its demand for programmers either through immigration or various training programs that are increasingly common in cities like San Francisco and New York.

We at Zoho don’t believe that the only path to success resides in the traditional four (and for many students, six) year degree. College can measure many things, to be sure, but as an increasing number of companies are starting to find (we’re looking at you, Google!), GPA and test scores are poor predictors of long-term success. We understand that all people have to be trained for their jobs, and that most of that training happens (surprise!) on the job. So, we cut out the middle man. Why should we ask students to bet on us and our industry, if we aren’t willing to do the same?

It was out of this realization that Zoho University was born. We decided that students don’t need to take on crippling debt, spend a few years at school, and acquire arbitrary credentials in order to be good at their jobs. Since we are going to have to train them anyway, why not train them at 18 rather than at 22 (or 23, or 24)? We started small, with six students. We put them through a six-month training program that covered the basics they would need to do any job in our company: English, Math and Programming. After they’d completed the program, we placed them in teams across the organization, letting them work as paid interns. 10 years later, those “first six” are still with the company, serving in a variety of positions from software development to systems administrator to project management.

 We’ve learned a lot in 10 years. We’ve put hundreds of people through our program. At the end of it—students can choose to work with Zoho, or go somewhere else. If they choose to go work somewhere else, they walk away debt-free. If they choose to work with us, the interest has to be mutual—managers in our different teams are still free to choose, or not choose, Zoho University students.

Most of them stay—we have an 80% long-term retention rate. We just accepted our 31st class—so we now have some meaningful samples to compare. We’ve found that our ZU grads are just as successful in the company as those who went the traditional college route. The biggest difference we see is that by the time the 18 year old ZU grad turns 22, she has four years of industry experience under her belt, something the college grad most definitely lacks.

A decade is a long time in a human life, and a lifetime in tech. As more employers come to see the advantages of this approach, we believe the ZU model will provide a meaningful alternative to conventional college education. The exploding cost of college education, paired with the lack of relevant skills it imparts on students, demands such an alternative. We’re confident other smart, entrepreneurial companies will follow suit. We’re positive that Zoho University will be here 10 years down the road, supplying our workplace, our economy, and our society with students that have no debt but are full of knowledge and experience.

https://www.zoho.com/perspectives/education.html

The First rule of Ecology is that everything . . . . Bill Wolf

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