Seth Haines's Blog, page 30

I’m Not Impervious to Worry

After this week’s announcement, some of you have emailed me words of encouragement. A few of you have emailed me the same question: Are you stressed or worried?

Of course.

Better people have followed the wild wind into the world of entrepreneurship and have failed. Less-skilled folks have succeeded when all the world thought they’d fail. Life is a crapshoot, business even more so. Success is fickle (perhaps even an illusion). Money fails. And perhaps more to the point, as my friend Sean is fo...

This Business of the Quickening (Or Quitting) (Part 3)

It is a season of change.

Joseph called from Denver, told me the aspens were turning gold on the front range. A day later, I saw John–or rather, his Facebook avatar–and he told me of the autumn-blue Colorado sky that’s so beautiful your heart aches. The weather hasn’t made the turn yet in the Ozarks, and the maples are still in the modesty of their green sleeves. I ache for the crisp blue that’s already biting at the heart of every earnest Coloradoan, for the gold leaves smelted by God himsel...

This Business of the Quickening (Or Quitting) (Part 2)

This is not any other week. Yesterday, I wrote of the quickening moment, the moment of starting a new job. I wrote about being a quitter, about walking out on a career that, by all measures, has treated me well (ceteris paribus). And though some of you have asked “What’s your new job?” or “Are you having a premature mid-life crisis?” let’s not put the trailer before the truck.

A word on my life before this quickening week.

For 12 years, I have been a member of a large law firm (large in Arkan...

This Business of The Quickening (Or Quitting)

There are quickening moments in life, moments when you first feel the movement of something new. New love, the knee of your first child pushing against your wife’s belly, the early inklings (or doings) of a new career path–these bring the flutter of new life. In the quickening moments, folks are suckers for a cliché, saying things like, “this is the first day of the rest of my life.”

So, let’s go ahead and get this over with–this is the first day of the rest of my life.

I suppose my moment co...

The Weekend Review, September 24, 2016

Would you like a few good links to start you weekend? I thought so.

Be well. See you Monday.

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Books:

Processed with Snapseed.

I stumbled across a copy ofThe Illustrated Manby Ray Bradbury at The Dickson Street Bookstore and snapped it up. (You should always snap up Bradbury in used paperback.) This collection of short stories is blowing my mind.Find your own copy of The Illustrated Manhere, or here, or here.

Technology: Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has pledged $3 billion to eradicate...

The Business of the Lesser Gods

This business of living out a spiritually formed life in The Market might come with its own price. It’s always been that way.

In the Christian book of the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul visited Ephesus and taught of “the Way.” More than a few Ephesian citizens adopted Paul’s teaching and began to burn their books of magic. (Has anything riled folks up quite as much as a good book burning?) This is where the rub set in. The Way threatened the Ephesian economy–The Market–which was fueled in no...

The Business of Being a Spy

We are in The Market, participants in this Frankenconomy of the West.And as we’ve discussed this week, as we punch in and punch out, as we work the daily grind, it’s our job to hedge against its machinations. It’s our job to live a more spiritually formed, sacrificial way. Some might call this being “in the world but not of the world.” Our French mentor Jacques Ellul puts it another way.

“From another point of view (and here the relation is quite different), he may also be sent out as a spy....

The Business of The Spiritual Formation of Business (Part III)

As I said yesterday, The Market is neither good nor bad. It is
an amoral entity, a mechanism for producing and distributing milk and meat. And let me reiterate, don’t we all need milk and meat? Don’t we need clothing, homes, and transportation? The college professors and television scholars tell us The Market is the most efficient means of delivering that milk and meat to the people, and experiences teaches us this is true. (Aren’t you reading on a screen produced, distributed, and sold in T...

The Business of The Spiritual Formation of Business (Part II)

Yesterday, I asked the question: how can we participate in the market without allowing our souls to be co-opted by it?For those of you who make the morning commute, punch the clock, and give your nine-to-five to any career, this is the priceless question.

We live in a world driven by economics, and let’s call the driver of economics The Market. The Market sends message after message, tells the people what to buy, how much to buy, and when to buy. It facilitates (and at times manipulates) choi...

The Business of the Spiritual Formation of Business

Pour The 8:00 Cup of coffee. Punch the clock. Say your good-mornings. Power up the computer. Scan the to-do list. Settle in for your forty to ninety-hour workweek.

Welcome back to the Monday morning routine.

For twelve years, I’ve followed some semblance of this Monday ritual in my current career as an attorney. I’ve entered the week–that five-day span of promise and dread–and set about to balance the tasks of client-pleasing and billing hours. I’ve crafted arguments, written thousands of pag...