Michelle Bachmann won Saturday’s straw poll…good for her. But does it really mean anything?

It must to Tim Pawlenty, who has decided to leave the GOP race. However, historically only George W. Bush took winning in the straw poll and converted it to a win in the Iowa caucus, the nomination, and subsequent win of the White House. Otherwise, it’s been a horrible predictor of final outcomes.

There’s no doubt that Bachmann is running a good campaign. But if she’s thinks that what the Hawkeye elites had to say means much, she should heed the warning from one of the Three Little Pigs, who built his house made of straw…and we all know how that one turned out.

Vulnerability: liable to increased penalties but

Pain and suffering and discomfort and sacrifice is so countercultural.

Three fears that keep us from being vulnerable – Naked Service:

1. Fear of Losing the Business (of being rejected)
• Enter the danger
• Speak the kind truth – terminal niceness in churches
• You will not always get rewarded for it
2. Fear of Being Embarrassed
• We have to ask questions and make suggestions
• Trust comes from helping them even if makes you look dumb
• Celebrate our mistakes
3. Fear of Feeling Inferior
• When we take a lower position – we do the dirty work
• Genuine desire to serve you
• Honoring your clients work – be so interested in them

We are called to vulnerable because the one who called us was the most vulnerable and humble of them all.

The hardest job is to be an effective teacher. In three years her class went from 13% kids proficient in reading and math to 90%.

Biggest myth: weren’t enough teachers who want to teach in tough areas. Real problem: how the school district operated, meaning best candidates never got hired.

When DC schools were taken over by the mayor, Rhee was asked to take the chancellor job. She said no several times, but the mayor willing to sacrifice his whole career convinced her to take the job.

In DC almost everything was broken. Kids started off in Kindergarten ok, but the longer they stayed in the schools, the worse they got. Huge level of disfunction in this district.

Core focus: human capital. The way we can have most impact was to have a teacher in front of every class and a principal at every school.

Try to create a culture that thought about every child and family as our own.

Wanted teachers:

• who have snap – classroom awareness, magical performance
• Value-add – kids are growing, educators accountable for kids performance

Much rather deal with anger than apathy.

Do I need to do a revolution or an incremental strategy?

• Not an incremental girl…could make change fast enough.
• Never heard a parent in the district say, “you’re moving too fast”

The education agenda has been driven by special interest groups. There is no group advocating for kids, she started an organization called Students First, a movement of ordinary people bringing to bear influence.

Someone here today will change everything.

The notion that we can promote from a position of power…the TV-industrial complex:

Buy TV->Get more distribution->Sell More Products

Ends up with average products for average people – mass is built into our system.

Revolution is occurring destroying the perfect, enabling the impossible. Industrial age is over, replaced by tribes who surround ideas or common bond.

People still want to be in sync, we want to do what “our people” are doing.

Tribes need leaders who will connect, commit, build a culture and be clear about where we’re going.

Is it your opportunity?

What’s changed in the last five years is the laptop…the means of production. Everybody has their hands on the world.

Is this the end of job? The rise of the artist. In the post-industrial age we have the change to do things differently. But there is no map.

Quit bowling…if you’re playing by the rules…don’t expect people are going to talk about you or stop and visit. Pick yourself…if you want to write, write…if you want to sing, sing!

If failure is not an option, then neither is success.

Give gifts not favors. Too many people are holding on to something while it rots.

Go Make something happen. Make art, give gifts, do work that matters, lead.

We need you to lead us.

Has the technology and events spurred us to engaging the globe, or do we retreat?

Our mission: we become witnesses of the Gospel and take the Good News across cultural thresholds…be the leaders to break through the “sound barriers”:

1. Jerusalem – comfort zone, speak truth to power and confront those people in our own family. Take on the policies and traditions that are uninclusive.
2. Judea – differences in political parties, denominations, generations
3. Samaria – we avoid like the plague, it takes a spirit-filled leader to go to Samaria…they need to move them beyond their natural affinities

From the beginning the church was intended to be a global movement.

Are you ready to break through your sound barrier?

1. Pray for a divine mandate – what’s breaking your heart, God?
2. Name your catalytic events
3. Mobilize People to Go!

Where is your Samaria…that’s where Jesus is calling us to go!

Lessons I’ve learned from my parents; a story about standing up for something.

You will always face outrageous adversaries; before you can stand tall you must realize that you were born out of radical love and action. A grand conspiracy of love.

What will you do? There are forces that will try to crush you and worse lull and seduce you into mediocrity.

We are the result of people who did not see the world they way others saw it; they had extraordinary vision and the courage of doing something about it. Your attitude about the world speaks to your character.

The world you see outside of you is a reflection inside of you. If you see despair and destruction that’s what’s in your heart and you’ll be worthless, but if you see hope and love then you can do something.

If it is to be…it’s up to me.

Show me first of how you choose to live…about your values, ideals, thought put into action. Infuse truth in that moment.

In every moment you can let life be, or infuse life with truth.

Let us know, stand up. Let us stand and tell our truth.

Today would just be another 10 hour work day in his 6 day work week, pouring molds at a foundry, or working the fields getting them ready for planting. He probably would have been working the past six years, since turning 14. Working conditions were brutal, pay was weak. It’s hard to tell if he would ever have the opportunity to break out of the immigrant social class he might have found himself in; certainly options at the time were few.

His world would be amazingly small. Information would be limited to the daily newspaper, if he was fortunate enough to have gone to grammar school and was literate. It might have been a dream to save up for a Model T, which was released three years earlier. Technology such as commercial radio, TV, and of course the internet were still years or decades away.

I just wanted to take a moment and note what a difference four generations makes! Even with all of the negativity and strife in our day, no one can deny that the best time and best place to live is here and now.

We are blessed to have Joel in our lives these past two decades, and know God continues to unfold His amazing plan for him. We are so thankful to our Heavenly Father for his rich blessings on our family, our community, and our country.

I’m not finding myself jumping for joy over the election returns and the massive Republican wave in the midterm elections. No Woods-ian fist pumps in the air, or high-fives to other conservatives…actually more nervousness and melancholy.

Before my GOP friends start freaking out and saying “he’s gone soft,” I must affirm that I’m still a believer in conservative values, less government, balanced budgets, pro-family values. I think that the last two years of single-party rule has been an orgy of overreach. Still I’m not convinced that this massive repudiation of the lib agenda is going to make life easier for everyday Americans anytime soon.

Actually, there is enough blame and has been enough “overreach” in the past ten years to go around for everyone. As I said on Facebook on a liberal friend’s rather heated thread about this week’s doin’s:

I’m convinced that these things are pendulums (Sr. Bertha’s Latin class: pendula) that swing from one side of the continuum to the other and they always lead to excess and overreach. On the “rich” side we have the Wall Street-Washington coercion, the bailouts and the tax loopholes and the insane CEO salaries. On the “poor” side we have $68 billion a year in Medicare fraud, spent $7 Trillion in aid since the great society yet poverty is static to growing, a crumbling infrastructure especially in urban areas controlled by generations of corruption and incompetence. And all we get is every two years intellectually offensive campaigns by politicians who pander to the base in the primaries then run away from their convictions to win in the general, followed by a cynical media so lazy that they take their orders from the NY Times and amplify stupidity like “Man-up!” and ignore real investigation and balance.

And to think our fathers and grandfathers gave up their adolescence and often their lives in service to save our country and civilization for this?!?!

I’m beginning to think that Rush is right…there exists a “ruling class” of both Democrats and Republicans who play some enormously high-stakes game of slam…feigned indignation and counter-slam; mixed with contempt for the “great unwashed.”

What could break me out of my sourness? The mandate I wanted to send with my vote is to remove the uncertainty about taxes and regulations on small business so that hiring can begin again. If you are going to lift the tax break on the >$250K then just do it. The wishy-washyness is killing the decision-makers. There continues to be good work that the government can do. Any remaining stimulus should be used to for schools and bridges, like it should have been in the first place. Finally, the entire budget has to be “on the table”: entitlements, defense, the whole works. No more corporate welfare…and middle-class welfare either. There are no sacred cows. A clear course to balancing the budget and fixing our structural deficits could be the silver bullet to get us out of this downturn to head to another “morning again” moment.

That would deserve a “yeah, baby!”

Sounds like the lowest point of President Bush’s tenure, when Hurricane Katrina left the Gulf and New Orleans in shambles. But it also describes President Obama’s lack of response to the true core of this economic crisis which has left the entire globe in fiscal agony, that being a solution for the banks and their bad assets.

Instead of flying to New York to do the hard work necessary to make headway on the global credit and financial meltdown, the President does a 180, flying to beautiful Downtown Burbank on the Left Coast to crack jokes with Jay Leno. While he’s there comparing his bowling talents to athletes in the Special Olympics, he does a “you’re doing a great job, Brownie” about his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

I know that I’m supposed to have a tingle down my leg just thinking about the President, and any negative comments about Mr. Obama puts me in the dog house with many of my friends and family, but I fear that he is being influenced by the most cynical of political operatives and party hacks. The troika of Emmanuel, Reid, and Pelosi are taking advantage of an American public in real pain to enact the most liberal tax and spend fantasies conjured up over the last forty years.

I don’t want to make too much of it, but to me the Leno appearance indicates a lack of maturity and seriousness; like the rock star persona has gone to his head. What was he trying to accomplish with his performance on the Tonight Show other than yuking it up with Jay? Support for the stimulus package which was rammed through Congress in 18 hours and is now law? Firing up the faithful in their class envy of tone-deaf Wall Street bankers?

It might be that it’s just more fun. Perhaps the President is finding that governing takes more than filling stadia with quivering fans. It means diving into the details and compromise and conviction. And painful in its own right. Mr. President, time to get serious.