Category: Conversation
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Who Wants to Work For a World That’s Not Working With Us?
“I hate school,” says my 7-year-old almost every single day. “Oh really?” I ask with curiosity. “What do you hate about it? Tell me more,” I encourage even as I am continuing to make her food for lunch and pack her things to send her to the very place that she has just told me…
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The Burden
Almost every Black person I know who has grown up in America knows what it’s like to feel the existential burden placed upon us that says, “You represent your entire race.”
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Conversation Catalyst or Conversation Coward?
Usually I write poems or long blogs to express my thoughts. This time I drew a picture. The point of the picture—if it’s not obvious—is that I think we are at a critical moment in the world when we can choose to be #ConversationCatalysts and foster a #CollaborativeCulture or we can be #ConversationCowards and devolve…
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A Call to Restore the Balance
A bird flapping with one wing is grounded and spins in a circle going nowhere fast. – The Way
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Permission to Speak Freely: “Let’s Talk as Equals”
Whether we intend them to or not, most of our conversations happen in frameworks that are upheld by socially accepted ranking systems. As I’ve witnessed it, when conversations happen in a context where someone believed to hold a “higher social ranking”, it is virtually impossible to have the conversations we need to have in order…
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Save the Future With Your Present Conversations
If you are part of a community of folks as small as your family or as large as a megachurch and you aren’t challenging yourselves in your conversations your communications are the equivalent of standing water. And elementary science tells us what happens to standing water. The conversations that we participate in are supposed to…
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A Conversation Among Equals: The Importance of De-ranking Conversations
The fact is that, whether we intend them to or not, most of our conversations happen in frameworks that are upheld by socially accepted ranking systems. And, when conversations happen in a context where someone holds a perceived “higher ranking”, it is virtually impossible to have the conversations we need to move our society forward…
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Stop In the Name of Love
If you had the power to end all of the violence in the world with a single action, would you do it? I imagine that most of us would say that of course we would. No one wants violence, right? It is just an unfortunate deterrent that we must use to prevent greater violence from…
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Communicating to Death (or some better title)
“Urkel is dead and I can’t breathe.” Those were the words Oprah spoke to the interviewer when they asked her about one of the most recent casualties of a senseless shooting. I couldn’t breathe either. How could Urkel be gone? He held the hopes of so many of us. He had achieved the dream and…
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We Met. We Talked. Now What?
Can one conversation fundamentally change who you are and how you are in the world? I think so. And that’s precisely why I think so many of us fear authentic conversation. But hopefully this fear is waning. We Met. One day I had an encounter with a woman who struggled with an addiction to crack…
The Roofless Church 