Leadership

Today I had a small epiphany.
For the last two weeks I have started riding my bike.  I was having a hard time getting started, so I asked someone at church to ride with me.  I have tremendous respect for my new riding partner and it is not because he agreed to ride with me.  He is one of those people that you see in major church callings that you think you could never do.......ie: stake presidency, high priest group leader, etc.  A true leader with exceptional values.  I won't use his name so I don't embarrass him since he is humble and sincere to boot. Held in high esteem and fourteen years my senior, I am slightly intimidated by him but being intimidated has never stopped me before.  For the two rides that we have ridden previously, I have held off on the pace.  I tend to ease up and stay along side riding partners who do not ride as hard as I can, letting them set the pace.  Today my compadre asked me to take the lead and set a faster pace.  I did and he kept up just fine. We got the workout that we both needed.


Today's bike ride taught me some valuable lessons about leadership.

First, it is difficult, if not impossible to lead from behind.  It is difficult to sometimes leave our charges to their own devices, but it is a necessity to achieve everyone's goal.  "John" (I will call my friend, John) needed to be pushed and I needed a harder workout.  If "John" had never said anything, we both would not have gained what we needed.

Second, the best leaders are terrific followers.  I have a hard time respecting any one who can give orders but cannot follow orders themselves.  It seems that too many of the members in congress are of the ”do as I say, not as I do” club.  My respect for "John" has been vindicated by his placing me in the lead on our bike rides.

Third, leading means stepping out and sometimes being on your own for a season.  So many of our political leaders are known to legislate by how they read the polls.  President Reagan, when faced with a poll that was against what he thought was the right thing to do, was known to say that they needed to better inform the American people.

Fourth, you can never know when the mantle of leadership will fall on your shoulders.  This is why it is a good thing to be as prepared as possible.  The ultimate goal of a good leader is to develop the leadership potential in his followers.  American soldiers are known for their ability to carry on after their commanders are killed or injured where other troops are stymied by the loss of command.  The LDS church is excellent for teaching leadership.  The training starts early on when primary children are asked to give talks. Sacrament is passed by our young men (ages twelve and up) and responsibilities are given to kids as leaders in their age groups.

Fifth, the key to effective team work is the interpersonal relationship between the leaders and followers.  Trust needs to develop among team members, especially between the leader and his followers.  The leader needs to know that he can trust in his team to get done what is needed to be done.  Team members need to know that their leader is moving them in the proper direction with the right vision.

Sixth, an effective leader knows the skill level and talents of each member of his crew.  As obvious as this may sound, it doesn't take much thought to come up with examples of bosses and supervisors who often operate blind because they have no idea of who it is they're managing.

In conclusion, my bike rides with “John” are going to be valuable to me both on the physical and philosophical plane.  This may be because I tend to learn on the fly.

Strange

While reading the blogs I follow,  I started reading my wife's blog and did a double take.  I felt as though I had somehow flown through a black hole into an alternate reality.  A reality that had my wife writing the political junk which would inversely mean that I do the personal interest writing.  Come to think of it, just recently, I did write about my childhood.  Hmm; if I start posting recipes, please send for help. 

To be fair, my wife has written political posts before but it has been a long time.  Anyway it's a good post and I urge all of you to click on the link below and read it.  It saves me from having to comment on the described incident.
getting-bad-rap

The Commander in Chief Goes AWOL

Warning, Obama rant in progess.

Monday,  Memorial Day,  bbqs,  picnics and horseshoes basketball.  Yes, Obama has his priorities straight.  Why should he bother with that age old, worn out, tradition of laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  Maybe he should have asked some of his troops; a general or two maybe.  The tradition of the Commander in Chief laying the wreath has been long held.  It shows respect to the soldiers he commands. 

Who the heck is running his protocal department?  Early in his tenure, he gave the British Prime Minister a gift of twenty-five movies on DVD  (in the wrong format for Great Britian).  A snub in comparison to the gifts The Prime Minister gave Obama.  Just lately, he's returned a bust of Winston Churchill, a gift given to Bush.  Clearly a snub.  Of course, Obama has the right to decorate the White House in any style he likes (within reason) but I would imagine there's enough room in storage for the bust.  It did not need to be sent back.  In March, our "esteemed" President walked out on Isreali Prime Minnister Binyamin Netanyahu who was at the time a guest at the White House.  What is it about this man that he snubs our allies but bows to our potential enemies?

It is bad enough that alliances that have been fostered for years are under threat of being torn asunder by these callous snubs, but when the President snubs the Armed Forces, it becomes personal.  I served in the ARMY straight out of high school.  I felt honored to have been a part of our nation's defense.  I was in the ARMY when Carter was in office and morale was low.  Then Reagan became President and I saw the military transformed almost overnight.  It was Reagan who gave us the effective fighting force that we have today.  As bad as Carter was for our military, it must be ten times worse for those serving under Obama.  I am ashamed and embarrassed by our President, as well as concerned for our country.  Thankfully, people are starting to wake up (even democrats) and ask where this President is taking us.  Let us pray it is not too late to right the ship.    

Now and Then

My daughter lacks for very little,  if anything.  She has the love of her parents.  She makes friends easily.  People in the church think she is someone special.  We are ready to take her to hang with her friends or whatever planned event she needs to get to.  We just recently bought her a laptop.  She owns a Nintendo DS.  She has the benefit of satalite tv.   If there is anything we can afford to get her (that will not harm her)  we will get it.  You could say she is spoiled (her mother's fault,  of course) and yet there are times when I feel for her.

I grew up in the sixties.  My childhood was simular to the movie, The Sandlot, except I and my freinds were not as focused on baseball.  Football was what we lived for.  The best time for football was immedietly after dinner when we would meet and play in the cooling evening for as long as we could possibly stay out.  There was a park at the end of the block,  three houses from mine.  That park is still there except somehow it seems to have shrunk.  There was a ditch that ran through the middle of the park (now it's a small culvert).  My friends and I would challenge each other into jumping across the wider parts of the ditch.  Bordering the park on the east and west were bullrushes and marsh.  We would place scrape wood in the rushes making trails and collecting cattails.  My childhood was filled with endless summer days out.  My parents weren't concerned about their children being abducted, unlike what parents fear today.  If I had no chores, they were more than happy to have me out of the house.  Gone after breakfast, not to be back before dinner and then back out for football.  If I was offered dinner by my friends parents, then even better.  My friends and I were explorers.  We wandered anywhere we could about the neighborhood.  We caught gardener snakes and frogs.  We were daredevils; riding bikes across a narrow bridge one hundred feet in the air (or so it seemed), jumping off  the top of huge gravel piles to end up sliding hundreds of feet riding a roaring avalanche of fresh gravel.  If we had any change, we would go four blocks from my house to the neighborhood grocery store where we bought licorice whips and candy bars.  We rode our bikes two miles to the nearest swimming pool.  We would futilely try to drain the pool with the best cannonballs we could muster  When in the middle of summer we became bored, we became inventors,  inventing games that Calvin and Hobbes would be proud of.                  

In the fall, when school started, we would walk or ride our bikes.  I took the school bus once and could not stand it.  Today we drive our daughter to school.

I wonder if the world was safer when I was a child or if we were just more naive.  With expanded media coverage, I think our eyes are open to the reality of how dangerous our world really is.  Or has it actually become more dangerous?  Either way, I and my wife will not risk our daughter's well being.  There are tradeoffs, of course.  My wife and I have a much closer relationship to our daughter than I had with my parents.  In time, Rachel will find her freedom as she grows into adulthood.  I asked her if she felt she had a happy childhood and she looked at me as if I was a crazy man (I thought she knew that was a given) and asked me why I would ask such an obvious question.  As parents we do what we need to do to raise our children.  My parents must have felt that it was important that I learned early how to deal with independence.  My wife and I feel that we need to shelter our child a little while longer so that she will be able to grow into the amazing woman we see peeking out of her young face.      

The Message?

Imagine that you are the parent of nine children.  Three children are three years of age,  three are nine and three are  sixteen, seventeen and eighteen, respectively.  Now imagine that your children get to vote for who their parents are.  The opponent who is running against you has several credit cards and has promised to use those cards to supply the three and nine year olds with almost anything they want. The teenagers will have to work to help pay off the debt.  Given these circumstances, would you, as a loving and caring person, be voted in as their parent?  It is understood that sometime in the future the debt of those credit cards will have to be paid by the kids.  The teenagers would realize that this is not a good situation and would more than likely vote for the more responsible parents.  The three year olds would believe your opponents when they told them that they are "entitled" to all the candy they can eat and  that it is wrong that you insist on a bedtime.  The election outcome may pivet on the nine year olds.  What would your message be?

The situation described above is similar to what conservatives who run  for office face.  One third of the electorate will vote Republican, one third will vote Democrat and the other third will decide the outcome of the election.  We have recently had Republicans who have shifted left to gain office.  They have bought into the notion that they must promise to give things in order to get elected.  Conservatives will never win in a contest of desirable outcome.  We see that these outcomes are not possible.  We also see that the debt incured by promising welfare entitlements is bankrupting the country. Sharing the wealth that other people have earned is a disincentive to those earning it, thus crippling the economy.  Not to mention it is just wrong to give to other people someone else's gain.

Given this situation, can a conservative who remains true to his principles get elected?  Can someone run on the idea that we need to scale back on the "give away" programs run by the Federal government?  An example of what is run by the feds that could be more effectively handled by the states is the Department of Education.  Ronald Reagan tried to eliminate this department that he called "Carter's boondoggle".  He was met with fierce opposition by the very powerful teacher's unions.  We, as a society, have become so used to how much the Federal government is in are lives that there is real fear in losing our security net  (regardless of the tremendous waste that we all know occurs in Washington).

There were two people who were able to get elected to the office of president that did not promise a laundry list of goodies.  One said, "My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what can you do for your country."  This was followed up by, "My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."  The other said, "Goverment is not the solution to our problem, goverment  is the problem".  In spite of  the messages (or maybe because of them),  they were both very popular.  It gives me hope for this country that Ronald Reagan and John F.Kennedy could talk of a vision for our country that did not consist of our goverment taking care of us and still get elected.

When I talked to my wife about my "nine children" analogy,  she was quite certain that she would be elected as their mother.  When pressed, she explained that she could convey, even to the three year olds,  the ramifications of their decisions.  Upon further reflection, I believe that she is right.

 One obvious reason is the bond between parents and their children.  Their is a bond that we share as Americans, as well.  When I compare the words of Obama to those of Reagan, I notice that where Obama  uses the word, "I", Reagan used words such as, "we" and  "fellow Americans".  Where Obama talks of how America should be,  Reagan spoke of America's greatness.  There has never been a greater nation than the United States of America and that fact has to be part of our message.

We expect our children to act in a proper manner.  I believe that we should expect upright behavior from our leaders as well as ourselves and America will respond to that message.  We have lowered expectations for our leaders and they in return view us as the three year olds in my analogy.  We complain about how crooked politians are and yet we continue to elect them.  Is it for the goodies they promise us?  They certainly think so.  Our message needs to be that there are expectations for both the electorate and the elected .

Sincerity is the key ingredient in the making of our message.  Good parents know that they need to be honest and direct with their children as well as consistent.  One reason President Reagan was so popular is that the people could see that he actually tried to do what he said he would do.  One example of this was his budget proposals.  Every budget he submitted to congress was balanced, as promised.  Speaker of the House at the time, Tip O'Neill, would declare Reagan's budget proposals "dead on arrival" refusing to take responbility for cutting spending.    

Where my analogy does not fit is in the fact that we want as little government involvement in our lives as  possible.  Yet it is the goal of good parents to raise their children in such a manner that they will become independent adults.  If liberals raise their children in the way they run the government, I can't imagine their kids ever leaving home.    

           

Hey! I'm Up Here.....Someone Please Talk Me Down

I grew up attending an unafilliated Protestant church.  Before the Left Behind books came out, I was steeped in apocalyptic speculation.  The Book of Revelations still remains one of my favorites of the Bible (this should give you tremendous insight into my charactor).  I have noticed that the LDS church doesn't seem to focus a lot of attention on future biblical prophesy.  They rightly focus on preparation for whatever happens.  I am not complaining about my new found church.  I am trying to prepare you for what I am about to write.  You see, I have this annoying habit of putting together future scenarios in my head, stringing together facts and events and trying to fit them into biblical prophesy.  This, by the way, is one of the things I do that drives my wife nuts.  I am not saying that I am a prophet or have any greater insight than anyone reading this and, odds are, I am totally wrong, but it's nice having a blog where I can put down on paper (so to speak) what I speculate. 
One Final Warning:  you are about to enter into my version of the twilight zone,  read it at your own risk.

Since reading about the Antichrist in the Bible, I have an innate distrust of anybody in a leadership role who has charisma.  Of course, this makes it dificult for me to trust anyone in leadership since charisma is one of the prerequisites to being an effective leader.  Speculations on who the Antichrist is has been the game of Christians since Christ last left the earth.  I remember when a friend's mother thought it was Ronald Reagan when he was president.  Her reasoning was that his three names all contained six letters (his middle name was Wilson).  I considered it for about three minutes and than dismissed it because it was, after all, Ronald Reagan - the last good president we have had (I place him as one of the three greatest).  Letters in a name is one interpretation of the six-six six riddle; but another interpretation that I have heard is that it cannot equal seven ( the number of perfection)  no matter how many times six is repeated.  How this would apply is that the Antichrist would be a person portraying himself  and his agenda as perfect or close to perfect but never able to be perfect.  At this point, I think you, my very savvy readers, are catching on to what I'm saying.  Perhaps you have had simular thoughts. 

Okay enough beating around the bush.  I think President Obama might (emphasis on might) be the Antichrist.  Now that I have finally put that out to the public at large, I truly feel as if I'm up a tree in the center of crazy town.

Here's my reasoning:

A)  The charisma thing.  It amazes me how people are taken by his charm and how eagerly they look past all his flaws.  He has very little political experience.  The people he surrounds himself with are leftest to the extreme and yet a country that is supposedly centrist elected him to the highest office.

B)  Although he has such little experience, he comes off as arrogant.  In and of itself, arrogance would not be indicative of the Antichrist but it lends credence to my idea of the assumption of perfection.

C)  There has been some dispute about his having been born in this country.  Okay, I know there are many people born outside of America and they can't all be evil.  I wonder about the possibility ( and this is a stretch but, hey, it's my brain - you have no idea how scary it is to live in my brain) that Obama could have been born near the original location of Babylon.

D)  The UPC bar codes that are on many of the products we buy start with,  have in the middle of them, and end with the numbers six, six, six.  The mark of the beast is ready and could easily be used to ID the population at any time.  The reasoning for using this form of ID is in place.  It involves the control of money.  If we were to get rid of paper money and simply use debit cards, money would be harder for terrorists or other unsavory charactors to obtain.  Of course, cards can be stolen.  But if chips were to be planted in either the forearm or forehead, as referenced in The Book of Revelations, it would be nearly impossible to steal.

E)  Okay, this is a real stretch but bear with me.  The Mayan calender is scheduled to make its big change in 2012.  It's possible that the Mayan's are decendants of the Lamanite's.  Is it possible that the Mayan calender could be inspired by our God?  Truthfully, I don't know, so I leave it for your scrutiny.

Now that we have plumbed the depths of my addled psyche (now you can relate to my wife) let's step back and gain some perspective.  Every generation since Christianity was founded has thought that they were in the last days. It's quite possible that the seventh seal has been opened recently (earthquake's could be our clue), but even so, it could be up to a thousand years before Christ returns.

I have questions about Mormon beliefs regarding the last days.  Most Protestants believe in a rapture (the catching up of Christians) before the Tribulation.  It is speculated that the rapture creates the disruption that brings about the changes necessary for what is foretold in The Book of Revelations.  I know that we are to meet in Jackson County, MO where we will be protected from the tribulation period.  Is it possible that the calling up of the Saints and the rapture could both occur?          
       

Let Freedom Ring...........................Loudly

Since I started this blog nearly a year ago, I have noticed a trend developing in the subject matter of my posts (ramblings, musings, out and out nonsense..... you decide).  I don't think I intended to focus so much attention on just the federal government.  Clearly there is plenty to write or complain about within the State of Colorado and there are human interest strories that I could give my two cents worth on.  I think there are a few reasons for my compulsion to cover national government events.  One:  I'm comfortable with the subject matter.  This is due in part to the fact that most of the media that catches my interest is of  the goings on in our nation's capital.  Two:  People are closer to the state and local governments, so I feel that they are more informed and don't need to hear me blather on about things that they know all to well.  I do not mean to say that you three (or am I up to four?) people who put up with my ramblings are uninformed.  Quite the opposite.  I  am grateful for those of you who regularly comment.  You are well informed and I love sharing with you my opinions.  And my wife is thrilled that I have an outlet so she doesn't have to constantly be harangued.  Three:  And most importantly,  I feel that the greatest threat to our  freedom comes from our own federal government. 

We, the American people, in our desire for security, are trading in our freedom - this monstrous health care bill is the biggest assault on civil liberties we have seen in our lifetimes.   The dumbing down of the populace has had a deleterious effect.  Civics classes are almost non-existent in the public schools and let's not even go into the drivel that is taught as history. 

Today we have the tools to turn this trend towards socialism around and, let me be clear that socialism is an anathema to freedom.  With the advent of the internet, we have unbelieveable access to information and it is information that is our greatest weapon against the enemies of our great nation. 

A well informed electorate is the cure for what ails us,  That and God is the only thing that will turn our nation back to it's former greatness.