Be Present And When Necessary Have The Courage To Speak Up And Speak Out

I am writing this at the beginning of 2008 before the first Sunday of the year, because I have just received an email regarding what is happening in some mega-churches across America and I understand that some major big-named ministries are being investigated regarding their financial affairs. I was aware that there were problems but I did not realise they were this serious. What happened to the simple preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

What is missing? And who are missing? If some men of integrity are missing then things can suddenly go very wrong. Let me correct that. They do not go wrong suddenly. They go wrong slowly bit by bit until the issue is immense and the Name of Jesus Christ is ridiculed and laughed at, as a consequence of the activity and behaviour of those who perhaps started well.

Let me illustrate this in a different way by looking at Thomas. You will find the actual account in John Chapter 20.

Nobody knows where he was nor why he was not present with the others, but he missed so much by being absent.

Thomas was not in the Upper Room on resurrection evening when Jesus Christ appeared to his baffled wondering men. He was the disciple who had been quick to ask questions, and now his mind seems to be racing, as he attempts to work out just what has been happening.

Did he go off to consider seriously all the various events of these past few days? Jesus had been betrayed, arrested, crucified and buried. Thomas had witnessed these facts.

But now some trustworthy women were saying that the tomb was empty and that Jesus had met them that morning, and Peter and John were adding to the irrationality of it all.

The risen Jesus had appeared to those who had gathered in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, and He had spoken to them and breathed upon them.

Thomas had missed seeing and hearing the risen Jesus, and receiving from Jesus, and this raised further questions in his questioning mind.

He would not accept the explanatory answers of Peter and John and the others. That was not good enough. Mere words were insufficient.

“For me to believe I will have to poke my fingers into His wounds!” Thomas wants evidence.

He has to wait another week, and that can be a long time when you have a heavy troublesome burdened heart.

One week later, through the same locked doors, Jesus Christ reappears, and now Thomas has his chance. He did not need to touch Him.

Realising who this is he blurts out, “My Lord and my God!”

By being absent a man can miss seeing that vital convincing evidence.

There is something further though. By remaining silent when you become aware that what is going is not quite right, then other things can go wrong. Money can be misused. Funds can be diverted from their original intention.

During this coming year, if you are a committed Christian, be present at all the Services you can. Be in the Word of God every day. Take time and make time to read it and pray. Know the Scriptures as well as you can. Keep yourself as pure as if possible in this soiled sinful fallen world.

If you serve on a Committee or Board and you see things going wrong or just beginning to go wrong, have the courage to speak up. God will honour that. But not only that – there will normally be someone else around who will have the spiritual insight to see the same issues and who will rise and speak to support you.

These things take courage. I remember someone saying to me when I was appointed to a very important committee forty years ago this year – I must have been a boy member! – now stay to the end of the meeting because it is when good Bible believing people slip away and absent themselves that bad decisions are made in the final minutes when there is no-one to speak up and speak out.

This calls for real leadership!

Much is at stake – even the glory of the Name of God, and of our Saviour and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Sandy Shaw

Sandy Shaw is Pastor of Nairn Christian Fellowship, Chaplain at Inverness Prison, and Nairn Academy, and serves on The Children’s Panel in Scotland, and has travelled extensively over these past years teaching, speaking, in America, Canada, South Africa, Australia, making 12 visits to Israel conducting Tours and Pilgrimages, and most recently in Uganda and Kenya, ministering at Pastors and Leaders Seminars, in the poor areas surrounding Kampala, Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu.

Making Your Metrics PowerPoint Presentation Work

Metrics are essential management tools designed to provide specific measures of effectiveness of company programs and activities relative to stated goals, objectives, and plans. They describe what needs to be done, how things should be done, and who should be doing such courses of action. The answers to these questions determine the programs, activities, strategies, resources, as well as expected outputs that are specific and measurable. There are many kinds of metrics in the arena. You can draw up metrics for almost all kinds of company programs, from personnel development programs, marketing and sales campaigns to resource management, planning processes, and many others. However, these metrics will be useless unless they are disseminated and properly explained to the concerned people. One easy way of making people understand company metrics is through the use of metrics PowerPoint.

PowerPoint presentations have many advantages over other kinds of presentations when it comes to driving a point across. Presentations can be concise and brief, yet effective and persuasive with the use of diagrams, graphs, and texts. Naturally, all these things can also be done through printed documents, but PowerPoint presentations can be manipulated more easily to highlight or stress a point. You can enlarge or focus particular parts of the presentation that will help you convey the message more effectively. In addition, there are less distractions to your audience since they do not have to look down to read printed materials in order to follow your discussion. Power point presentations are easier to digest and you can stimulate interest by adding thought-provoking images.

All these advantages are available to you when you make you metric presentation. But it must be remembered that all these conveniences are just aids, and the most important ingredient still that will hold the interest of you audience is the relevance of the contents of your presentation.

Presentation of metrics must follow an orderly pattern. If you are presenting a marketing campaign metrics, it would be best to highlight the goals of such a campaign, perhaps by placing it in the first slide in bold and big letters and accompanying it with representative images of what the accomplishment of the goals will do for the company as a whole. Next will be the objectives, which, of course, must be achievable, measurable, specific, time bound, and the like. Those objectives must have the aforementioned qualities is very important since it establishes the measures with which accomplishments can be evaluated on their effectiveness. Do not forget also what many managers often forget – the mechanisms to be used in monitoring the implementation and evaluation of results.

The planned activities envisioned to achieve the objectives follows. This is the most interesting part because now, your audience will know what their roles in the campaigns will be, with whom they will work with, what resources are needed to operationalize the campaign, and most importantly, what particular activities are to be conducted and their specific outputs.

The metrics PowerPoint presentation must be simple and straight to the point. You can make a few digressions to amuse, arouse, and sustain interest to, but nothing will hold the interest of your audience better than relevant content.

Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy

CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER is structured much like most of Clancy’s books. We’re told a large number of stories from different places and points of view. At first they seem unconnected, but the threads will come together by the end.

It may seem somewhat “risky” in that, although this is a Jack Ryan book, Ryan himself is off-stage until the final two hundred or so pages. He doesn’t even know what’s going on. But part of the plotting is to dramatize what he does when he finally does figure out the truth. But the “real” heroes of the book are Clark and Chavez.

Clark is a CIA op who’s appeared in previous Clancy novels. Chavez is a young, talented light infantry fighter.

The most obvious focus of the book is drugs and the Medellin Cartel of Columbia that imported so much cocaine into the United States.

The U.S. sends several small squads of light infantry fighters into the jungles of Columbia — of course without the permission or knowledge of the Colombian government. At first, their job is simply to spy on known airfields, radioing in the location of planes taking off. Eventually they attack processing centers.

In the meantime, a Coast Guard ship happens upon a small yacht just after two men have murdered its family of passengers. Using illegal, unorthodox and unlikely methods, they learn from the killers that the man was a laundering money for the Medellin Cartel, but had been caught skimming and was killed for that.

I’m not so sure such low-level killers would know that much info. I think they’d just be told, “Kill and get away.” Their legal odyssey dramatizes how drugs are impacting out court system. Their lawyer is as slimy as defense lawyers for drug cartel murderers can be — but from good-heartened, good-liberal motives. Their final fate shows how drugs and drug money are whittling away at both the bad and good guys in law enforcement.

Yet it’s with the upper most levels of the U.S. government that this novel is most concerned. And the possibility of people at that level sending soldiers such as Chavez into danger, and then pulling the plug on them to save their own political careers or just to keep themselves out of jail.

And of course, there’s the whole issue of whether or not drugs do constitute a “clear and present danger” to the United States. Some people even refuse to believe that terrorists pose such a danger. Senator John Kerry said he wanted to return to treating it as a law enforcement issue, and many of President Obama’s actions lean in that direction.

The Medellin cartel is gone, but Columbia and other countries still manage to smuggle a lot of cocaine into the U.S., and will continue to do so because there’s a huge market for it. That’s the real problem, and it’s one that can’t be fought by special ops forces.

All in all, this is a novel that could surprise people who hate Clancy and even some of his fans may assume he’d take a more direct stance on these issues, but there’s also plenty of action for those who simply want the military suspense.