Put God First

I think many of us, yours truly included, have an understandable tendency to limit our thoughts about the sacrifice Jesus made on our behalf to the spectacular nature and drama of his death, his crucifixion. After all, he died so we might live. And what greater sacrifice can a man make but to give his life for his friends?

In recent years, however, I’ve started looking at the daily miracles around me through much smaller eyes, more precisely through the eyes of my little girl, now eight years old.  Her eyes may be smaller than mine, but what she sees through them as an eight-year-old child is doubtless much bigger than what I see through my 55-year-old adult counterparts.  And of our two worlds, hers is simply much bigger, more wondrous, and much less fearful than mine — guaranteed.

So I’d like to borrow her eyes just long enough to rephrase the question, to shift the emphasis away from Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice, his death, to his life instead: What did Jesus give up in life? And what does it mean to me?

Jesus was the indisputable Son of God, this much we know. It’s safe to assume, therefore, that Jesus had the power at his disposal to raise great armies and vanquish enemies with the wave of his hand. He didn’t do that. It’s safe to assume that Jesus had the power to amass riches beyond anyone’s ability to imagine. But he didn’t do that either. Safe to assume that Jesus had the power to compel everyone to love him, and likewise safe to assume that he had the power to deliver and enforce justice for all time. He didn’t do any of these things.

It seems to me, therefore, that the sacrifices Jesus made on our behalf during his life were all lessons in restraint and moderation; the things he didn’t do were as important as the things he did do.  And almost all of the things that he did do — even the miracles he performed — were little things, little kindnesses at the behest of little people. So here’s my final answer to the question, “What does Jesus’ sacrifice mean to me?” It means that I have a God-given responsibility to show restraint and moderation in all things, especially in those circumstances that grant me power and authority over others, and it means that the great lessons of life come to us in little packages that require only the miracle of little kindnesses to flourish…

Thank you and God bless, this Easter and always…

The thoughts, theories, and discussions herein are predicated on those found in my latest book, Put God First: A Pocket Guide to Quality of Life in the Great Age of Excess.  Click here to read the Preface and Introduction (requires Adobe Reader 4.0 or above).

Click here or on the above book graphic to order a signed paperback copy of Put God First for $14.95.

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the Put God First Ministry weblog via the subscription form in the sidebar to the right.  We’ll email you a download link to a free ebook edition of Put God First!  Thank you, and God bless…

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing. – Edmund Burke

Most of the evil acts in my life, and those I have witnessed in others, seem to be acts more of omission than commission.  My failure to speak up or act at times in the face of what I know is wrong or unjust sometimes seems to me a form of muted evil.  More often I see righteousness in small kindnesses around me, in everyday civilities and generosities.  Evil seems to shout (at least in the headlines) whereas righteousness mostly whispers.  Evil seems largely depersonalized, and doesn’t seem to care who I am.  By contrast, righteousness seems to whisper directly in my ear; it seems to know exactly who I am.  The banality of evil is the depersonalization of evil, and – as Edmund Burke observed: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”  Perhaps that describes the difference between “good” and “righteous”: A “good” man can do nothing and still be good, whereas a “righteous” man is compelled to act.

The thoughts, theories, and discussions herein are predicated on those found in my latest book, Put God First: A Pocket Guide to Quality of Life in the Great Age of Excess.  Click here to read the Preface and Introduction (requires Adobe Reader 4.0 or above).

Click here or on the above book graphic to order a signed paperback copy of Put God First for $14.95.

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the Put God First Ministry weblog via the subscription form in the sidebar to the right.  We’ll email you a download link to a free ebook edition of Put God First!  Thank you, and God bless…

This and the previous two posts are reprints from my former weekly column — Einstein’s Corner — in MediaPost’s Media Daily News… 

Phase III language is the language of motivation and selling. It should be where the Phase I language of intimacy and the Phase II language of learning come together. But the marketing and advertising industries are currently truncated, mired in the growing inertia of Phase II.

Our reliance on and fealty to our own communications technologies prevent us from expending the requisite effort to synthesize our language, and come at the further expense of the already orphaned creative culture. We’re far too consumed with the minutiae of getting there to imagine where we’re going in the first place. What we say now takes a backseat to how quickly and frequently we can say it.

The inertia that surrounds our industry is very much a byproduct of our obsession with it. Inertia surrounds and shields our addictions like a protective carapace, and is why obsessive compulsive behavior patterns are so tough to bust. The digital age mantra of faster smarter better simply becomes a faster smarter better rationale for the same old same old.

The most self-consumed industry of all nowadays, the one most immersed in its own inertia, is the media industry. The folks perhaps least capable of recovery, perhaps least capable of evolving Phase III language, are the selfsame folks who need it most: the scions of advertising and marketing.

Advertisers beware. Be careful what you ask for. Your manic quest for ever-faster, ever-smarter, ever-better will generate little more than less, little more than DROI - diminished return on investment. Your agencies are rapidly losing their ability to fashion Phase III language, the language that defines your brand. They can only deliver a diminished brand message. In the end, faster smarter better is neither smarter nor better. Only faster.

Of course, faster smarter better wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the fact that consumers are also faster, smarter, and better at avoiding advertising. It’s quite possible that P&G now delivers 2 billion daily ad impressions because consumers have discovered how to avoid, block, or skip past the first 1,999,999,999.

But if advertisers want someone — anyone — to stick around for the delivery of their ads, they might want to insist upon and institutionalize the only compelling component of good advertising: good creative. That initiative can only come from the client side now that almost all of the rogue creative cultures driven by rogue creative people are gone, devoured whole by the major media holding groups. The agency community at large is far too reactive to help itself, far too addicted to its own Kool Aid to emerge with any measure of sobriety without some sort of massive intervention.

No such Phase III initiative can occur, however, unless and until clients make room for it between their own ears. The agencies will follow, as always.

The thoughts, theories, and discussions herein are predicated on those found in my latest book, Put God First: A Pocket Guide to Quality of Life in the Great Age of Excess.  Click here to read the Preface and Introduction (requires Adobe Reader 4.0 or above). 

Click here or on the above book graphic to order a signed paperback copy of Put God First for $14.95.

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the Put God First Ministry weblog via the subscription form in the sidebar to the right.  We’ll email you a download link to a free ebook edition of Put God First!  Thank you, and God bless…

This and tomorrow’s post are reprints from my former weekly column — Einstein’s Corner — in MediaPost’s Media Daily News… 

As mentioned in last week’s column, Phase II language is the language of learning, of gathering information about others and the world around us.  Expressed creativity usually takes a break (or gets squeezed out) during Phase II.

Believe it or not, up until Bill Bernbach introduced the world at large to a small bug of an automobile in the 1960s, advertising was considered an essentially quantifiable craft, even if it was quantifiable — at least according to John Wanamaker — only 50 percent of the time. Bernbach’s influence not only sparked a creative revolution, but also precipitated a concomitant decline in agency resources devoted to research. The emergence of TV as the dominant medium over print likely had a lot to do with the ascent of creative as the dominant new agency service, and just as likely a lot to do with the ubiquitous 15 percent agency commission fee that all but guaranteed exorbitant agency profits.

Fade out and fade in: We now have the exact opposite situation in the transition from demographics to psychographics as the dominant lingua franca in a widely fragmented and all but commission-free media landscape. The rapid-growth agencies of the late 1990s and early 21st century are those attuned more or less exclusively to media rather than creative, and driven largely by the Wall Street culture embodied in the primary Wall Street tool - the electronic spreadsheet.

Now it may well be that our current obsession with Phase II language — with gathering and assessing obscene amounts of information — may well reflect the simple fact that we now have the sudden technological ability to gather and assess obscene amounts of data. It’s possible that we just haven’t come to grips with our own technology-driven power yet, given the basic imperative of technology to accelerate itself and everything around it. However, it’s also possible that we never will.

So despite an occasional burst of creative talent here and there, we are still very much ensconced in Phase II language with diminishing hope of emerging from our self-imposed creative exile as time marches on. The longer we linger in the addiction-induced inertia of Phase II language, the stronger that inertia becomes and the less likely we are to find a way out, to recover our sense of balance and priorities en route. The obsessive-compulsive hunt for better ways to deliver the message will eventually leave us with nothing to say.

This is not to vilify the media mavens in our midst. This is merely my assertion that our obsessions with our own media technologies (to the near exclusion of quality creative) all but guarantee diminished return on investment (DROI). Simply stated: Advertising performance will continue to decline as bandwidth and subsequent media tonnage increase.

Our industry response thus far to the phenomenon of DROI has been entirely predictable, as are all obsessive-compulsive and addictive behaviors: more of the same — faster, smarter, better.

But the only real offset to the increased bandwidth-to-DROI equation is a re-emergence of quality creative and its eventual integration with technology-driven research, the subject of next week’s column about Phase III language: synthesis.

The thoughts, theories, and discussions herein are predicated on those found in my latest book, Put God First: A Pocket Guide to Quality of Life in the Great Age of Excess.  Click here to read the Preface and Introduction (requires Adobe Reader 4.0 or above). 

Click here or on the above book graphic to order a signed paperback copy of Put God First for $14.95.

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the Put God First Ministry weblog via the subscription form in the sidebar to the right.  We’ll email you a download link to a free ebook edition of Put God First!  Thank you, and God bless…

This and the next two posts are reprints from my former weekly column — Einstein’s Corner — in MediaPost’s Media Daily News… 

According to the book, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, by Eugene H. Peterson, language can be split into three distinct phases, each with an equally distinct function:

Phase I: Establish intimacy
Phase II: Accrue information
Phase III: Motivate and sell

Over the next few weeks, I will apply a thesis-antithesis-synthesis taxonomy to Mr. Peterson’s observations, and examine how our obsessions with and addictions to technology and the media inhibit our ability to express ourselves and apply our craft as marketers and advertisers.

Phase I
This is the primary language of Creation, awe, personal intimacy, relationships, injury, and art. The coos, wails, and pet names of infancy may be largely inarticulate and syntactically hazardous, but they serve a serious function nevertheless: to create intimacy and establish trust between child and parent.

We never truly grow out of Phase I language, however; it typically re-emerges at major transition points and crossroads in our lives, whenever we are required for whatever reason to re-examine our relationships with other individuals or the world at large. For instance, the adolescent encounter of first love (or each new love later in life) often evokes a return to Phase I pet names and for-your-eyes-only syntax in an attempt to facilitate and establish intimacy. And, as mentioned earlier, Phase I language is also the language of choice for artistic expression and knee-jerk reaction to personal injury or imminent threat.

The great paradox of Phase I language is this: The intimacy it engenders makes it–by far–the most demanding and difficult to command of the three phases, although it is almost always the single phase least in demand by others as we mature, and therefore–again by far–the least practiced as well.

Phase II
Phase II language is the language of learning, of gathering information about others and the world around us. Our success (or lack thereof) with Phase II language determines in large part how well we perform in school–and later, in the workplace.

As the antithesis of Phase I language, Phase II language is the language of adolescence, and explains how teenagers can know everything there is to know (just ask them), yet remain so passionately engaged in rejecting everything they thought they knew (aka Phase I).

In its extreme form (as it exists in today’s wholly mediated world), Phase II language is also the language of emotional retreat; it’s where we go, what we sink back into whenever we feel threatened later in life by the incursion of the emotional moment. Nowadays, we pick up a newspaper, turn on the TV or radio, or surf the Web in order to tune out of ourselves and the world at large. We confuse ourselves with the facts.

Not so coincidentally, Phase II language is the language of choice within the digital marketing and advertising industry.

Phase III
Phase III language represents the synthesis of Phases I and II. It’s the expressed sum of fact and fiction–where our dreams find sustenance and take wing, where our faith finally finds The Word.

Great motivators and great leaders employ Phase III language. It’s the synthesis we crave, the serenity of warring factions come together at long last.

There exists a delicious and deliberate tension in Phase III language. It’s the language of both sin and redemption. It’s also the language of great advertising.

The thoughts, theories, and discussions herein are predicated on those found in my latest book, Put God First: A Pocket Guide to Quality of Life in the Great Age of Excess.  Click here to read the Preface and Introduction (requires Adobe Reader 4.0 or above). 

Click here or on the above book graphic to order a signed paperback copy of Put God First for $14.95.

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the Put God First Ministry weblog via the subscription form in the sidebar to the right.  We’ll email you a download link to a free ebook edition of Put God First!  Thank you, and God bless…

From Charles Kovess‘ book Passionate People Produce…

Passion is…a sense of excitement.

What excites you?  What makes you yearn for more?  Do you see any connection between those things that excite you and God?  If so, how do they connect? 

The thoughts, theories, and discussions herein are predicated on those found in my latest book, Put God First: A Pocket Guide to Quality of Life in the Great Age of Excess.  Click here to read the Preface and Introduction (requires Adobe Reader 4.0 or above). 

Click here or on the above book graphic to order Put God First either as a signed paperback edition for $14.95, or as a downloadable ebook for $6.95.

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the Put God First Ministry weblog via the subscription form in the sidebar to the right.  Thank you, and God bless…

From Charles Kovess‘ book Passionate People Produce…

Passion is…a feeling of inspiration.

What inspires you in your life?  Do you see God in those things that inspire you?  How can you translate what inspires you into your relationship with Him?

The thoughts, theories, and discussions herein are predicated on those found in my latest book, Put God First: A Pocket Guide to Quality of Life in the Great Age of Excess.  Click here to read the Preface and Introduction (requires Adobe Reader 4.0 or above). 

Click here or on the above book graphic to order Put God First either as a signed paperback edition for $14.95, or as a downloadable ebook for $6.95.

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the Put God First Ministry weblog via the subscription form in the sidebar to the right.  Thank you, and God bless…

From Charles Kovess‘ book Passionate People Produce…

Passion is…a burning desire or hunger.

What makes you burn with desire or hunger?  Part of the key to putting God first in our lives is found in the act of decompartmentalizing Him and making our lives available to Him.  Part of the exercise is to move our thoughts about Him and relationship with Him beyond the church, synagogue, or mosque, and into the details of our daily lives.

How do you translate your passions into your relationship with God? 

The thoughts, theories, and discussions herein are predicated on those found in my latest book, Put God First: A Pocket Guide to Quality of Life in the Great Age of Excess.  Click here to read the Preface and Introduction (requires Adobe Reader 4.0 or above). 

Click here or on the above book graphic to order Put God First either as a signed paperback edition for $14.95, or as a downloadable ebook for $6.95.

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the Put God First Ministry weblog via the subscription form in the sidebar to the right.  Thank you, and God bless…

The quality of life, faith, and putting God first are all acts of commission.  How do you put God first in your life?

The thoughts, theories, and discussions herein are predicated on those found in my latest book, Put God First: A Pocket Guide to Quality of Life in the Great Age of Excess.  Click here to read the Preface and Introduction (requires Adobe Reader 4.0 or above). 

Click here or on the above book graphic to order Put God First either as a signed paperback edition for $14.95, or as a downloadable ebook for $6.95.

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the Put God First Ministry weblog via the subscription form in the sidebar to the right.  Thank you, and God bless…

From Chapter 1 of Put God First…

 …in the end our appreciation for all of the good things God gives us is measured in the amount of time and attention that we actually lavish on them, and – more important – on the amount of time and attention that we lavish on Him.  Quality requires time and attention…

Time of course is our most precious inventory. Time on this earth is our first and most valuable God-given gift, a blessing that only He can bestow and only He can rescind.  Of all the precious gifts He gives us, time is the only one we cannot replenish, the only one we cannot replace.  We can replenish our faith, replenish our health, replenish our money, and sometimes even redeem and replenish abused trust.  But once our time is gone, it’s gone forever, never to return.What does quality mean to you?

What are your thoughts?  What does quality mean to you?  Where do you find quality in your life?

The thoughts, theories, and discussions herein are predicated on those found in my latest book, Put God First: A Pocket Guide to Quality of Life in the Great Age of Excess.  Click here to read the Preface and Introduction (requires Adobe Reader 4.0 or above). 

Click here or on the above book graphic to order Put God First either as a signed paperback edition for $14.95, or as a downloadable ebook for $6.95.

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to the Put God First Ministry weblog via the subscription form in the sidebar to the right.  Thank you, and God bless…