This is Dave Egger’s novelisation of his screenplay adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are which ran in the New Yorker last week.
The film, directed by Spike Jonze, is out later this year.
Below is a post from the always great Youth Specialties blog.
It’s a personal and poignant post and, as someone who is in Christian leadership, I totally get where the author is coming from.
Having said that, I don’t (re)post this with a spirit of self-pity. While I’m sure all leaders feel like this at times, I count myself very blessed to minister along side Louis, Sue, and Dan (and until recently Rach) as well as a stunningly good team of volunteers. They are not only fantastic co-workers but some of my best friends. God has been very good to me.
Anyway please read this and pray for those in leadership. We need it!
Being a leader isn’t always easy. Sometimes you feel like there’s nobody you can talk to that really “gets it.”
Often times it’s extremely lonely. People can think you’re too busy to join in on something they’re doing so they never ask. Other times when they do it gets weird because you turn into the “answer man” - or even worse nobody talks about everyday life because they feel like they need to have some deep spiritual conversation because you’re there. Regardless, you feel on the outside of things.
Leadership is busy. Very true, however we can often feed this perception because we like “being busy.” There’s something inside us that likes a ton of phone calls, a lot of emails and voice mails. We feel wanted - or needed. But then this eventually wears off and you dread the emails and phone calls. You start to shut off your phone more, you may even put on an automatic email reply just so you don’t have to reply immediately. In other words, once you actually are really busy you wish you weren’t so much.
Leadership has some real dangers. There are many, but I’ve been thinking about one danger that I wanted to address here. As a leader our mind and mouth are used a lot. We think and pray through things and then communicate the vision of where we feel like God is taking us. The danger in this? When our mouth’s are used to such a capacity our ears can often shut down, or at least tune other voices out. This is very dangerous for a leader (or anyone). We think we always have something to say when in fact the truth is we should probably be listening more than speaking.
May we be humble, having ears to hear what God is saying - directly to us personally and through the mouth’s of others…
Warning!! (super) nerdery to follow:
I think futura has to be my favourite typeface. Its so clean and minimalist:
Wes Anderson uses it brilliantly in all of his movies:
CORRECTION: The font above is Helvetica not Futura! (As pointed out by philipallenphoto in the comments)
And stupidly Ikea is changing it for Verdana. Fools!
via lonelysandwich
via kottke.org who got them from a twitter trend here’s a selection of pretty funny new collective nouns
a conspiracy of theorists
an array of geeks
a melancholy of goths
an argument of lawyers
a tantrum of 2 year olds
an ego of divas
a timberyard of prospective authors
a dwindle of voters
a yummy of mummies
a priori of assumptions
an immigration of bnp leaders
Click here for a wee spotify mix of songs Ive been listening to this morning. (The link should open spotify so you’ll, of course, need spotify for it to work).
There’s no theme or really any order. The tracks are:
