Good question

Pete Greig writes in one of his latest newsletters:
I sometimes wonder what Adam and Eve talked about with God every evening in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. After all there was no sin to fight, no sickness to heal, no gospel to preach, no transformation of society required. Back then they did not pray to make stuff happen. They prayed because they enjoyed sharing their lives with God ? it was the most natural thing in the world. They knew that it was what they were made for.
I like that.

Survival in crises

Sometimes contents link in an interesting way. As part of my coaching training, I recently took part at the seminar on "leadership coaching and organizational development". The speaker Dieter Tappe told, inter alia, the importance of trust in an organization (which can be seen now in the banking crisis, where lack of trust between the banks intensifies the crisis). He said that only organizations that hold up a high degree of confidence can survive. His "Head of trust" included several steps (by memory)
Distrust / little confidence
1. I take you to the cleaners
2. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth
3. I scratch your back, and you scratch my back.
Trust
4. I'll give you something, but (soon) want something back
5. I'll give you something, but it is ok, if I only get it back a little later
6. I'll give you something, trust it from life and from the system to get it back.

Yesterday I spent the whole day in bed, because I had an upset stomach. I was as bad as I haven´t been for the last 15 years (food poisoning in Albania!) No more. I could barely move, keeping nothing to me, lost 1.5 kilos of body mass in one day! In the evening I called desperately a neighbor and asked her to bring me Cola, which actually helped.
Here I thought of "The Rise of Christianty" a book by Rodney Stark, a sociologist who has studied how Christianity in the first centuries spread. He mentioned among other things, the surge of Christians after the great plagues, which infested the Roman Empire. He said that during epidemics, most people did not die of the virus, but that someday they were too weak to get some food and drink (as I did yesterday!). If nobody is there, who supplies it, they simply die.
During the plagues of antiquity those who could afford it, left the city ( "Every man for himself," ; cf. level 1 of Tappe). The Christians, however, who had a different code of ethics had supplied their relatives, friends and gentiles, whose life chances have increased significantly. After epidemics, there was a percentage of a sharp increase of Christians, since less-Christians and Christians sympathizers had died. The author introduces the fact that the value system of the Christians was ultimately better for crises than those of the Gentiles - quite similar to Tappe. Very exciting idea.

Originally written by Kerstin Hack on Thursday, December 11, 2008 @ 15:40