Soul Keeping

We had the first meeting of our small group from church this week.  I am excited about what God has in store for us.  We will be meeting at our house, and my good friend Dan Kniffin, will be leading.   We will be reading Ortberg’s, Soul Keeping.  I just read the introduction and was pleased to see that much of the book will be based on discussions that Ortberg had with Dallas Willard before Willard died.  I mentioned Willard in some earlier posts when I was reading his book, The Divine Conspiracy.   Our first assignment in the small group is to define what the word “soul” means to us and to come up with three words describing our soul.  Please feel free to join in the learning along with us.  You can reply publicly or email tommiller@kw.com  privately.

US Open

The 2014 US Open finished up this week with a couple of men with low name recognition in the singles final, and Serena winning her final easily, giving her the same number of grand slam wins as Martina Navratilova and Chris Everett.  13 years ago, Caroline and I took a trip to New York to attend the US Open.  We didn’t stick around for the finals, but we did get to see Sampras/Agassi in the quarter finals.  Quite memorable.  Had we stayed for the finals, we likely would have flown out on that Tuesday.  In case you haven’t been doing the math already, that would have been 9/11/2001.   We returned three days earlier.  During our week in New York, we considered going to the World Trade Center, but decided to wait until we could bring our children back.  We never suspected that would not be an option.   For all of the terror that we experienced watching from Atlanta, I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have friends or family in the towers that day.  2980 people were killed that day – a horrific number.  The author of this article chose to focus on one – Gayle Greene.  I don’t remember seeing an HBO Special or feature length movie about Gayle Greene, but to the people who knew her personally, the story of her life is one that they will never forget.

Words Cut

Last week, I had a heated exchange with another real estate agent over an active sales situation.  She was trying to protect her client’s interests, and I was trying to protect mine.  At one point, I got very frustrated and sent a stinging email to her and copied our brokers.  That started a barrage of emails that went on for about 24 hours.  We were able to get the issue resolved, but I felt bad about my communications with her.  I elected to meet with her face to face so that I could apologize for the part I played in making the problem worse.  While I feel like great progress was made, I know that it is impossible to erase the feelings that were created in the earlier exchange.  I saw this article today which does a good job fleshing out the problem.  I hope you will read it and let me know what you think.