day 1170: One Divided By Two Equals Freedom For More

"So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law."

Today, one entity becomes two.  NewsCorp has split into the new Newscorp and the new 21st Century Fox. Newscorp keeps all of the print and digital media and Fox gets the broadcast and cable media.  Their theory being that dividing the company, the two entities will be more focused and therefore stronger than the one put together.  We will find out later today how the shareholders respond.  There is nothing new with the spinout or the splitting of a corporation, but with each of these moves what is truly desired is that the freedom from the other creates new opportunities for creativity and leverage.  In my experience what I have seen is that one of the entities will immediately flourish and one one will stay somewhat the same. In this case, we will also have to wait and see.  What we can predict is that the one that feels the greatest amount of freedom will be the one that exceeds the expectations.

When we accept and follow Jesus He frees us from the worldly being that we were before and allows us to live and flourish in His grace and love, not bound up by those laws and rules that we could never achieve or uphold anyway. Yes, in order to flourish and grow spiritually we also have to shed parts of us that are holding us back.  What we know for sure, that no one can predict in the business world, is that when we couple ourselves with Jesus we are on the right side of the growth equation. As we start this week where we as a country celebrate our freedoms we can also focus on how Christ frees us from those things that hold us back. Split and shed for freedom.  In Christ, this makes perfect, predictable and reliable sense.

Reference: Galatians 5:1 (New Living Translation)

day 692: "How Could This Have Happened?"

"An enemy has done!, the farmer exclaimed."

Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire media magnate is well known for his statement to his management team, "Bury your mistakes". It's actually not a bad strategy, if you have the money to do it, and you also take the time and energy to understand what caused the mistake in the first place so that you don't end up repeating and then burying the mistake again. But sometimes, like what is happening in the UK right now with the NewsCorp newspaper organization, the mistakes, when surfaced, can be so obvious, that all you can do is ask yourself, "How could this have happened?". There are times when the finger-pointing, deflecting and blaming doesn't do any good, and if we are honest with ourselves, we know that what happened is that we took our eye off the ball and we let something slip by us and it became a way of doing business and it really is bad when it catches up to us. NewsCorp is not the first, and won't be the last. What looks like a single mistake, like an oil well explosion, turns out to be a safety and reporting systemic problem. We all have these hidden mistakes waiting to happen, and we have to be diligent to constantly be evaluating and assessing where these weak points might be.

In the parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, the King had a legitimate excuse to what was going to be a big problem. He had an enemy who decided that the best way to thwart a successful harvest of the wheat was to fill the King's fields with seeds of weeds. When realized, they surely had to ask, "How could this have happened?" But, when the King found the reason, he didn't panic, he didn't try and cover it up, he didn't look for the scapegoat, he made the best of it and he made sure that everyone knew that for a while it was going to be ugly and unpredictable, but that at harvest time it would all work out. We need to be more like the King in our lives. The weeds are just part of our lives and there isn't anyone to blame or get angry against. Instead, it is us that we have to manage and stay positive with our lives being the example of the wheat that an can grow and thrive, even among the weeds. If we spend too much of our time and energy (both which are precious), asking "How could have this happened?", then we are not listening to the consistent and always present answer that is coming from Him.

Reference: Matthew 13:28 (New Living Testament)