Marc's Messages 3.0

Merry Christmas!

 

My family wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! The picture shows the Dutch polder landscape as seen from our apartment in Utrecht on the two days a year we have snow. Lucky you in Montana, Canada, Finland, Austria and the indoor skiing slopes in Dubai. ;-)

Winter in Holland

A beautiful and quite rare Winter day in Holland. I took my son Peter for a walk and a pancake. More pictures here.

Reconnecting with Jasper

Had an interesting meeting with Jasper van der Kolk, who coaches people in creativity and innovation, and also pioneers a form of emerging church in Amsterdam. He just came back from Legoland, to learn the ins and outs of a form of strategy development and moderation called LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. But we talked mainly about organic networks. ;-)

Simple church in Europe

It was good to have Steve Hill, David Schäfer, Alexander Campbell and Nico-Dirk van Loo over for one and a half day to process the development of simple church networks in Europe. It was a fruitful time in which we prayed and talked through issues related to team building, cockpit research (research as a steering instrument), communication and training.

Btw, if you need a personal prophetic word for 2008, look here.

Learning from history

VPRO television started a docu series based on Geert Mak's impressive journal 'In Europe', chronicling 100 years of European history, based on many highly interesting interviews with people that personify that history today. Tonight's program was about the year 1916, the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles in human history with over one million casualties. A crazy war that drove many literally to madness, distruped hundreds of thousands of families, still impacting generations after.

It makes you wonder what the Dutchies are doing in Uruzgan - engaged in a so-called human mission, but in reality a guerilla war that's impossible to win. Same with the Americans in Iraq. Why aren't we learning from history... Btw, over the years VPRO has developed a comprehensive website with excellent historic documentaries, that links yesterday's stories to today's realities. Good stuff, worth to check out.

World history in one day

Today I joined a few Shift friends and fifty other people for a seminar with the presumptious title 'The history of the world in one day'. In just four hours and five cups of coffee Evert Jan Ouweneel took us through 5,500 years of history, from the stone tablets of Mesopotamia to the globalized currency markets of the 21st century. No new facts for a historian I have to admit (except some parts of Chinese history), but Evert Jan is an excellent teacher, and it was good to see how he told this megastory and kept his audience hooked from beginning to end.