Work

Business and…

Standard

If you read the About Cerulean Sanctum tab at the top of the blog, you’ll eventually discover that I work from our home outside Cincinnati, Ohio, as a freelance business copywriter and copyeditor. The Web’s been devoid of that reality for quite some time.

I’ve struggled for about eighteen months attempting to get my biz site online. I wanted portal management software to create the site, Ethereal Pen Productionsbut I either got massive nuclear overkill or anemic, prissy code with an attitude. I committed to Joomla!, but its templating system favored graphic designers and code noodlers. With it perpetually in flux between two or three incompatible versions, I finally threw in the towel. In what must be considered massive irony and good fortune, version 2.1.x of WordPress included far better handling of static pages than previous versions (a former showstopper for me), so I took the plunge. The wraps came off the site yesterday. It still needs some tweaking, especially graphics-wise, but I like the lean look.

So, Ethereal Pen Productions finally lives on the Web. You’re invited to critique.

Better yet, if you need anything written, let me know. My kid needs braces.

And…

I’m still recovering from the blowback from Monday’s post, Dissing Discernment. I think all the principle players in the comments have made up. I know now not to juggle five things at once while replying to comments, so even this old diehard learned a few things from the whole conversation.

I didn’t know I was posting anything so controversial, but the whole topic’s a lightning rod. I suspect that’s one reason so few books on the topic exist. Tim Challies should sell a million copies when his discernment tome comes out. Or people will burn piles of it in the town square. You never know. (Maybe just in Canada. They’ve been testy ever since Gretzky fled.)

Whatever the case, blogging will be light in days ahead due to tax prep and deadlines on several writing assignments.

And…

If you’ve got a blog, check your bandwidth. I found a huge spike in my outgo this February. Lucky for me, I’m nowhere maxed out on my five domains. Still, Cerulean Sanctum drowned in bandwidth warning messages toward the end of last month, forcing me to re-apportion things.

So I did a little snooping and found something throttling my site: Yahoo! Slurp.

When I sent a message to Yahoo! asking about the sevenfold increase in the number of daily hits from them compared to the previous month, they told me they’d been experimenting with a plethora of new page-sucking bots and had been hitting some sites hard.

Well, no thank you very much! Fortunately for me, I’ve got some leeway. Nonetheless, their little experiment doubled my bandwidth outgo! (That’s not easy to do, either.) I can imagine that some sites that pay by the byte will receive a nasty little bill from Mr. Host courtesy of the crew from Sunnyvale. I guess the Yahooligans thought they could pick on me because I used to live there, but fled. (Heck, Gretzky got out of California, too!)

A heads up to all of you.

Be blessed…and be wary!

The Church of Gil Gunderson

Standard

Recently, I spoke with a young man who possesses a rare gift. Though he knew he had the gift, he didn’t see it for what it was, deciding to pursue other avenues rather than let his gift take him in a logical direction. Now that he’s burned out other options, he’s regretting all the choices he made that diverted him off the path his gift created for him. He’s not sure he can get back on the path, confessing that getting off it was perhaps the most lunkheaded thing he’s done in his life.

You can see the regret painted over his face.

I saw his train wreck coming. Everyone who knows him did. I’ve prayed for him a few times since. I believe he’ll be okay in the end. Though I thought he blew it at the time, I’m encouraged that he’s wised up. Most guys his age would’ve taken years to come to their senses. His confession holds out hope he’ll be able to turn his bad choice around.

Few topics nag at men more than this one: What might have been.

In contrast to the young man I just mentioned, I know dozens of men who thought they knew the best way to go, only to find the path dead-ending after years of travel. Most of the time, it’s a career cul-de-sac. They got into a particular line of work and it vanished, went overseas, proved soul-killing, demanded moral compromise, or some other unimagined outcome. Now they don’t know what to do.

I feel for these guys. No one knows what to tell them.

I’ve written page upon page here at Cerulean Sanctum about the invisible nature of our employment. Invisible, at least, to the Church in America. Sure, maybe once every five years you’ll hear a sermon about how to be a good employee, but most preachers never examine the nature of work itself and how it impacts the soul—especially when it all goes wrong.

Nothing we do in a day competes with work for the sheer amount of time consumed. Despite this, I suspect that in most Christian households, work alters more of the way we live than anything else, even more than our confession of Christ.

Untrue? Well, check how everything in our day revolves around work, even our devotional lives. If Christ were all that important, our work would be a blip in the day compared to how we live out our discipleship. A look at the typical family will tell otherwise. It’s almost impossible to separate our jobs from even the the most minute aspects of our lives.

Which is why the man who finds himself in a dead-end job or habitually unemployed in his “peak earning years” presents such a difficult puzzle.

I used to enjoy The Simpsons. One of the recurring characters is Gil Gunderson, a parody of the Jack Lemmon character in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. The running gag with Gil concerns his series of humiliating jobs and the utter desperation that surrounds him like a haze. He’s always hoping that the next deal’s the one that will save him, but instead we see him reduced to so much human grist for the corporate mill.

I know plenty of guys like Gil. They wake up one day and realize their one chance at the brass ring passed them by years ago.

Some try to reinvent themselves. I saw this in spades out in Silicon Valley. When the Internet bubble first showed signs of bursting, companies ditched gobs of forty-something guys, the ones who did all the dirty work in the startup days but earned a few too many cost of living increases. How did these guys respond? They all became consultants. The Valley teemed with consultants of all kinds, each little guy desperate to find his one tiny morsel in the limited consultancy pot. They’d crow about how they empowered themselves, but you knew every single one was sweating blood at night praying some company would rescue them out of the hell of making $5,000 a year as a “consultant.”

Next stop, real estate. Then what?

I hear they’re hiring for the crab boats.

You find a lot of these guys in the ministry, too. When they were young, nothing fit, and the ministry looked like the only option. They end up hanging around for decades, their ministry amounting to a mound of legumes.

On the other hand, you’ve got some guys with a calling bigger than the planet, yet one church after another treats them like bubble gum stuck to the bottom of their congregational shoe. They wind up pincushions for whatever the pitchfork-toting natives dream up.

I feel for both. I feel for all men discouraged in their work, ministry or not.

I’ll probably never understand in this life why this happens to decent guys who work hard. I got an e-mail today from a guy talking about how bosses praise and praise till their oxygen runs low, gushing over the unmatched skills of the one receiving praise, yet the praisee’s the first one pink-slipped after Conglomo Corporation suffers a less than stellar quarter. And for what reason? Who knows? Guys who muddle through this never find out.

What can the Church do for the Gils of this world? How can we help?

I think about this nearly every day. My wife and I have discussed starting a ministry that meets the needs of people in just this fix, but we never get any clear direction on how to start. Nebulous social issues resist change simply because framing their limits proves so difficult.

What do you do for a fifty-year-old autoworker who’s been one all his life but discovers himself on the unemployment line with no one hiring? What’s he going to transition into?

Again, back in my Silicon Valley days, I saw plenty of guys burnout in their careers, yet somehow they found a way to start a completely different one. After years of watching some Midwest guys try the same thing, I now understand how the Silicon Valley guys successfully segue from the boardroom to handmaking bicycles in Marin: They’re filthy rich.

Sadly, that assembly line guy isn’t rolling in the kind of cash that allows him to self-finance his whim. So I don’t know what to tell him.

The stock market drop spooked people. Not much of a drop as I saw it, but that jittery look’s returning to some faces. The Cincinnati Business Courier is sponsoring a symposium for business leaders on how to prepare for the looming U.S. economic disaster. Talk about inspiring positive energy!

I want to help men left wondering what might have been, the Gils of the world. I think we in the Church need to get our collective acts together to brainstorm this issue because it’s only going to get worse. Greenspan dropped the word “recession” the other day and, despite the fact he’s no longer the Fed Chairman, grown men soiled themselves.

It’s bad enough we’re minting Gils. (Look around. They may seem invisible, but they exist in numbers too large to ignore.) Now imagine a country filled with them.

What’s the American Church’s response?

Knowing Which Way the Wind Blows

Standard

(Warning: This post relies on many of the talking points in a previous post on the economy, "Politics, Economics, and the American Church." It may help to read that post first.)

I'm a dedicated reader of The Wall Street Journal. It's been the newspaper of record for me for about six years now, about the only newspaper that's both written for thinking adults AND not given to populating its staff with people burdened with agendas (*cough* Gray Lady *cough*).

But lately, the economic reporting at the WSJ resembles a hundred people sticking their wet fingers in the wind, each with a unique perspective on its ultimate direction. In the aftermath of the holiday buying orgy, that's ominous.

Long-time readers know that I discuss economic issues here at Cerulean Sanctum regularly. And one of my regular types of posts is my warning that the Church in America is woefully prepared for an economic meltdown. I remember 1999-2004 very well, but it seems that few others do. That recession was only a warning shot across the bow. But just as 9/11 did nothing to swell the ranks of our church rolls, we American Christians appear to have learned nada from that last recession.

After the trouncing the Republicans received just months ago, leading conservatives scratched and scratched their heads, blaming the defeat on everything except the economy. In fact, they thought their trump card was the strength of the economy. Yet I noted that in close races Democrats who eked out wins over Republicans in states that went to Bush universally ran as economic isolationists. Another Great Depression?People voted for politicians they thought could protect their jobs, keep our trade deficit in check, and who understood that all this talk of free trade is little more than hot air at the expense of the guy just trying to keep his head above water.

If I was wrong on that assessment back in mid-November, Christmas buying would tell.

Well, I've been noting the retail misery index in recent weeks, and as I expected, retailers are calling Christmas 2006 a bust. Yes, online retailers did better than in previous years (I'll get into that in a second), and so did luxury retailers. Yet for just about everyone else, Santa brought a lump of coal. Discounters saw their traditional base grow even cheaper, while mid-level department stores are already claiming the St. Valentine Day Massacre got moved up to St. Nicholas Day.

As for the luxury retailers, those folks with salaries in the top one percent have enjoyed close to a 20 percent increase in earnings since 2004. Given that happy days are here again for the financial elite, should we be surprised they're snapping up the latest special-edition Swarovski chandeliers for their yachts?

But for the rest of us 99 percent, we're slumming at around a three percent rate of salary growth in the face of 50 percent increases in energy prices in some markets, not to mention still-atmospheric gas prices. Did anyone else notice that prices for petroleum-based plastic items this Christmas were up 15 to 30 percent?

Which explains to me why online retailers finally did well this year–better to shop online than blow a ton on gas money driving around shopping. But even that doesn't explain it all.

I've been shopping online since 1994. I suspect that puts me in that top one percent of online shoppers. This Christmas, I purchased almost nothing online. Why? The prices were worse than brick and mortar stores. In all my years of online shopping, I can't recall that being the case. Shipping prices were up (obviously), but so were online retail prices in general. In years past, the big guns like Amazon and Buy.com killed the B&Ms in price. Not this year. In fact, this year the little niche players online had it all over the big guys, yet it was the big guys claiming 2006 filled their coffers.

So yes, the gas situation drove some of that. I also think that this may have been the year when the reticent Internet shopper loss his reticence. But as for us, three Christmases ago our front porch looked like an Amazon loading dock. This year, I bought nothing from Amazon at all.

In fact, in our extended family, both sides cut back on spending. Three years ago, my son alone got $250 worth of gifts. This year, I spent less than that on the sum total of our gift giving—for the eighteen people on our list. And one side of our family is already asking to cut back even more for next year.

Like I said in this post, our economy is not in good shape and no one seems to get it. Or at least they didn't before the day after Christmas. 

Economists raved about the fabulous growth we had in 2006, though the actual percentage of growth has been repeatedly revised downward from 2.8 percent to 2.0 over the course of the year. A couple years ago, the same sources deemed Japan's 1.2 percent growth "miserable," yet here we are with our 2.0 percent growth in this astonishing period of blissful wealth. Last time I checked though, wealthy people didn't proclaim, "Hey, we need to spend even less money on Christmas."

Still, the economic news continued its wonderfulness all through December. However, the day after Christmas, the WSJ, the loudest of the wonderfulness trumpeters the last two years (even as its business pages told of company after company laying off employees, and its biz reporters wondered at the dearth of IPOs since 2004), announced that major economists predict another recession—soon.

Wow. A recession. From nowhere!  

Six years ago, the majority of families we knew were single-income. Now, virtually none of them are. Yet if you ask these now-double-incomers if they're better off financially, you'll get two sets of bared teeth and a collective growl.

What continues to bug me is that we Christians aren't doing anything to prepare for the economic bottom falling out of America. From what the car rags say, Ford and GM (who were smarting for certain last December even with their employee pricing ruse) sold a grand total of three cars between the two companies this December. And China's set to introduce its first car line in America. If China starts dumping cheap cars here, you can bet that it won't only kick Ford and GM in the shins, it will force every car company in the world to ramp up building plants in China in order to compete. That means they won't be building more here. Few of us understand how much of our shaky economy depends on car manufacturers. The Church sure doesn't.

The sum total of all the millions of sermons preached in America in 2006 probably didn't include a half dozen talking about how to prepare the Church and its people for dark economic days. We've got virtually nothing in place to help folks find work. We don't fight for economic justice for the poor. So when its the middle class asking, "Buddy, can you spare a dime?" who's going to fight for us?

Where are the Christian leaders out there who can talk on this issue of economics in America? Who works with big corporations to bring godly justice for overworked, underpaid people? Who's calling companies on the carpet for paying failed CEOs of large multinationals golden parachutes of a quarter billion dollars or more? Money doesn't grow on trees, so someone lost money out of his pocket so that some corporate failure could gild his lillies while he waits for the next board of suckers to come around. How much more are you paying in medical expenses this year while the CEO of United Healthcare walks off with a billion dollars?

I keep hoping that each year's going to be the one when we smarten up. I'm beginning to see that the best we Christians seem to be able to do on this issue is react—and too late at that.

What is it going to take for us to get wise?