That's Not Me

Can we just say thanks to everyone?

Popcorn, coffee, greeters, technical people, band.

We are lucky.

And we're lucky for people who are flexible because we have changed a lot of things for this month.

And so thank you to everyone for being flexible.

Okay.

Oh, actually, I'll give you an update.

Have you guys looked in the sanctuary?

You can ignore the sign.

Bryce, for you, the sign does not apply.

You're just like, I'm Bryce does not apply to me.

Go in, take a look.

Uh, that's they've taken a third of the scaffolding out of there already.

But the place is packed full.

The painting people think they'll be done on time.

Uh, then they have to put everything back in place, rewire it, and then clean it.

Cleaning is gonna take 600 years, I think.

I don't know.

I'm not a cleaner person, but okay.

This series is called Shelf Life Books That Have Changed Me.

This book.

It's interesting, Craig.

Where's Craig?

He just walked away.

I just literally saw him.

Something about how he started that last song.

I was like, yes, that.

There's moments when something just shifts everything.

And for me, it shifted the entire purpose of the Christian story.

For those of you who didn't grow up in the church, this maybe doesn't make sense, but for those of you who did, you know those feelings of kind of like the weight of the journey.

You're a sinner.

You're bad.

You should feel guilty.

You should feel shame.

And I grew up in this way of looking at the story, and it's like because I grew up with that, that's all I could see.

But this book helped shift everything for me.

And I want to share the book by way of a Bible story.

There's a story of David and Goliath.

Does anyone know the story of Dave and Goliath?

Heard of David and Goliath?

Put up your hands so I can see it big.

Okay, everyone's heard of David and Goliath.

It's a metaphor now, right?

Goliath is the big bad guy.

David's the little guy.

So that's how it starts.

The story is two, there's a champion for the bad guys.

And if these, if the good guys can beat that champion, they win.

The bad guy's champion is like seven foot whatever giant.

So everyone's scared.

Crapless.

Keep it PG for the kids.

David walks up and says, wait a second.

It's not right that that person goes unchallenged.

It's not right that we will go into servitude because no one is brave enough to fight him.

But as you know, David's the runt.

He's a little guy.

He's a shepherd.

So yeah, he's fought some wild animals.

He thinks he's all like top gun here.

He's like, oh, he killed a animal, wild animal one time.

It's like, yeah, that's a giant.

Not really applicable skills.

But he thinks he can do it.

So what they do is they take David and trying to protect him, they put every bit of armor they can find on the kid.

Because they're like, he's going against a giant.

This guy's going to get destroyed.

We're going to get we're going to lose.

This is going to go bad.

David's sitting down where they're putting on the armor.

He can't even stand up.

The armor weighs so much.

They got a sword on his back that he can't lift.

It's like, you know, dragging the sword to the tip of the ground.

I'm going to go fight a giant like this.

And he says the line, and this is the line I want you to hear.

This is not me.

This way of fighting.

This way of being here in this moment.

It's not me.

It's not how I do things.

It's not in alignment with me.

Have you felt that weight of trying to live as somebody else?

If you ask me to tear apart our condo and renovate everything, I'm motivated.

You ask me to clean a bathroom?

It's like I got 6,000 pounds of armor on me.

I'm like, I can't get off the couch.

Why is that?

There's things at work.

You're like, man, you can send me that every day.

Bryce was talking about one.

Someone gave him some obscure, random, really hard task.

He's like fired up.

Me?

I get to work on that.

Something else.

It's like, oh, that's not me.

Now, what we often do is we we say, well, no, no, no, you should be able to do that.

You should want to do that.

Cleaning, I don't know.

For all you cleaners out there, somehow you have a spiritual gift that I do not have.

I don't know how you'll do it.

It's like once you clean it, it just starts getting dirty immediately.

And then you clean it again, and then it keeps getting and oh, kill me now.

What are those things in your life, in your job, in your relationships, that just feel like you're carrying 6,000 pounds of armor on it?

You have no motivation.

Just drudgery.

Pain.

And society tells us we shouldn't think this way.

But what if what if there's something profoundly spiritual in that line?

This is just not me.

This is where it shifted for me.

The book for today is called Strengths Finders.

Has anyone ever heard of that book?

Just put up your hands so I can get a good sense of it.

Few of you, very few of you.

Strengths Finders essentially has a premise.

And I'll show you the premise through my life.

So when I was a kid, I didn't know I needed glasses.

I can't see very well without my glasses.

So there's this sport called baseball.

Does anyone ever heard of the baseball?

They take this hard little thing that you can hardly see, and then they fire it right at you.

And you're supposed to somehow be able to catch that in a glove.

Without my glasses, I can see when it leaves someone's hand, and then it just kind of turns into like a big blurry thing.

I remember my dad going, not believing me.

So he's like, okay, you're gonna learn this, kid.

I'm gonna teach you how to play baseball.

So he's he gets on the other side of the yard, he takes this thing and he whacks the ball up in the air.

And I remember seeing the ball.

This is like I still remember it.

I'm like, I don't know, eight.

I still can see the ball go flying up, and then it just kind of goes into mist.

And I do one of these.

I can't see it.

So I'm hoping that I figured out the trajectory as it comes up, and somehow I put my glove in the way.

It's like this like and then the last second, I just hear it smoke me right in the eye.

Just I still hear the thump in my head.

I got this big black eye, my gloves still up like this.

I'm laying on the ground, my dad's like, Well, why didn't you catch it?

I can't see it.

I decided I was gonna try and get better at baseball.

So I joined a league.

I would get up to bat and you'd see the pitcher do one of these.

And then they just kind of like, and meanwhile, I'd be going like this.

Did I hit it?

They put me the furthest outfield that they could.

The coach said, put your body in front of it.

I've been doing that my whole life.

I keep getting black eyes.

This is the dumb sport.

Okay, contrast that with this.

And I don't mean to brag, but for whatever reason, math makes sense to me.

Like the world is math.

You know that you know those word problems from school where you know a train leaves Chicago and another train leaves uh New York, and then one has a cannon on it and it shoots a bomb, and another one has another thing.

I can solve that in about 10 seconds.

Just so you know, a lot of you are twitching right now of like this like, oh, math.

You give me a math problem.

I still remember the kinematics equations.

It took me no effort.

Now, here's where Strength Finders comes in.

If I have a limited amount of energy and time in my life, which place should I put it in my life?

If I put it towards catching a ball, how much better do you think I'm gonna get?

Just yell at an answer.

Very little, negative amounts.

I literally could practice baseball for the rest of my life, and not only would I not make the oh, what's the name of the official uh baseball league?

Major League Baseball.

Major League Baseball, thank you.

It's so traumatizing, I just like avoided.

I could spend my entire life trying, and maybe I could maybe catch the ball without getting a black eye.

If I put that same amount of effort into math, what do you think would happen?

Strengths Finder says this.

We have weaknesses and we have strengths.

If you put the same amount of energy into your weaknesses, you will gain a little bit.

A very little bit.

If you put that same amount of energy toward your strengths, you have a massive shift.

A massive shift.

David is sitting there going, I have 6,000 pounds of armor on me.

How long do you think it's gonna take him to get big enough to be able to not only carry that armor into battle, fight all day in that armor?

As a tall, skinny guy, I'm telling you, you can spend your entire life trying to get bigger.

It's not gonna happen.

Finally, he says, This isn't me.

I can't do it this way.

So he takes all the armor off.

He grabs a sling.

So a sling is basically a string with a pocket and another string.

Huge shift in military fighting.

He walks towards Goliath on the way, he grabs a few stones, sticks it in his sling, puts a few in his pocket, stands far enough away from Goliath so Goliath can't get his hands on him.

Kills Goliath in one shot.

Slinging is incredibly difficult.

You have to be able to do an incredible amount of math to figure out where's the sling, where do I have to release it?

But if you're good at slinging, the amount of energy you can generate and put into hurting your opponent is insane.

Question.

Are you going through life carrying your proverbial armor, trying to do things through your weaknesses?

Or are you going through life using a sling?

I am good at this.

I can solve problems this way.

Think about that for a moment.

How much of your motivation, the weight of life, the way it feels like things aren't working, is you going, no, no, no, I'm trying to do life in a way that's just not me.

What if you just shift?

Look at life through a different lens.

I was thinking about a parent.

As somebody who um empathy is not necessarily a natural innate strength for me.

We'll call that a weakness.

For those of you who are laughing, please keep it to yourselves.

How much of parenting, how much empathy would I need to be a good parent?

I would need some, right?

But you know what I'm really good at with my nieces and nephew?

Having fun.

I can turn anything into a game, I can turn anything into a competition, I can turn anything into anything.

What if I was a parent, and I guess I am a parent, a stepparent, my 30-year-old stepchildren?

What if you looked at through this lens?

What if instead of trying to figure out how do I become the perfect empathetic person?

Ask yourself, how could I do this using my strengths?

Now, this is the part where you say to me, Vince, that's nice.

That's all fine and good.

You're talking about how we handle life.

But there's a reason I use the David and Goliath story.

What if our spiritual journey uses the same principle?

What if our spiritual journey is about finding our strengths and utilizing them to make the world a better place?

Instead of focusing on our weaknesses.

This is the part where I like Craig's kind of line.

Now, for those of you who grew up in the church or grew up with church background, probably you're thinking something in your head.

But wait a second.

Isn't the Christian story all about like we're we missed the mark, we sinned, we did bad things, and we need a savior?

That's what Emily said this morning.

Uh duh, we needed a savior because we're bad.

So wouldn't the Christian story be about working on my weaknesses because I'm fundamentally a weak person?

And that's how I grew up with the Christian story.

Vince, find your weaknesses and fix them.

That's your journey.

And I wondered why my spirituality felt like that 6,000-pound weight of armor.

When strength finders came into my life, it said, What if you look at the Christian story through the David and Goliath lens?

Not focused just on our weaknesses, but focusing on our strengths.

Now, if you say there is weaknesses, there's part of it, yeah, that's part of our tradition.

There's a story of Jesus, him and his um I was gonna say enemies, that's too strong of a word.

There's a bunch of people who don't really like him very much.

And so they're having a conversation about how you should do the spiritual journey.

And they do it by finding a woman who's currently sleeping with someone who's not her husband.

We don't know where the guy is, but they catch the woman.

Do you know the story?

They're like about the the law says she should stone her.

Jesus says, Whoever is without sin cast the first stone.

You ever heard that line?

It's from this story.

When no one throws a stone, the woman comes to Jesus and says, What happened?

I f like I thought this was over.

And he said, No.

Go and sin no more.

Isn't that the story of the Christian journey then?

Go and sin no more.

Stop being weak.

Stop doing the things you shouldn't do.

Focus there.

The interesting part of that story is actually, I don't think the story is about the woman.

I think the story is about Jesus.

What do you do when a bunch of people use religious rules to justify hurting somebody else?

And what's Jesus' strength?

First rebuttal.

But finding a third way to handle it.

He didn't say the law is wrong, he didn't say the law is right.

He said, Whoever is without sin, cast the first stone.

He used his strength to save a woman's life.

What if the spiritual journey is about finding your strengths and using them to take care of, to support, to build a better world?

We call it taking water.

What if that's the focus?

That's what Strengths Finder said to me.

If we spend all of our energy working on our weaknesses, the stuff that we do bad, we make this much difference.

This is me in the baseball, right?

How much effort could I put into baseball and get better?

I could put my entire life into it and I would get a little bit better.

But my strengths.

Your brain should probably be saying, But Vince, what about my weaknesses?

And Strengths Finders has an answer to that too.

They said, Yeah, you need to deal with your weaknesses, but here's how you think of them.

Put the least amount of effort you can possibly put into them so that they don't hamstring you.

That's a different way of looking at it, isn't it?

Put the least amount of effort.

Actually, don't hamstring you.

I already said that I'm not good at empathy.

I'm actually feelings in general are always been a bit challenging for me.

So when I was going through my divorce, I had more feelings than I prefer to deal with.

Like a lot more.

And so I have these crazy amounts of feelings, and I have very little skill in dealing with big feelings.

The old model said I should become better at it.

Strengths Finder says, What if you use your strengths?

You know what I'm really good at?

Focusing on an outcome.

So I started training for triathlons.

I would train six, ten, fifteen hours a week.

You know what you do while you're training for trathlons?

You move your body a lot.

And you have a lot of time to sit.

You know what that helps you do?

Feel a little bit of your feelings at a time.

Someone who's good at dealing with big feelings maybe could have worked through this in weeks.

For me, it took a lot of Ironmans, a lot of ultramarathons.

But it was a way I could do it, using my strengths.

Our tradition is full of stories like this.

David and Goliath, David uses his strengths.

Esther, she uses her beauty.

Moses' father-in-law uses his skill in navigating groups of people.

Jesus uses his idea of this third-way idea, finding a way between the black or white.

No, no, it's gray right here.

Paul, rhetorician, uses his strengths to navigate and explore his spiritual journey.

And so my question for you is this what if you looked at your spiritual journey through your strengths?

Instead of your weaknesses?

People say to me, Oh, If you want me to pray every day, oof.

And they come to me and they'll say, Vince, I'm gonna start reading the Bible every day.

And I am like, Do you like reading the Bible?

No, I hate it.

Is there something else?

In your spiritual journey that you love?

Yeah.

I love getting together with my friends, creating gatherings that are nurturing and fulfilling.

Or I like going into nature and walking.

I like seeing it in the complexity of the world through science and math, physics.

Could it be that we can explore our spiritual journey through that?

Now, yes, we need to deal with our weaknesses, but the least amount of effort so they don't hamstring us.

And then put the effort into our strengths.

Okay, God doesn't like that.

Not sure what happened.

So let me ask you.

What are your strengths?

Are you good at math?

Are you good at catching a ball?

Are you good at putting colors together?

Are you good at putting systems together?

Are you good at putting spaces together that feel warm and lush?

We have people in our community who have strengths that are using them as part of their spiritual journey.

Troy works for on our team.

He's a logistical genius.

I'm qualified to analyze these things as a genius.

Oh, wait, let me finish the story.

Troy and his partner Brad volunteer time, but Troy specifically rosters hundreds of volunteers to go down onto the Stampede Grounds and sell tickets for the Dream Home, which raised last year three-quarters of a million dollars for charity.

Now we can applaud.

Using his strengths is part of his spiritual journey.

We have another person in our community who is good at selling things in the marketplace.

This is not a skill I have.

She's good at it.

Someone in her building was overwhelmed and said, I'm just gonna get rid of all my stuff.

I'm moving and I'm just gonna dump it.

I just like, I don't care.

She's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Let me help you.

No, no, no, no.

I'll get rid of it.

No, no, let me help you.

She raised$7,000 for that woman on marketplace.

That's a strength.

Come on, people.

Think about your strengths.

Now I know in your mind, because you're looking at me like I got no strengths.

Oh, you do.

Some people, anything mechanical you touch, you can fix.

Some people create music that inspires us.

Some people create organizational structures that make Friends Church work.

Some of us navigate people.

What are your strengths?

What shifted for me was this idea of my spiritual journey was what overcoming my weaknesses.

Stop doing bad things, stop doing this, stop doing that.

That was my tradition growing up.

Strengths Finder said if we put effort into our weaknesses, very little changes.

But when we put effort into our strengths, disproportionate growth.

This made me shift the direction of Friends Church.

Many years ago we were focused on this.

You're not good enough.

You didn't do this right.

That's bad.

This book, this idea, this concept made me re-look at the Bible, and I kept seeing story after story of people using their strengths to make a difference.

Their strengths to make a difference.

And I asked, what are my strengths?

So as we leave here on this hot day, because the temperature's climbing in here, all you were out stampeding last night till late.

I'm sorry.

As you leave here today, here's what I want you to reflect on.

What are my strengths?

What is just easy for me?

What doesn't feel like 600 pounds of armor?

Feels like light and fun and joy.

And how do I how do I harness that in my life?

To do beautiful things.

And what if what if we made that the core of the spiritual story we're a part of?

We call it taking water.

But underneath is a logic that says taking water does not come from focusing only on our weaknesses and trying to make them better.

No, we fix them only as much as we need to.

And then we take our strengths.

And we change the world.

If you're wondering how is the I have strengths, but they're not applicable in any way, they're not spiritual, challenge accepted.

Email me, vince at friendschurch.ca.

I will show you how you can connect them.

If you're partnered, if you're with friends, if you're with other people, ask them as you leave today, what do you think my strengths are?

Ask them, how could I use those strengths to take water to our world?

Sometimes we get locked in our heads.

It's like all I can see is, oh no, that's not good.

Sometimes we're stuck here.

We just live in a world of weaknesses, right?

Your job, everything is this, the What if you moved here?

What if you parented here?

What if the next time your kid brings home a report card, instead of looking at the one thing that they're not good at?

English.

What if you looked at their strengths?

90 in that, 90 in that, 90 in that.

But what do we want to look at?

We want to look at weaknesses.

But if strength finders is right, they're not going to get much better at that.

But put it towards their strengths.

Do it with your partner.

Ask yourself, what are their strengths?

Weaknesses are easy because you can feel it, right?

Oh, you didn't do that right.

Oh, you didn't, oh, you didn't pick that up.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Put that aside.

Remember Gottman?

Five positive for everyone negative?

If you have a partner, look at their strengths.

What do they do well?

What do they do well that feeds you?

Thank them for it.

Do you see how when we shift into this way of thinking, it's like all parts of our lives change.

You can go into work and say, you know what, this just isn't me.

But if you let me do it through my strengths, as you leave here today, I want you to think of two things.

What are my strengths?

And how can I use those strengths to take water to the world?

The book Strengths Finders, it changed the whole Christian story for me.

It changed the trajectory of what I thought we were even trying to do.

It changed how we do friend church, why we do friend church.

I hope it'll change you in the same way.

I hope you'll just look through your life and say, this is why I'm motivated.

Because I'm using my strengths.

And this is why I'm demotivated.

This feels like there's signs from the gods today, isn't it?

I think that one was a positive one.

The lighting, I don't know which way to go on that one, but that one feels positive.

Folks, as you leave here today, there's more popcorn.

Please get some more salt.

It's good for your soul.

I don't know, but it is.

If there's a doctor in here, just don't hear what I just said.

May we live in our strengths.

And may those strengths change the world around us for the better.

Amen.

Hell yes.

Have a great week, everybody.