The Visible Way begins around the frustrated dreams of regular people who are alive to their creativity and begin a journey toward expressing it. At every turn, western society in its most commercial and busy-ness, causes creatives to be stunted and thwarted in their leadership development due to having a different approach, a desired innocence, and a passionate mentality. Take these learners and seekers and add educational experience for over two decades, and you arrive with the five ordered philosophic and foundational terms that guide the visible way: global, spiritual, professional, academic, and visible. These conceptual frameworks have been interpreted into five everyday words we use to describe what we are doing while in The Visible Way, so you can easily understand and apply this to your life, church, family, band, school, or whatever.
Our community words are:
Many other ways exist for people to be free and explore their creativity together and for fulfilling life, but these five concepts, held onto and in consort with each other, make a path straight and, when enlivened by God the Holy Spirit, they are powerful.
This evening, as I write, I am mentally preparing for a worship and prayer session in about one hour in India. It will be 10 and ½ hours ahead of my time here and I am speaking at the morning celebration after an all night prayer vigil. We are together. We also have been and we are just recently able to access that truth more vividly through internet video. We are actually moving back to community with God and each other in this global understanding, as God made us together and intended that we thrive in the garden with a mutual life in and through Him.
This sums up the beginning concept of global focus. It is not that we are far away from our human brothers and sisters around the globe or in different cultural contexts near us, it is that we are actually unified with them. We are in this life together with billions of persons and we are in the kingdom of God with a billion people daily. Together. Jesus describes our unity many times as he speaks to his followers, and includes us in modern times just as much. Any thorough reading of the later chapters of the gospel of John illuminates the unity in which we are created and live as kingdom minded people.
You will read a lot about God the Holy Spirit in this book and it is because God is the Holy Spirit and likewise The Holy Spirit is God. The closeness and intimacy of God the Holy Spirit is a biblical truth and an hourly comfort to me and to the global true Church. Being inspired each moment to be your made self and align with the work of God is a spiritual discipline and joy.
I accentuate the third person of the trinity of God as God the Holy Spirit is the actual closest friend we have – not God the Father or Jesus Son of God – and who has been stationed near us and all around us since the time of the incarnation, Pentecost to be exact, and we should take care too acknowledge his presence minute by minute in our lives. Again, this inspiration comes when we notice and noticing takes practice.
Becoming proficient at music is time consuming. It is said (Malcolm Gladwell popularized it) that a person needs 10,000 hours to become an expert in a thing. When the mystery is pulled back and we see that The Beatles didn’t just write a few albums of all number one songs in a row but they worked tirelessly for little money practicing their craft, we see a key ingredient to a successful life is drive. I seek this internal engine in new students, record label artists, friends, companions, and myself. To be professional is to find your drive. Skill is important but drive always wins when harnessed.
Many people believe you cannot create drive and I do believe people have different “gears” in how they run their lives. Drive definitely does not always mean fast. Some real drivers are persistent and strong in their drive. Think about the drive in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for instance. He was not a flash in the pan, but like many others who fight for noble causes, he got up every day for years and pushed the momentum forward, through unbearable odds. Drive is something you can develop but you have to notice its presence or absence and hunger a little bit for it to come. The enemy of drive is often comfort.
Human beings are never done learning. I expect that the day I pass into the remaining eternal life and time, whether untimely in earth terms or in some distant place of care, I will learn something from someone that day. I hope so. To learn and to change requires focus. Although I’m not a focus champion (as an entrepreneur and visionary I can jump to the next thing easily), I built in the academic component to my life through the establishment of an accredited college and the system of training that is constantly around us in the record label or just in my household.
“Academic” comes from early thinkers having a place to study and a course of instruction. It has come to (unfortunately too often) resonate as a place of no practical use, but this would be wrong in the true etymology, with philosophers dealing with the whole person and learning how to think and act with wisdom and knowledge. Focus (“from the eyes”) brings a concentrated point to the academic pursuit – a vision appointed to the system.
