Stealing another insight from Jonathan Reckford’s speech to our MPA students last week, here’s a beautiful idea on finding your calling.
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.”
The quote comes from the theologian Frederick Buechner, but this essay points to him and other authors that were new to me. Read it for a spiritual uplift and resonant ideas.
Last week in our MPA program where I teach, we had Jonathan Reckford (CEO of Habitat for Humanity International) speak to our students as our Administrator of the Year awardee. At the end of his speech, he shared a blessing that I loved but didn’t catch the attribution for. After a little digging, I was able to find it. I hope you love it as much as I do.
A Non-traditional Blessing
May God bless you with discontent with easy answers, half-truths, superficial relationships, so that you will live from deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, abuse, and exploitation of people, so that you will work for justice, equality, and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that you will reach out your hand to comfort them and to change their pain to joy.
May God bless you with the foolishness to think you can make a difference in this world, so that you will do the things which others tell you cannot be done.
If you have the courage to accept these blessings, then God will also bless you with:
happiness—because you will know that you have made life better for others
inner peace—because you will have worked to secure an outer peace for others
laughter—because your heart will be light
faithful friends—because they will recognize your worth as a person.
These blessings are yours—not for the asking, but for the giving—from One who wants to be your companion, our God, who lives and reigns, forever and ever. Amen.
Sister Ruth Fox, OSB
I’m so incredibly proud that this new legal defense fund is being hosted at University Impact. The fund’s purpose is to protect whistleblowers who call out fraudulent science, a big problem over the last few years.
“A Silicon Valley investor has pledged $1 million to help pay the legal costs of scientists being sued for flagging fraudulent research. Yun-Fang Juan, an engineer and data scientist by background, hopes the new Scientific Integrity Fund—the first of its kind—will make speaking up about wrongdoing less intimidating.”
I’m board chair and a co-founder at UI, and one of our big goals is helping philanthropic capital move more easily into needed areas like this one.
Congratulations to the UI team for making this happen. We’re also very grateful to Yun-Fang Juan for trusting UI as the place to make this happen.
Science integrity sleuths welcome legal aid fund for whistleblowers | Science.org
I was looking for estimates of how many lives have been saved by vaccines and came across this excellent article. The other inventions that rank as high as vaccines include blood transfusions, synthetic fertilizers, and toilets. The graphic visualization is also very cool.
“For most of civilized history, life expectancy fluctuated in the 30 to 40 year range…By the 20th century, an explosion in new technologies, treatments, and other science-backed practices helped to increase global life expectancy at an unprecedented rate…What were the major innovations that made the last century so very fruitful in saving lives?
These discoveries saved billions of lives | World Economic Forum