This is one of the entrances to my neighborhood. You pass a bulky manufacturing building on your way in.

Our neighborhood is a modest, planned community with an assortment of condos, patio homes, traditional suburban family homes, and a few custom designs. Just past those telephone poles all the wires go underground. Roads curve around ponds and traffic circles. A clock tower chimes in the town square.

Near our house is a monument of a girl on a pedestal flying a kite. Wrapping around the top of the pedestal are words like ‘loyalty’ and ‘reverence.’

It’s a nice little neighborhood. When we give directions to visit we always bring people in through the other entrance, the one with the ducks and fountain in the pond. We don’t bring first time visitors in past the factory.

My friend Chris was the developer of our community twenty years ago. He said they designed it with open spaces and ponds and benches to encourage people to get out and meet their neighbors. Inspiring words on monuments were to influence the kids.

One time I told Chris I bet he hated seeing that factory on the entrance road.

“I thank God every time I drive by that factory,” he said.

A long time ago, as he was planning to build our community, Chris owned an asphalt company. One of his employees did a little creative accounting. Chris’ company ended up owing a lot of money. He was going to end up bankrupt.

But then a manufacturing company wanted to buy a piece of property on the edge of the area Chris was planning to develop. Selling that piece kept him in business and enabled him to build our neighborhood.

Without that ugly factory my neighborhood wouldn’t be here.

I’ll bet not even five of my neighbors know that.

Every time Chris drives by that factory he connects the dots between a horrible time in his past and his hopes and dreams. In between those dots is a little miracle dot that looks blah to most people.

Chris wouldn’t call it connecting the dots. He’d just say: Pay attention. Then don’t forget.

Same thing.

When you pay attention to your scariest moments, your hopes and dreams, and things that look blah, what do you see?

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Day 19 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams. Visit the Nester to choose from over 1,200 more 31 Dayers.

Forget right-brain, touchy-feely story stuff, you say. Just give me a formula I can follow to connect the dots between my life, my world, and God.

Okay.

Perspective + insight + truth = encouragement

If you know the truth and you get a wide perspective on it, and you think and add deep insight into what you’re seeing, you WILL be encouraged. Every time.

Of course the perspective and insight parts are full of touchy-feely, imprecise story stuff. Sorry.

To keep it simple you could just stick with the facts of truth. But facts by themselves are like the ingredients of a cake all laid out on the counter. Not very tasty. Not meant to be consumed alone. Meant to be connected.

Here’s the un-formula way to say it:

Dots get lonely. Introduce them to friends.

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This is Day 18 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams. Subscribe on the right or below and each day will be delivered every morning to your inbox.

Connecting the dots is about perspective. Connect more dots and you have a better chance of getting a true, helpful perspective. False, unhelpful perspectives make life lots harder.

I’m for easier

Most of your dots are from your own life. Many years ago, when I was first married, I was an alcoholic, separated from God, with no education or ambition. I was unemployed for long stretches. But those days taught me something I’ve always remembered: “Having no job and no money will not kill you.” (You can read about this phase of my life in From Beer to Eternity).

This influences how fearful I am of the present and future. I’ve connected the dots from the past to now; I’ve already had those kinds of big problems and survived.

Like I said yesterday, all your dots don’t have to be from your own life. You always have a built in reservoir of dots to make today look smaller and more manageable. That reservoir of dots is called HISTORY.

Right now the only history you know personally is during your own lifetime. Your expectation of today can only be based on what you know.

But knowing history gives you more dots.

So lets pretend

Let’s pretend that when you were a kid or young adult, you lived through a once-in-a-century crisis that lasted fifteen years.

You saw 1,300 banks close. You saw 1 of 4 Americans earning NO income–zero, nada, zip. And for those who had jobs there was no minimum wage and no limits on how many hours your boss could make you work. Large groups of homeless, unemployed men drifted around the country.

A horrible drought and crop failures destroyed thousands of family farms in the middle of America; 2.5 million people left their homes and farms. Giant dust storms blew dirt clouds from the Great Plains as far as Chicago (where dirt fell like snow) and even to New York City.

It gets worse.

Then America fought TWO wars, one in Europe and one against Japan. At the same time.

One dictator’s goal was to take over the world. Millions of people were murdered, apart from war, just because of their religion. Another dictator killed millions of his own people (and he was on our side).

After Pearl Harbor, Americans cancelled their plans–marriage, family, college, career–everything was on hold. Twelve million Americans (almost 1 in 11 of every man, woman, child) were in the military.

In three months on one island during WW2 (Okinawa), 12,000 Americans were killed. On Iwo Jima 6,000 died in one month. (Wikipedia says about 5,000 U.S. soldiers have died in the War on Terror in eleven years).

You lived with confusion and uncertainty and fear and war and depression, and you lived it for fifteen straight years. And you survived to thrive and raise a family and own a home and business.

Now what are you afraid of?

If this was part of your personal past, how might it influence your fears and expectations for “these troubled days we live in” today?

Would today seem a little lighter?

Of course there are serious things to deal with today. But would the effect and personal weight of these serious things be different if you had those dots to connect?

You do have those dots.

Those things happened. You have 80- and 90-year-old family members and neighbors who can tell you about it. If they don’t, I just did.

And you can read books.

What have you survived that can make you less fearful of today and tomorrow?

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This is Day 17 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams. Subscribe on the right or below and each day will be delivered every morning to your inbox. Visit the Nester to choose from over 1,200 more 31 Dayers.

We were at McDonald’s. Stella saw her teacher from the year before and said, “She’s one of the best teachers I’ve ever had.”

Stella was in first grade when she said that. She’d had two teachers.

When you’re six, one year is a sixth of your life and two teachers are your whole universe. “Best teacher ever” can be a true statement but not mean much. When you’re fifty, a year is only one fiftieth of your life, and you can’t even remember all your teachers.

It’s still a year. But a bigger perspective makes it look smaller and make more sense.

When you back up and get a wider view, you have more dots to connect.

All the dots don’t have to be part of your own experience. You have a built in reservoir of dots to make today look smaller and more manageable.

That reservoir of dots is called HISTORY.

Here’s an example

Tonight is another Presidential debate. Maybe you’ve taken sides and feel some passion against the other side. What seems normal to one seems outrageous and irresponsible to the other. Can you feel it? You’re convinced you’re right and they’re wrong, and you’re convinced it’s important.

It’s called partisan politics.

If you pay attention you hear people say it’s worse than ever these days. Of course that means the other guys are worse and more partisan than ever. Some people think about these days and get angry and depressed.

That’s where the dots of history come in.

Do you know when partisan politics began in America?

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Right at the start.

Within the first 3 years of George Washington’s Presidency, partisanship busted out all over everything. It had to. Because people have beliefs they are passionate about, and people disagree and get mad at each other. Not everybody, but most. It’s not new.

In America, politics was all romantic after the Revolution–the founders were all on the same team. Then the governing had to start, and with it the partisanship.

There will never be a President who goes into office with the reputation and respect that George Washington had. And even he couldn’t stop the partisanship. It got even worse his second term. By the end of his Presidency, the Father of our Country and hero of the Revolution had been insulted and trashed, by both enemies and friends, as badly as any politician since.

Washington wanted to retire after his first term as President, but changed his mind:

The immediate reason for his decision (to run for a second term), reached with great reluctance, became obvious in several spirited conversations with Jefferson and Hamilton…

Jefferson accused Hamilton of plotting to commandeer the government after Washington’s departure…(with) himself as king, emperor, or dictator…Hamilton charged Jefferson with working behind the scenes…to capture the federal government for its slave-owning supporters.

The hatred between the two men became palpable, mutual, and personal…

Although no one knew it at the time — indeed no one yet possessed the vocabulary to talk or think about it sensibly — political parties were in the process of being born. The split between Jefferson and Hamilton was destined to foster the creation of the two-party system and a central feature in the American political universe.

— Joseph P. Ellis from the book His Excellency: George Washington

In other words, our political parties began as an effort to try to add a layer of depersonalization to passionate human disagreements. To keep us from strangling each other. It worked. But the replacement for the strangling can still get pretty ugly.

When you connect to these dots of history you realize it’s all normal. So you can chill a bit about today.

To me, this is one of the coolest things about learning history: it gives me perspective on today which I find calming and encouraging.

Think of a time in your own history when you thought your whole world was ending, but it didn’t. How can that help you the next time your world is rocked?

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This is Day 16 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams. Subscribe on the right or below and each day will be delivered every morning to your inbox.

We’re half-way up the 31 Days mountain and I want to thank you for joining the journey, for sharing, and for subscribing.

I’m a big believer in the value of connecting the dots. I think we underestimate perspective and it’s value to help life make more sense. That’s what this 31 Days thing here is about.

We have another sixteen days of talking directly about what connecting the dots looks like. After that, this place will still be about dot connecting (I don’t know what else to talk about!), but probably not as overt nor every day.

But at the end of 31 Days we still won’t be there.

Because you can’t go all the way to connecting everything. And that’s a dot too: the “Can’t get all the way there” dot.

In church yesterday, this jumped out:

He has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

— Ecclesiastes 3.12

We’re never going to figure it all out. This side of heaven, it will never all make sense.

That’s good, not bad. Amen.

But the journey is fun. Thank you again for being part of it.

If you do not already subscribe and would like to receive the next sixteen days in your inbox each morning, just enter your email and check the ‘updates by email’ box. After these 31 Days you’ll continue to get updates a few times a week as we keep on connecting the dots to make more sense of your life, your world, and your hopes and dreams.

And to get the occasional friendly, personal, encouraging newsletter, just check that box too.

Of course you can UNsubscribe at any time.

Thanks!

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This is Day 15 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams.

Visit the Nester to choose from over 1,200 more 31 Dayers.

It’s not winter in the Carolinas. It’s only October 14.

It will be 76 degrees and sunny today. Definitely not winter.

However the leaves are starting to change. Mornings are chilly. The things that have to happen for winter to come have started happening.

What you’ll notice big-time later starts with something you hardly notice today.

Nothing can stop it. It WILL happen.

It’s the same way every October 14, every single year. Totally normal. If it hadn’t happened before, you’d never suspect what was coming.

October 14th’s are going on with you right now, too. Something has started to change. Nothing can stop it. It WILL happen. And it’s totally normal that you have little sense of it.

* * * * *

I walked down a street in a new neighborhood the other day. One side was filled with houses, cars, and families, with everyday living debris scattered around. The other side was empty lots; nothing happening, blank, no life.

But, sticking out of the grass in the empty lots were white PVC pipes. Hmmm, it’s not as empty as it looks. Water and sewer and electricity are in place. The road is paved. It’s not a wilderness. Much has already been done that can’t be seen. Houses could go up fast. Things are ready for visible change.

But right now, it’s only October 14.

Can you think back to a time when major change came to your life, but it started with a whisper you hardly noticed?  Later you realized things were happening underground all along.

How does connecting to those dots of your experience encourage you right now?

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This is Day 14 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams. Subscribe on the right or below and each day will be delivered every morning to your inbox. Visit the Nester to choose from over 1,200 more 31 Dayers.

Connecting the dots is all about meaning

Just like the old dot-to-dot drawings, a picture takes shape when you connect the dots. The dots take on meaning as a part of something bigger.

If your dad sat you on his lap and read the encyclopedia to you, you’d die of boredom.

Lonely, disconnected facts can be cold and flat.

BUT what if your dad connected the dots and translated them into reality so that you knew what it meant? And when you knew what it meant you could picture it. And so it became real, right outside your window.

You met Richard Feynman’s dad on DAY 7. In this video Richard tells a story of how his dad taught him to connect the dots between fact and meaning. (1:31). If you’re reading in your email, click HERE to go the the blog to see the video.

What facts are getting translated and becoming real to you these days?

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Day 13 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams. Subscribe on the right or below and each day will be delivered every morning to your inbox.

I count eleven:

I don’t think I create anything. I’m really serious — I discover the ideas

If you understand how to think . . . If you have a background of graphic art, and you are a sports fan, and you’re literate, and you’re interested in politics, and you love opera, and ballet’s not bad either, and if you understand people . . . and you understand language, and you understand that product, and you understand the competitive products . . .

and you put that all together in about ten minutes — the idea’s there.

— George Lois, famous for his magazine covers in the 60’s and 70’s

See, it’s easy. Respect all your interests and background. They can add up naturally when you need them to. You just have to pay attention.

What are you needing understanding on right now? How are your random interests and background helping?

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Day 12 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams. Subscribe on the right or below and each day will be delivered every morning to your inbox.

You take a walk. The leaves are changing. Some are dry and brown on the ground. You feel a bit sad. Just a month ago the wind made warm music through these leaves. Now winter’s coming. But you know winter won’t stay, so it’s not so bad.

You read in the Bible about the seed that has to die and fall to the ground before it can produce much fruit. You read about how Jesus was rejected, suffered, died, and came back to live a new life. You think to yourself how resurrection is a good thing but you notice there always has to be a death first.

Then you think of that loss, that disappointment, that dream you’ve given up. You think of that hopelessly dead thing. And you remember that first the old leaves fall so the new ones can come later with spring. You remember that there can be no resurrection without a death.

And you sense a teeny bit of encouragement. Your loss, your dead thing, is part of how God has made the world to work. You’re not alone–the whole world goes through this. New things come from death. There’s hope.

You just connected the dots

That’s just an example. What dots are you connecting right now?

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This is Day 11 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams. Subscribe on the right or below and each day will be delivered every morning to your inbox. Visit the Nester to choose from over 1,200 more 31 Dayers.

Steve Jobs was pretty creative. A couple of things he said about connecting the dots:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity.

You don’t have to have all kinds of incredible experiences; just thinking more about the experiences you do have can make a difference.

A lot of people . . . haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.

The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Do you have any experiences, or hopes and dreams, that have always seemed random and out of place? Are they?

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Day 10 of 31 Days of Connecting the Dots: make more sense of your life, your world, your hopes and dreams. Subscribe on the right or below and each day will be delivered every morning to your inbox.