The bottom line

I hate preachers that know it all, and have an answer for everything. Along with about a few hundred million uneducated pagans from the back-blocks of Zimbabwe, I’m probably the world’s most Un-Theological Genius. I find the arrogant religious zealots especially obnoxious, in that they seem to have definitive answers and rules for everything. It has the effect like putting my brain into neutral and red-lining the motor - a truckload of noise, no progress and a lot of broken bits to pick up if it carries on too long . . .

It’s not that I don’t listen to my mates who CAN wrestle with the brainy ones from throughout history theologians that have formulated great ideas and philosophies. I do actually try to work out all the mysteries of the amazing creation we live in by myself, but there is just so much STUFF out there where somebody thinks THIS, and then somebody thinks THAT and in the end they all seem to think faster than me and know so much more than I do.

I’m waiting for the day when everybody agrees with each other, then I might be able to piggy-back onto their ideas and not have to think for myself any more! Actually, if that ever happens, I’ll probably have to step in and upset the apple cart with another opinion, so for the moment I think I’ll just be happy to live with what I do know now.

Sean d’Sousa, from Psychotactics recounts the story of a couple that had lost their life savings on property investment in Australia. Devastated that they had nothing after making every mistake known to property investors, they sought advice on how to find something else to pay their bills. Asking them what they had to start with they poured out a sob story, about how they had made so many mistakes that they had lost everything and now had nothing to offer. Wrong. With Sean’s help they wrote the book “1001 Mistakes we Made in Property Investment” or something along those lines.

I recently counseled a Small Business owner who was also thinking along the same lines. She had bought an online business and spent more than a year or so pouring time and money into it only for it to fail to fire. Her demeanour was a combination of depression, despair, self-doubt, regrets and frustration - boy, I can identify with those sentiments at times. But my advice to her when she said she was seriously considering chucking it all in, was that she was 18 months ahead of anyone else who was just starting out and she just needed to get smarter. If she used the knowledge and she and her husband had gathered and moved forward, she would get there in the end.

Essentially, these two people were advised the same - to just use what they had access to and get on with it. Start from the bottom line - not trying to shoot for the moon, just work with what they had and build from there.

I’ve spent the last few years taking my knowledge and understanding of Internet usage in business out into the public space with conference and seminar speaking, writing and developing resources for others under the Internet UNMASKED!! brand. I’ve found that my lack of ability to grasp anything other than big-picture stuff has helped me heaps to communicate complex subjects in simple ways that others can understand.

It seems that while others get bamboozled with new technology, new ideas, or technical complexity, I just get the big picture and help others to eliminate confusion in a business sense. Big-picture thinking actually gets down to the bottom line pretty quickly, because you don’t get bogged down in the details.

I like to do the same thing in a spiritual sense too. I’ve got a mate who ascribes to the belief that something special happened in the Heavenlies in 1844 they call “Investigative Judgement“. It’s based on a tricky little scripture in Daniel.

And he said to me, “For two thousand three hundred days; then the sanctuary shall be cleansed.”
Daniel 8:14

Cor Blimey, it’s true if you add 2300 onto Daniel and do the numbers the way they sat that you get 1844, but I really can’t see the significance of 1844 for love nor money. I live in another century, and Atonement stuff is an inch or two hundred beyond me, but there’s been a real hoopla about this one for a century and a half in some circles. I’ve yet to work this one all out, but I’m not going to reject it out of hand, because it could conceivably be so. My mate’s been right on some of these things before. But because it’s one of those painful little theological things that again spin my mind at twice the speed of a DVD, it gets second priority to . . . well virtually everything else actually, leaving other very clever people theologians to work it all out.

I have to just let the details pass for the moment and focus on the bottom line or my mind will go to mush again. In these moments of theological challenge I just revert to the one thing that I really DO know - the thing that underpins my entire perception of reality, and it is this . . .

The Good Book is not just only true, it is the Truth.

The VICTUS IN AMBITUS way, just like David, who scribbled out the words:

I have set the LORD always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.
Psalm 16:8

is to sit very firmly on that bottom line and not be moved.