Tag Archives: Erwin McManus

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Do You Have Days Where You Feel Like You’ve Been Dragged Through A Fiery Crucible?

“We live in the crucible between the promise of who we can become and the reality of who we’ve been.” Erwin McManus

I love this quote from McManus taken from his book The Artisan Soul: Crafting Your Life into a Work of Art

What McManus is saying is that in order to get from “who you are today” to your future potential or, the “promise of who you can become”, you will experience a lot of work, learning, change and pain. This journey is not comfortable but it is rewarding. It will stretch you in ways that you don’t want to stretch and it will break you down and then build you back up.

A crucible is defined as “a container of metal or refractory material employed for heating substances to high temperatures.” The crucible is used to break down substances at high temperatures or to refine and purify substances by burning or boiling off impurities.

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How To Be A Connector Of Unconnected Ideas

Are you a divergent thinker? Most of us have heard of the movie “Divergent” which was released in 2014. It is about a girl (played by Shailene Woodley) who grew up in a post apocalyptic world that was segregated into five factions. Each faction had a distinct role to fill in the “new world” and everyone in each faction was expected to think and act in accordance with the mission of their faction. Those who could not fit into one of the factions were homeless, lived on the street and called factionless.

Every year the kids who were turning 18 had to take a test that determined their mindset and selected their faction for life. This faction could be the one they grew up in or it could be one of the other four. If it was a different faction than they grew up in, they would have to leave their family and everything they had known and move in with the new faction. No cross-faction citizenship was allowed.

Although this system appeared to result in a very orderly and focused society, it was obviously very closed minded and limiting. It did not allow for much in the way of free thinking or creativity.