David Allen, Getting Things Done

• What are the long-term goals and objectives in my organization, and what projects do I need to have in place related to them to fulfill my responsibilities?
• What long-term goals and objectives have I set for myself, and what projects do I need to have in place to make them happen?
• What other significant things are happening that could affect my options about what you I’m doing?

David Allen, Getting Things Done

The six-level model for reviewing your own work:

• 50,000+ feet: Life
• 40,000 feet: Three- to five-year vision
• 30,000 feet: One- to two-year goals
• 20,000 feet: Areas of responsibility
• 10,000 feet: Current projects
• Runway: Current actions

Tony Morgan, Developing a Theology of Planning

When you don’t have a plan:

• You give the loudest person, regardless of their spiritual maturity or commitment to the church’s mission, the opportunity to influence what happens in your ministry.
• You push your sharpest, most capable leaders away. Because they are used to organizations with clearly defined plans for future growth, they won’t stick around your church.
• You fuel more debate as people argue about what to do next.
• You need to hold more meetings. Without a clearly defined plan, you have to meet more often to decide what’s next.
• You encourage division. Even though you committed to the same mission, failure to establish strategy will lead to splits within the church.
• You make it difficult to celebrate what God is doing in your church. Without goals, it’s difficult for people to know what success looks like.
• You eliminate the need to discern God’s will. Failure to plan requires you to sit back and wait on God when God may be waiting for you to move.
• You make it difficult for people to know how to pray. And without specific, faith-stretching prayers, there’s no challenge for people to rely on God’s power.
• You limit the financial contributions to your ministry. People give to organizations that actually have a plan—a big plan—for the money they invest.

John Scalzi, “Redshirts”

Hanson: I don’t think it would actually make you happier to be told you were right about this.
Dahl: I don’t want to be happy, I just want to know.
Hanson: And even if you were right, what do you get out of it? Aren’t you better off believing that you’ve accomplished something? That you’ve gotten the happy ending you were promised? Why would you want to push that?
Dahl: Because I need to know. I’ve always needed to know.
Hanson: Because that’s the way you are, a seeker of truth. A spiritual man.
Dahl: Yes.
Hanson: A man who needs to know if he’s really that way, or just written to be that way.
Dahl: Yes.
Hanson: Someone who needs to know if he’s really his own man, or—
Dahl: Tell me you’re not about to make the pun I think you are.
Hanson: Sorry, it was there. Andy, you’re my friend. Do you believe that?
Dahl: Yes. I do.
Hanson: Then maybe you can believe this. Whether you’re an extra or the hero, this story is about to end. When it’s done, whatever you want to be will be up to you and only you. It will happen away from the eyes of any audience and from the hand of any writer. You will be your own man.
Dahl: If I exist when I stop being written.
Hanson: There is that. It’s an interesting philosophical question. But if I had to guess, I’d guess that your creator would say to you that he would want you to live happily ever after.
Dahl: That’s just a guess.
Hanson: Maybe a little more than a guess.

Every love story is also a ghost story.

David Foster Wallace

Even then, she hadn’t wanted to die. She’d just wanted it to be over. To be free of it all. For the pain and guilt to be over. And the feeling of being trapped. She might have been able to stand all the rest of it, but not the sense of being caught.

James S.A. Corey, Nemesis Games

You know those stories about a trapped wolf chewing itself free? That boy’s my paw. I’ll never be whole without him, but I’m fucked if I’ll give up getting free.

James S.A. Corey, Nemesis Games

Once is never. Twice is always.

James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

No matter what they looked like, or what they chose to call Him, when a group of people called out to God together, they were one. Even if there was no God, or one God, or many gods, it didn’t matter. Faith, hope and love, Paul had written, but the greatest of these is love. Faith and hope were very important to Anna. But she could see Paul’s point in a way she hadn’t before. Love didn’t need anything else. It didn’t need a common belief, or a common identity.

James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

She had a sudden vision of Jesus, who’d asked His disciples to keep doing this in remembrance of Him, watching her little congregation as they floated in microgravity and drank reconstituted grape beverage out of suction bulbs. It seemed to stretch the boundaries of what He’d meant by this.

James S.A. Corey, Abaddon’s Gate

That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.

James S.A. Corey, Drive

That good feeling is the most that girl will ever be able to give you.

James S.A. Corey, Gods of Risk

The Church of Humanity Ascendant was a religion that eschewed supernaturalism in all forms and whose theology boiled down to “Humans can be better than they are, so let’s do that”.

James S.A. Corey, Caliban's War

A vision without a task is but a dream. A task without a vision is drudgery. A vision and a task is the hope of the world.

From a church in Sussex, England, ca. 1730