GYC West 2015: Saved to Serve

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GYC West

Family Health

Conna Bond

The Value of Value

Of course, we have come here to share, actually, some personal perspectives on family health and family life.

This is the first breakout session for Family Health for GYC West 2015.

So if that's the 1 you're intending to be in, you're in the right place.

Some of the topics that we're going to share when we're here are going to sound slightly more like personal health type topics.

But that's because from our experience at being a family for the past 24 years, my husband and I are just celebrating our 24th anniversary as of this month.

We have realized that there are certain things that must be put first when you are seeking a good family life, good solid family health.

And so we are going to talk about what some of those first things are.

And hopefully that will translate well to your own life as you navigate, you know, your own family lives and your personal relationships, even friendships.

It really is more about relationships than anything else.

So my name is Kana Bond, and I teach marketing and business ethics at Walla Walla University.

I've been teaching there full time for the last 2 years.

Before that I was home full time with our 4 children, probably for a good 15 years or so.

I have a degree in law and early on, about halfway through law school, I had 2 children.

By the time I finished law school, I had 2 more children.

And as I was doing my internships in downtown Orlando, I would look out across the city where I had dropped off our daughters at a daycare and think, you know, I just cannot leave my children to be raised by somebody else.

So I made, you know, I had had illusions of being a business law attorney in a large law firm downtown, and of course those doors were opening up, but when it came down to it and I looked at my own children, I knew what had to come first.

I thought at that point that if there was nothing else that I ever did other than raise my own children, that was plenty, that was enough.

But it's been interesting how the Lord has now carried me through into a new stage of my life.

And I actually ended up teaching at Walla Walla University, which and my 2 daughters actually took my classes, so I got paid to continue homeschooling them, which was kind of a nice thing because I have 2 more children coming up in the ranks now and I'll still be there, you know, teaching them and with them in school.

So I'm going to share with you some of the things that come, the epiphanies that I have learned from teaching and from being a mother, from applying the things that I teach to students every day in class that I think are very applicable to family life, that have helped me make sense of some of the experiences that we have had as a family, that I have had personally as a mother, as a wife.

And the first place that I want to start with has to do with figuring out and facing who we really are.

Okay, so the first presentation I'm sharing with you today, I decided to call it the value of a value.

The thousand ways that we deceive ourselves.

This was a year or so ago at our youngest daughter's eighth grade graduation.

She's got a little graduation tie around her neck there.

We're going to go from here to visit her there.

She's the 1 in our older daughter's arms.

She is 21, almost 22, and she is a head wrangler at a camp and loves her ministry, working with young children.

And then Taylor is 16, navigating the waters of being a teenage male, which is not an easy thing in this day and age.

So we're still navigating those waters with him.

1 of the verses that I use, in fact, this is the theme verse that I use for every class that I teach at Walla Walla University is Luke 1610.

I start every class with this, I carry it through as a theme every class that I teach, and I finish every class with this text.

And that is, 1 who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and 1 who is dishonest, and a very little is also dishonest in much.

We're going to be focusing on what seem like some very little things in this seminar, because we have discovered, I certainly have discovered in my own personal life, that the little things do matter, that they end up adding up to bigger things.

And that is true in our own personal lives.

It certainly is true in the lives of our children and all of our relationships.

I came across this quote as well that I love.

The smallest good act today is a strategic point from which a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.

Now, hopefully by the end of this presentation, that will make even bigger sense to you.

But this was a huge epiphany for me, and this again is another theme for this particular presentation.

So I wanna ask you, have you ever done something against your good intentions that you really did not want to do?

Is there anyone in here who has never done something that they really just felt they should not do or did not want to do and regretted it later?

Have you ever done something you didn't want to do?

You know, at the end of the day, you look back and you kinda catalog what you've gone through, what your experiences have been, and you know, You've got the good things, you've got the bad things, you have the things that you wish you hadn't said, the things that you wish you hadn't done, and of course there's no rewind button on life, is there?

What I want to talk about today is the anatomy of a bad decision.

Some of this comes from a class that I teach in business ethics because I'm teaching business students.

By the way, business students are, when they've rated them in terms of moral, cognitive development, at the very bottom.

Below doctors, lawyers, attorneys, all of that, dentists, which is interesting.

So I have a very uphill battle to take these students usually as juniors and seniors and hopefully make them aware of a sense of responsibility for their moral decisions in business.

Because by the time they get to that point, we certainly don't teach it to them at Walla Walla University, but to that point, they already have come with a jaded view that life is 1 thing and business is another and there are different rules by which we play in the business world.

Well, we're not so different than they are.

You may not be a business major, you may not be a doctor or an attorney or somebody else who's rated low on the moral scale, but we all have made bad decisions, bad moral decisions, sometimes making them knowing at the time that we are making a very bad moral decision.

Now I'm going to share with you some ideas and some theories that come from secular psychology and sociology, But with the recognition that when you study any discipline, I don't care whether it's psychology, biology, business, marketing, if you are studying the truth about those disciplines, you are learning something about God.

So when I teach marketing, when I learn marketing, I have learned vast things about how God interacts with people.

Because marketing really is just a psychology, and that's my specialty.

It's really the psychology of why people make transactional decisions that they do, and why they respond in a certain way.

So this cognitive moral development is a theory that was developed by Lawrence Kohlberg.

I think he was a graduate student when he did this research.

He followed some boys, I think there were 50 boys, and he followed them over a number of decades, you know, asking them questions and doing research.

And he discovered that these boys tended to go through the same levels of moral development.

Now it didn't mean that they necessarily made better decisions as they got older, but the way they processed the decisions that they made and why and on what basis, as how did they determine what was right or wrong at any given point, grew and developed over time in these same ways.

And we find this tends to be true with all of us.

And this actually reflects, you know, this kind of reveals how God deals with us as we mature and grow in our Christian walk.

But he narrowed it down to 3 phases that we tend to go through in our moral cognitive development, and they correspond roughly to ages.

You know, you'll see, reflect, you know, childhood and adulthood and hopefully a greater maturity, but not always, not always.

So the first phase is the pre-conventional phase, and that's when we're saying, we decide, the way we decide what is right or wrong, we say, what can I get away with?

Okay, I'm waiting for that punishment, if my parents don't spank me, it must be okay, right?

If I can get away with this, it must be okay.

At some point, we start realizing that if we start making some good decisions, we get rewarded.

Or we get an extra dessert or whatever it may be.

We start making good decisions, not because they're good or right decisions, but because there's something in it for us.

But that is still the pre-conventional, what we would kind of equate with sort of an immature view of what is right and wrong.

Is that really asking what's right or wrong?

No, we're not even considering at that stage whether something is right or wrong.

We're just saying what's in it for us, what can I get away with?

But are there adults that operate at that level?

Do we all sometimes operate at that level, even if we don't want to admit it?

Mark Bond

How Do You Know There Is a God?

Father in heaven, thank you so much, Lord, for what we've already learned this morning.

And Lord, as we continue to talk about family and as we talk about what really matters, Lord, we just ask that you would speak through us and be here in this room.

We ask that your Holy Spirit would interpret for us and allow us to, when this is all said and done, bring glory and honor to you.

So I kind of laid the groundwork with the first presentation for a very personal testimony that Mark is going to share now, his experience just walking with the Lord and seeking Him over the course of our marriage, being a father.

As I told you, we have 4 children, ages 15 to 20, almost 23 at this point.

And we have experienced all of the struggles and all of the temptations and all of the failures inherent in family life, but through all of that have also been experienced just how much the Lord can change a life repeatedly.

In our lives, certainly in mine, and in our children's lives, and most recently in Mark's.

And so he is going to share how the Lord has really kind of gotten a grip on his heart over the past year.

So, if somebody were to ask you, how do you know that there's a God?

What would you say if somebody said, well, How do you know that there's really a God?

I mean, this is really a big question in this postmodern age.

How do we know that there's any relative, is everything relative or absolute?

And there's a lot of people who just really feel like things are all pretty relative, and there's not really any 1 right way.

How do you, what would you say if somebody said, well, how do you know there's a God?

I mean, I could give a bunch of examples, but in my own life there's so many ways to seek God's answer of prayer in such specific ways that there's no other way it could have been a coincidence.

Then hopefully I'd have some right on hand to actually share it with you.

Yeah, there's a lot in nature that we can point to that would show the magnificence of God or his creative power.

There would be some that would probably point to Daniel 2 and say, well, look, here's the course of history laid out right here for thousands of years.

How could he have known that without Having a God who's all knowing and all powerful, who knows the end from the beginning.

We can talk about the complexities of life, the sun, the moon, the stars.

All of these things point to the heavens declare the glory of God, right?

How do you know when you're really, really in love?

You know, And I guess I'd like to just ask, before I start, so we've got an engaged couple who's getting married.

Mother and son, so you definitely have kids.

Conference, I'd rather live in the corner of a roof.

All right, well that just gives you a little bit of an idea of the group that I'm talking with here.

But I think if I share with you my testimony, Probably many of you will relate to my upbringing and what I grew up with.

And even as a child, I had a heart for the Lord.

But I'm not sure I ever really knew what real love meant at that early age.

I went all the way through college in Adventist universities.

I didn't do the things that good Adventist boys don't do, for the most part.

But I got baptized at about the age of 12.

And probably like most of you, I thought that would change everything in my life.

And then a few weeks, maybe a few hours later, I realized that I was still the same sinful person, and very much discouraged by the fact that I wasn't now like the prophet Daniel or something.

I went through year after year of Bible classes.

I learned about the 2300 days and the 3 angels' messages and Daniel and Revelation, and I learned memory verses and could recite, you know, the 10 Commandments or the Beatitudes or the Fruit of the Spirit.

And, you know, I was learning all of these facts and all this knowledge, but I didn't really have a living, breathing, personal relationship with God.

I knew all about God, and I actually liked all the things I knew about him.

And I wanted to have a really deep relationship.

And at times I thought, well, maybe I do.

But the cares of this world and distractions.

And I never really connected with him at the heart level.

I see that now more looking back than I did at the time.

I don't know that I could have articulated that at the age of 13 or 15.

But I wasn't really hungering and thirsting after righteousness.

Which I think really is a gift from God to have that hunger and that thirst.

And I'm sure I'm not the only person in the room here that can relate to that scenario of being just nominal in my relationship with God, and kind of wishing for something more, but not knowing how to get there.

And I want to be really honest and transparent here this morning.

I'm speaking to you as a man who's been broken and as a man who is, like Paul said, the chief of sinners.

I know exactly how he felt when he said that.

I feel like I have no right or I haven't earned the right to stand here and preach to you.

I just want to share what God has done in my life, as you said, personal testimony.

When I was in grade school, I was tortured as a kid.

I was usually the last person picked on any kind of a team sport.

If they were dividing us up for kickball, they'd say, OK, Mark.

I'd be the last guy that they would bring onto the team.

And I really wanted so badly to fit in, but the harder you try in that situation, the worse things get.

You just really cannot, by trying to force yourself into a situation, make it any better.

And I was called a lot of names, hurtful things.

And I had a very painful junior high experience, sixth, seventh, eighth grade, ninth grade.

And finally, somewhere in the middle of high school, I discovered, well, I was really into music.

I played the guitar and the piano all the time.

It was probably 1 of the only things that I was actually really good at, at that point.

The Power of Presence

As you know, I teach marketing and ethics, and a lot of marketing-related classes at Walla Walla University School of Business.

And so, you may wonder, you know, why am I teaching, you know, we're here for the family track, so why am I talking about marketing and some of the other things?

Well, the Lord says, he said to consider the lilies of the field.

So I'm considering the lilies in my field, because the work that I do has really illuminated and given me an understanding, a perspective on my experience as a mother, as a wife.

And I'm always looking for ways to bridge the disciplines because I believe that knowledge and wisdom are all connected in some way.

And I think that we do a disservice by teaching things like math and biology and marketing and business and all of the different disciplines separate from each other, completely detached.

Because you often hear, when I was homeschooling my kids, you know, I would start to bring in interesting connections between math and science or history and Bible and mom, what are you doing?

This is Bible, this isn't history or this is math, this isn't science, how come you're trying to make all these connections?

And I would say this is how we get to understand better who God is.

All of these things that are connected, yes, we may look at things from 1 perspective or 1 vantage point, but we're always moving and looking at the same Lord, the 1 who created us and gave us an understanding.

He gives us an understanding of who we are.

So because I am deeply entrenched right now and had just come out of teaching actually 3 marketing-related classes, I thought I would share with you some of the things that I have learned about the power of presence.

And actually Mark is going to continue with that same theme for the second half of this, so we do have a method to our madness.

And there really is an overall theme that maybe you're picking out.

We've talked a lot today about engagement.

This morning, we talked about moral engagement, or actually ways that we can be morally disengaged.

The power of presence is a little bit about not just physical engagement, but psychological engagement and connection.

And so we're continuing on with that idea that if you're going to have powerful relationships, whether it be as a parent or in a marital relationship or even with your close friends and family, that engagement is a really important factor in those relationships.

So that's what I'm, I'm gonna be talking about a lot of different things, but I just wanna make sure that you make that overall connection now.

That what I'm really talking about is presence and engagement.

But in order to get there, I'm going to give you a little bit of a primer on what marketing is or what it should be.

This is 1 of the most misunderstood areas on the planet.

Marketing is an idea, but it is also a strategy.

I teach it as a strategic set of actions and processes.

Now most of my students come in thinking that marketing is going to be about why we want to learn how to be creative and slap up a good poster and get people to come to our events, get them to like what we do, to see the value in what we do.

And they are often quite disappointed that what I teach them to do is how to think, how to ask questions, how to gather information, how to identify What information is important and useful to accomplish certain types of ends?

And of course, in marketing, we're really talking about, it boils down to 4 things.

We are capturing value when we attach prices to things.

We are delivering value, and we're communicating value.

And it really is not any different in our family lives, is it?

I mean, Don't we hope that if we have something good to pass on to our children that we are creating and capturing and delivering and communicating value?

So that brings us to consideration of what is value in the first place.

And that's kind of the direction that I'm going to take today, is to talk about what value is.

But I have to kind of take you through the steps a little to get there.

So marketing breaks down basically into 3 different phases, planning, implementation, and control.

Now, if we're wise, our lives will break down into very similar phases, okay.

We have a planning stage, or we're always thinking in terms of planning ahead and not just kind of haphazardly going through our lives.

Of course, we have to actually do something at some stage.

And then if we're wise, we're going to look back and evaluate.

We're going to look and say, did we achieve our objectives here?

Is there anything that we could have done better?

Now, the planning stage is a very important stage that often gets overlooked.

The students want to jump right ahead to the promotion and the implementation stage.

That's putting up the posters, being creative, that's advertising.

That's what everybody thinks marketing is, and that's not what marketing is about.

Promotion and advertising is just a very tiny aspect of what marketing is or what communicating and creating value is.

In the beginning, we have to look at our mission and examine what are we trying to accomplish here as a business or an organization or a nonprofit or for us as a family or as husband and wife or on behalf of our children.

What is the overarching purpose for everything that we do?

And we're going to use that as the standard by which we measure everything else that comes after.

Without that sense of mission, and in fact, there's a fantastic nonprofit marketer who writes, the market is always right, which means the market will always, they know what they want.

And you can't generally change that too much.

They know what they want, and they're pretty vocal about it.

Series

Family Health

How Do You Know There Is a God?

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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