So Much To Think About

The hardest part of following Jesus is not when suffering comes, it’s when success and wealth come. It is easier to look to Jesus when the day is hard than when the day is flush with ease and fun and all things go well. Maybe that’s just me.
Matt Redmond

Interview Question
A question I used for years in interviewing potential assistants: Do you know how to drive a manual transmission? If you said no, you didn’t get hired. 
I know that sounds terribly arbitrary. But here’s my reasoning. It is not necessary to know how to drive a stick in the 21st century—particularly if you’re 22 years old. So the only people who do are those who are willing to take the time to master a marginally useful skill. Now why would a 22-year-old do that? One reason is that they like knowing how to do things that most people do not. Another is that they realize that the most fun cars in the world to drive are sports cars, and the most fun sports cars to drive are the ones with manual transmission, and they like the idea of being able to turn a rote activity (driving) into an enjoyable activity. I want to work with the kind of person who thinks both those things.
Malcom Gladwell

Kenyans
Since 1988, 20 out of the 25 first-place men in the Boston Marathon have been Kenyan. Of the top 25 male record holders for the 3,000-meter steeplechase, 18 are Kenyan.
Eight of the 10 fastest marathon runners in history are Kenyan, and the two outliers are Ethiopian. The fastest marathon time ever recorded was Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge’s in the 2018 Berlin Marathon. The fastest women’s marathon ever recorded was Kenyan Bridgid Kosgei’s in the Chicago Marathon.
Three-quarters of these Kenyan champions come from the Kalenjin ethnic minority, which has only 6 million people, or 0.06% of the global population. The Kalenjin live in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Iten, a town that sits on the edge of the valley at 7,000 feet above sea level, is nicknamed the City of Champions.

True Friends
Here’s how to tell who your true friends are. If you’re starting to put your life together and you have friends that object, those are not friends.
Here are two hallmarks of a friend:
1. A friend is someone you can tell bad news to.
They won’t tell you why you’re an idiot, and they won’t interfere with your suffering. They’ll just listen, and maybe they’ll suffer along with you. And they won’t tell you some worse thing that happened to them.
2. But a friend is also someone you can tell good news to.
They will say, “Wow! In this vale of tears, some good happened to you. Great, man. Wonderful. I hope ten more things like that happen.”
And they’re not envious, jealous and one-upping you.
If you’re trying to get your life together, and your friends get in the way, that’s actually really useful for you because you’ve now identified who your real friends aren’t.
You might think, “Well, I can’t give them up.” Not only can you, you should and it would be better for them.
Jordon Peterson

Pastoral Care
Very few pastors see pastoral care as the heart of what they do or want to do. One has to wonder if the lack of pastoral visitation is not a contributing factor in the church’s demise in the USA. Pastoral visitation is not reducible to having lunch with someone if there is not some kind of pastoral interchange, some telling of one’s story, some prayer for the parishioner, some pastoral moment. To be sure, to be a pastor involves getting to know the other person but pastoral care is more than shooting the bull with one another. Scot Mc Knight

God sits among us in our grief. The good God who loves mankind wept at the death of His friend.
Fr Stephen Freeman

You can’t demonize people you disagree with, then pretend you’re offering them the Gospel…you’re simply offering them a chance to agree with you… Phoenix Preacher

The Bass Line of the New Testament
Let me use an illustration. In most rock songs, even in classical music, you need to have a bass part. In writing/constructing a tune we start with a beat/the bass and build everything around that. The “bass line” is the “baseline.” The bass line grounds the entire song. Take out the bass and see what happens. It changes the music fundamentally. 
The Hebrew Bible is the “bass line” in every part of the New Testament. Without it, you have a song but it does not sound the same. To say it slightly different, the Hebrew Bible (“Old Testament”) is the foundational worldview of every single sentence in what we call the New Testament. How the New Testament “looks” changes as much as when we look at the night sky through optical wavelengths and infrared ones. So as a matter of course build into your daily routine prayerful reading and study of the Hebrew Bible. Just do it.
Bobby Valentine

When God id is “Less”.
If you ever feel that God is “less than” some good, true, beautiful or loving thing then you’re no longer talking about God. Pick up the word “God” and walk it toward the horizon where you imagine the most good, true, beautiful, and loving thing in the world. Place the word “God” at the limit of that horizon. And when your imagination expands to see something even more true, good, beautiful, and loving keep walking the word “God” toward that horizon. For God simply is that horizon. Or, more properly, God, as the Source of the True, Beautiful, Good and Loving, is the Horizon that our horizons keep chasing but will never reach. God can only name that which exceeds all that we imagine as true, beautiful, good and loving. God is never less.
Richard Beck

STILL ON THE JOURNEY