Category: Notes Anthology

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.

Mary Schmich

Dissonance

Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy,” : Captain G. M. Gilbert after the Nuremberg trials. He was the prison psychologist charged with dealing with the Nazi’s.

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”: Elon Musk

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Spiritual forces

People are veritably besieged, on all sides, at every moment simultaneously by these claims and strivings of the various powers each seeking to dominate, usurp, or take a person’s time, attention, abilities, effort; each grasping at life itself; each demanding idolatrous service and loyalty. In such a tumult it becomes very difficult for a human being even to identify the idols that would possess him or her…

William Stringfellow

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Quitting

All my life, coaches have been chanting sports slogans about never quitting: “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.” “Quitting is tough, not quitting is tougher!” “You cannot fail unless you quit.” And, while that kind of motivation is helpful when the immediate goal is to win a game, it’s not always applicable to real life. It’s easy to determine the winner in a game, just look at the score. Not so easy in life.

Sometimes quitting is a smart, healthy, and productive choice. But we’ve trained kids over the years to believe that quitting anything shows a lack of moral character. That results in them hanging on in jobs, relationships, groups, and so forth even when those things are eroding who they are. Yes, we don’t want to get in the habit of treating people or jobs as disposable—we need to put the work in to make sure we aren’t quitting out of fear or laziness or insecurity. But we also don’t want to stifle the potential for change and growth in our lives out of misplaced loyalty to clichés like “There’s no quit in me.” That may just reveal stubbornness over intelligence.

“I quit, therefore I am” doesn’t say quitter to me, but someone who judiciously assesses life situations that seem to overwhelm them until it feels oppressive to the point of changing who they are or who they want to be. The act of quitting defines who they want to be. The 21 DOGE workers who quit out of protest. The Washington Post columnist who quit yesterday after her editorial criticizing Jeff Bezos was rejected. (FYI: I quit my subscription to the Post yesterday in support of the columnist: “A top ‘Washington Post’ columnist resigns, accusing publisher of killing piece.”)

Quitting is a way to maintain the integrity of who you are, whether it’s quitting a heinous job, quitting a combative relationship, or quitting an unsupportive family. Sometimes jobs, relationships, and even families suck and they don’t deserve you. It takes guts and strength to abandon the comfort of the known for the uncertainty of the unknown. But, as Kenny Rogers sang, “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” I know when to fold ‘em, therefore I am. 

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

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Belief and Behavior

For Jesus, there’s an unbreakable linkage between our beliefs and our behavior. If we believe in Jesus, we behave according to His word. If we don’t behave according to His teachings, then we don’t believe. It’s that simple. It’s that hard.

We live in a world that is filled with words. There are so many words coming at us from every direction, most of us have simply stopped listening. We don’t listen to the news. We don’t listen to our leaders. We don’t listen…well, to anyone.

But we do watch. We watch what other people do. We watch how others behave. We watch how they handle stress. We watch how they tend to their priorities. Then, when we find someone who is living well, we’re curious.

It’s not just Jesus who’s watching. Our neighbors are watching too. My guess is if we had more Christians behaving, more of our neighbors would be believing.

Mike Glenn

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NPC’s

Lately, political writers have called attention to the tendency of billionaire Elon Musk to refer to his political opponents as “NPCs.” This term comes from the gaming world and refers to a nonplayer character, a character that follows a scripted path and cannot think or act on its own, and is there only to populate the world of the game for the actual players. 

Heather Cox Richardson

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Come as you are..

Something in your book that seems to be quite contrary to one of the central themes stressed in today’s church is your claim that the church is not about being welcoming and affirming and accepting people as they are. That seems to have become a truism today: Come as you are; all are welcome. 

I don’t want you to accept me as I am; I’ve got too many problems. I want to be challenged to be better than otherwise I would be able to be. And so this idea of Come as you are—there are a lot of people who I don’t think should come as they are. 

I mean, what is baptism? It’s not coming as you are. It’s being drowned in the water of the faith that makes you a different human being than you were before baptism. So Come as you are is a slogan that might be good for self-help groups, but it’s not a slogan that’s good for the church.

Stanley Hauerwas – Jesus Changes Everything- A New World Made Possible

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Smashing

Smashing the old order does not, in itself, create anything at all. The Visigoths and the Vandals built nothing on top of the ruins of Rome. They indulged their thumos and scampered away to feast for a while on the wealth they looted, and then they disappeared into myth and memory.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/this-thing-will-fail?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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this decade, the consensus among supposed experts has again and again proven to be badly mistaken.

Most “serious people” predicted that Britain would vote to remain in the European Union.

Most “serious people” were confident that Donald Trump would fail to win the Republican nomination and certain that he would lose the general election.

Most “serious people” knew that the Covid pandemic would not pose a serious threat to people and that the virus did not originate in a lab leak and that mass events were a thing of the past and that vaccines couldn’t possibly be developed in less than three years and that these new vaccines would stop all transmission of the virus.

Most “serious people” predicted that Russian troops would enter downtown Kyiv within days and that Ukrainians would beat back Russian troops in a matter of weeks and that Russians were on the path to certain victory after all.

of course most “serious people” believed that consolidated democracies like the United States could never experience democratic backsliding and that extremists would never take power in this country…
YASCHA MOUNK

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Providence of God

“When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him?” (Psalm 8:3–4)

The work of God’s providence surrounds us at all times, though our hearts are frequently out-of-tune with the eternal hymn of its working. We are deeply aware of every offense against goodness, every tragedy, every rumor of evil, while we constantly ignore how we are preserved in health, delivered from danger, and overshadowed by God’s brooding goodness. In the math of good and evil, the miracle of our very existence seems to be factored as a zero.

I have come to think that the doctrine of divine providence is more readily seen by the old than by the young. For the old, most of life is “in the rear-view mirror,” while, for the young, it rushes towards the windshield at ever-increasing speeds. In hindsight, the hand of God seems clear, and, mostly, unmistakable. It is a mysterious working, particularly when I see good come out of seeming evil.

Fr Stephen Freeman

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Great grandson and ARCHIE update

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

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“?‘Each of you must respect your mother and father, and you must observe my Sabbaths.
I am the LORD your God.
Lev. 19:3

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. 
Micah 6:8

Those who kept the sabbath killed Jesus.

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Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Matt 5:7-9

 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
Matt 7:38-42

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor  and hate your enemy.’
But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
that you may be children of your Father in heaven.
He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good,
and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?
Are not even the tax collectors doing that?
And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?
Do not even pagans do that?
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
Matt 7:43-48

Those who follow Jesus…

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Every Person is a person

Never forget that every person on earth is a person Jesus died for. No persons are “people,” as the media describes them and as we’ve begun to see them, or rather unsee them. Every person on earth is like the rest of us, more or less—they laugh like us, they cry like us, they worry and wonder and want like us, they fear like us, they hope like us, they lose hope like many of us are losing hope, and they need love like all of us need love. If what your hearing and thinking and doing is not increasing your capacity to love, turn down, tune it out, and stop it, because if you can’t see the humanity in others you have already become blind to your own.

J D Spainhour

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Artificial Intelligence

It’s a societal problem. The use of AI when writing shortcuts critical cognitive processes that we also use for making moral decisions, engaging in political debate, reading the Bible and other texts, understanding others’ perspectives, articulating our perspectives, knowing ourselves and our beliefs, and so on. A risk of AI is an illiterate and convictionless society, one in which we no longer process our own thoughts, values, emotions, or beliefs and we are increasingly incapable of processing those of others. We offload that processing to a machine. If that sounds familiar, it should. Before the rise of AI we were already on this track. People were already reading fewer books and engaging in vapid civic engagement on social media. Already people were forming their “beliefs” based on trending topics and YouTube influencers. But AI accelerates this trend. So this issue isn’t just about teachers complaining that students aren’t writing their own papers. This is an issue about the future of civic society. And I think we can all agree that civic society ain’t looking so hot as it is.

O. Alan Noble

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Power

If God be not a tyrant, how can any of us? If God refuses to exploit God’s power, how can any of us exploit one another?
Scot McKnight

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Religious affiliation

…according to an average of all 2023 Gallup polling, 68% of Americans identify with a Christian religion, including 33% who are Protestant, 22% Catholic, and 13% who identify with another Christian religion or simply as a “Christian.” (Only 7% percent identify with a non-Christian religion, including 2% who are Jewish, 1% Muslim, and 1% Buddhist, among others. Another 22% said they have no religious preference, and 3% did not answer the question.)

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Grief

…learning from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross that “grief is the only human emotion that [has to] have [a] community to shoulder it. It cannot be borne alone.”

It takes a great deal of involvement within a community for grief to be expressed freely. It is the presence of the community that validates the expression of grief. This means that a singular expression of grief is an incomplete expression of grief.
Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community by an African scholar, Malidoma Somé

Somé compares the grieving process with a baby crying heavily just before falling asleep, saying, “Grief takes us to the top of the hill and then lets us walk back down slowly, peacefully.” We need some kind of process like that, something that helps us lead the world into the way of peace. Perhaps it will begin with sackcloth and ashes. It will certainly begin with repentance.
https://open.substack.com/pub/toomanywords/p/weeping-with-those-who-weepeven-when?r=1vlmt&utm_medium=ios

 “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Anne Lamott
“You can safely assume that God is recreating you in his image when you love all the ones God loves.”
Scot McKnight

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ARCHIE UPDATE

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY

When Christianity is assumed to be an “answer” that
makes the world intelligible, it reflects an
accommodated church committed to assuring
Christians that the way things are is the way things
have to be.

Stanley Hauerwas

Their Stuff/My stuff

it’s easy to see our partner’s crap, all the ways they drive us crazy. It’s much more difficult for me to look at my own stuff, my own reactivity, and my own childhood experiences which wired me to react in certain ways in given dynamics.

It’s hard, she says, “for me to study my own reactivity.” In the midst of being annoyed with one we love, it’s hard to ask ourselves, “What was it about me?”

Dr. Alexandra Solomon via NSE notebook 

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When a person believes that he or she possesses eternal truth, there’s a temptation to believe that he or she is entitled to rule.

David French

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“When you worship power, compassion and mercy will look like sins.”

Benjamin Cremer, a Wesleyan pastor 

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Doing it right

We don’t come to God by doing it right. Please believe me on this. We come to God by doing it wrong. Any guide of souls knows this to be true. If we come to God by being perfect, no one is going to come to God. This absolutely levels the playing field. Our failures open our hearts of stone and move our rigid mind space toward understanding and patience. It’s in doing it wrong, making mistakes, being rejected, and experiencing pain that we are led to total reliance upon God. I wish it weren’t true, but all I know at this point in my journey is that?God has let me do just about everything wrong, so I could fully experience how God can do everything so utterly right. 

Richard Rohr

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Shalom.

Of course it means peace.
But shalom is a word that overflows the boundaries of its own letters and irrigates other words.
Wellbeing. Harmony. Justice. Fruitfulness. Righteousness. Welcome. Union. And yes, Peace.
For all who, today as every day, long for shalom, in our heart, community, and world, this is a good prayer:

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Jim Gordon

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Jesus’ tool box

..one of the best tools in the toolbox of Jesus. Tell ‘em a story, a riddle, invite curiosity and imagination, and let’s see what becomes of a world like that. If Jesus wanted to be crystal clear, he would have written a book of philosophy, like Aristotle. Instead, he told stories.

Scot McKnight

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Gentle Parenting

In neglecting the dark corners of a child’s soul, gentle parenting does children a disservice. For the fact is that most children know that they’re sometimes bad, and that they sometimes do things out of malice, spite, and greed. Gentle parents are right: shame and guilt are negative feelings which may cause “trauma” for the child, as for the adult. No kidding. But the job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it. (I often wonder if the parents also want to avoid the “trauma” of guilt and shame, and so never acknowledge their own reasons for doing the things we do, such as becoming parenting “philosophy” consumers out of vanity, pride, or sloth. We may one day have good reason to ask forgiveness from our kids.)

https://unherd.com/2024/12/the-cruelty-of-gentle-parenting/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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ARCHIE UPDATE

STILL ON THE JOURNEY