I intend to live forever … So far, so good.
Scarcity
Brene’ Brown describing the impact of scarcity upon our lives:
We get scarcity because we live it…Scarcity is the “never enough” problem…Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.
Brown goes on to share this assessment from Lynne Twist:
For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of…Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack…This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.
Brueggermann and Grace
Walter once told me that he is disliked by progressives because he still believes in the old formula, that it is by grace alone that we are saved. And then he confided in me, “Conrad, I have to work to stay in that place of grace.”
And I love that old truth. Work to stay in the place of grace. For without the work there is but cheap grace. But without the grace, the work matters not. And is ultimately, expensive work.
The Nature of Focus
Focus is fundamentally different from mere attention. Attention can be fleeting, easily shifting from one thing to another, often beyond our conscious control. It’s our reaction to the constant barrage of sensory inputs we face each day. In contrast, focus is the sustained, intentional direction of our mental faculties toward a specific goal or object. It involves narrowing our field of vision, both literally and figuratively, which deepens our engagement with what we are focusing on.
Hyperfocus, often described as the intense concentration seen in individuals with ADHD, illustrates the power of focus. During hyperfocus, distractions fade, and the person becomes deeply engrossed in their task. However, this state can also lead to neglecting other important aspects of life. The challenge is to harness the benefits of such focus while maintaining balance.
Brad Vaughn
Penny wise?
A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child there residing, and enough to hand two pennies to every bewildered human born since the dawn of man. (To distribute them all, in fact, we’d have to double back to the beginning and give our first six billion ancestors a third American penny.) These are but a fraction of the several hundreds of billions of pennies issued since 1793, most of which have suffered a mysterious fate sometimes described in government records, with a hint of supernaturality generally undesirable in bookkeeping, as “disappearance.” As far as anyone knows, the American cent is the most produced coin in the history of civilization, its portrait of Lincoln the most reproduced piece of art on Earth. Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose (to make purchases), right now one out of every two circulating coins minted in the United States has a face value of 1 cent. A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, “sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes.”
It’s crucial that they remain there. Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.” There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there most likely would not be enough room to contain them inside government vaults. Moving them from place to place would be time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. (Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.) With each new penny minted, this problem becomes slightly more of a problem.
0.99
Retail legend claims that the “odd cents” pricing strategy (a Parisian trick imported by Rowland H. Macy to his New York City dry-goods store) proliferated after the cash register’s invention in 1879, as a tactic to prevent sales clerks from stealing. If a customer paid $3 for a $3 item, the logic went, a cashier could stealthily pocket the bills; if the price was $2.99, the customer would be owed a coin; to open the register, the cashier would need to key in the sale, thus creating, within the register’s hidden recesses, an incorruptible record of the transaction. That consumers tend to associate these prices with better deals (incorrectly, according to studies) was an added benefit.
Clarity of Scripture
Pop Protestantism believes in the clarity of Scripture in the sense of its perfect perspicuity. That is to say, that Scripture is clear enough that a Christian does not need a Pope or professor to tell them what to believe about the Bible. The plain sense of Scripture, combined with the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit, is sufficient itself to lead believers into truth. Which means I don’t take Bible study tips from an Italian guy in a pointy white hat wreaking of garlic let alone from a liberal “religion” professor at Penn State wearing a Che Guevera T-Shirt. Plus, if you combine the clarity of Scripture with a thing called soul competency where each soul is competent enough to interpret the Bible for himself and herself, then, you really can say that Bible interpretation requires only two things: Me and my ESV.
Except that such a view is neither truly Protestant nor a healthy approach to biblical interpretation.
If you look at the Protestant confessions, whether the Westminster Confession or the London Baptist Confession, the clarity of Scripture only applies to the things necessary for salvation. So yeah, reading the Gospel of Mark and Epistle to the Romans, you can figure out “What must I do to be saved?” without doing a Master of Divinity. But after that, all bets are off, not everything is clear, some stuff is disputed and debatable, and some things are downright baffling!
Wayne Grudem is correct that Scripture’s clarity does not deny the difficulty of some passages and the need for effort in interpretation. He writes:
I understand the clarity (perspicuity) of Scripture as follows: Scripture affirms that it is able to be understood but (1) not all at once, (2) not without effort, (3) not without ordinary means, (4) not without the reader’s willingness to obey it, (5) not without the help of the Holy Spirit, (6) not without human misunderstanding, and (7) never completely.
Which means with some assistance and some effort, one can attain knowledge of God through Holy Scripture. As Thomas Cranmer, the Anglican Reformer, put it,
This Word, whosoever is diligent to read and in his heart to print that [which] he readeth, the great affection to the transitory things of this world shall be minished in him, and the great desire of heavenly things that be therein promised of God, shall increase in him. (A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture)
And yet, precisely because Scripture is complex we need translators, historians and teachers to explain to us things like: women “will be saved from childbirth”; Who were the Nephilim or Pharisees? What is the kingdom of God? To help us wrestle with tensions like divine sovereignty and human responsibility or justification by faith and judgment according to works. This stuff is not self-evident and cannot be figured out after a 15-minute search on Wikipedia.
Michael Bird
Free Ride
Ana Ley, who covers mass transit, wrote a story this week focused on buses that quantified the problem in New York City with a jarring statistic: On nearly half of all bus rides in the city, people now skip paying the fare. As a result, about one million riders ignore the bus system’s most basic rule every weekday.
His faith was not a seamless garment but a ragged garment but a ragged garment with the seams showing. the tears showing. a garment that he clutched about him like a man in a storms
Fredrick Bruechner on James Muilenburg
Antimaterialist
an “antimaterialist,” that you believe reality is more than what science can investigate or reveal. An antimaterialist believes that truth is greater than facts, that reality includes more than the empirical.
Richard Beck
Weddings
Hassan Ahmed, 23, is charging his guests $450 for a ticket to his wedding next year in Houston, where he lives. Mr. Ahmed said he hadn’t heard back from many of his 125 wedding guests. But he has already spent over $100,000 on the wedding, including deposits for the venue, the D.J. and the photographer. In a video on TikTok, he said he was confused by the response, noting that many of his guests had spent more money on Beyoncé or Chris Brown tickets.
View from the Front Porch
As a result of participation in a recent class at church, I have been thinking about slippery slopes. The class focused on the interaction of Christians with the world on difficult subjects, i.e. LGBTQ+.
Leaders provided helpful information, stimulating hard but healthy conversations among participants. Varied viewpoints produced some anxiety. Rebuttals to ideas that conflicted with conventional thinking were often conciliatory but concluded with a warning that embracing them would be a slippery slope; implying danger and severe consequences and closing further discussion.
Slippery slope is an ideograph:
[a tool of persuasion, ideographs avoid arduous and often painful work of intimate, meaningful communication. Perfectly suited to a culture characterized by ambiguity, relativity and utility, they have metastasized into most arenas of communication, religious, business, personal, et al; rhetorical critics use chevrons or angle brackets (<>) to mark off ideographs.]
In personal communication, ideographs can impede conversation. For example, injecting “unbiblical” or “unchristian” can shut down a conversation that otherwise has potential for understanding and deepening relationship. Christ followers, called to love neighbor can ill-afford the use of ideographs.
Use of ideographs may indicate an anxious attachment to God.
“…those with anxious attachments to God have greater anxiety about abandonment, greater fears of being rejected by God. Consequently, these believers fear doing anything that might risk God’s disapproval. These fears interfere with faith development as any questioning or change in one’s beliefs risks making a “mistake.” A “better safe than sorry” dynamic comes to regulate how these anxiously-attached believers hold their beliefs and read the Bible.
Richard Beck
Slippery slopes are a reality and require deep and meaningful conversations. Christians best equipped to navigate slippery slopes are those securely attached to God.