For the Joy of the Journey

Energizer Bunny
GILBERT, Ariz. (AP) — As Forrest Gump in the Oscar-winning 1994 film of the same name, lead actor Tom Hanks abruptly trots to a halt after more than three years of nonstop running and tells his followers: “I’m pretty tired — I think I’ll go home now.”
Jacky Hunt-Broersma can relate. On Thursday, the amputee athlete achieved her goal of running 102 marathons in as many days, setting an unofficial women’s world record.
And she can’t stop/won’t stop, saying she’ll run two more for good measure and wrap up her challenge on Saturday with 104. “I might as well end April with a marathon,” she told The Associated Press.

postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD) –
cognitive problems associated with surgery that persist well after the effects of anaesthetics have worn off. “At the moment, estimates suggest that the overall incidence of POCD in older patients can be as high as 50-80% at discharge, 20-50% at six weeks and 10-30% at six months post-surgery. 

Bradford Pear competition
A stinky but handsome and widely popular landscape tree has become an aggressive invader.
Callery pear trees create dense thickets that overwhelm native plants and bear four-inch spikes that can flatten tractor tires. The stench wafting from their blossoms has been compared to rotting fish, chlorine or a cheese sandwich left in a car for a week.

White Huse Correspondents Dinner
President Biden
— “Look, I know this is a tough town. I came to office with an ambitious agenda and I expected it to face stiff opposition in the Senate. I just hoped it would be from Republicans.”
— “Republicans seem to support one fella: some guy named Brandon. He’s having a really good year.”

Thoughts about sin
The absence of sin isn’t the same thing as righteousness. Righteousness is a fullness and a presence. Sin itself is an emptiness and has the character of non-being. The spiritual life is fulfilled in righteousness – true rightness of being – living in the image of God.
Fr Stephen Freeman

The moral and ethical standards of the Early Church
…were not based upon a laundry list of the deficiencies of secular society, but on the example and teaching of Christ and how that was made real or incarnate in the life of the Church.  It was not a legislated morality.  It was a lived morality.  The measure was not an abstract view of society or the body politic of the empire.  The measure was the person of Christ.  For the Early Church the Christian cosmos was two-fold.  It extended far beyond the borders of empire to the furthest extent of creation, while at the same time the entirety of that Christian cosmos could be found in the smallest gathering of believers in the most insignificant village.  It was dependent not on power or influence.  It was dependent on presence… the presence of Christ.
Duane Arnold Phoenix Preacher

Self Aware
It’s in confronting the worst aspects of ourselves and being open about them that we find growth and help inspire growth in others.
Mark Manson

Spirituality
About 3 in 10 Americans claim no religious affiliation, according to data from the Pew Research Center, and a similar number say religion has little influence in their life. Only a third of Americans attend church regularly, according to Pew. But only 4% identify as atheists. And many unaffiliated Americans have spiritual beliefs, according to Pew, even if they eschew organized religion.

View from the Front Porch
Living on life support
Life support replaces or supports a failing bodily function. When patients have curable or treatable conditions, life support is used temporarily until the illness or disease can be stabilized and the body can resume normal functioning.

With the recent addition of a pacemaker, it occurred to me that I very much living on life support. At first that was a bit frightening. “He’s on life support.” is not something you want to hear. Probably not all that unusual for 80 but reality is there are probably a half-dozen meds, devices etc which removed would put my life in jeopardy.
I am finding it comforting to know I’m on life support.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Celebrity
No, I’m not a celebrity, but I do experience the temptation to think and act like one.
I see the dangers for others and myself. I know that success is a dangerous basis for self-esteem and a poor source for identity. It is unhealthy to think that productivity and ministry are the same thing. It is selfish to invest more time in your platforms rather than in the people who need you.
In my own head, I’m a celebrity, so how do I get outta here? How do I think and act like Christ’s servant and not like a guy who is destined to end up on Preachers in Sneakers?
Mike Bird

Partisanship
…if you think that most-partisan cohort is seething with anger because they suffer from painful oppression, think again. The data is clear. As the More in Common project notes, the most polarized Americans are disproportionately white and college-educated on the left and disproportionately white and retired on the right. 
The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who’ve ever lived. They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.
It’s simply an astonishing level of discontent in the midst of astonishing wealth and power.
David French

Death and Resurrection
I believe that Christians make a serious mistake when we begin to speak first about God rather than first about Christ and His death on the Cross and resurrection from the dead. It is a mistake because it presumes we know something about God that is somehow “prior” to those events. We do not, or, if we think we do, we are mistaken. The death and resurrection of Christ are the alpha and the omega of God’s self-revelation to the world. Nothing in all of creation is extraneous or irrelevant to those events.
This is to say that unbelief and faith are equally a part of the death and resurrection of Christ. The death and resurrection of Christ contain the utter and complete emptiness of hell, the threat of non-being and meaninglessness, the absurdity of suffering and of injured innocence. They also contain the fullness of paradise, the complete joy of existence and the ecstasy of transcendent love. Everything is there.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Price control
“…dollar prices are like the news. They tell you about something; they aren’t the thing itself. If we don’t like what we read in the news, changing the words on the page to say something better is just propaganda. And because falsified news, like a price control, isn’t truthful, it leads people to make bad decisions, damaging to them and to others. Ultimately, the only way to change news we don’t like is to get at what is causing the unpleasantness in the first place. In the case of runaway inflation, that cause is irresponsible management of the money supply.”
For Law & Liberty, Catherine Ruth Pakaluk

Gospel
The gospel is complete in and of itself. It is the perfect offering of the love of God for us. Though it is complete, it must be extended, and it must be extended with the same character with which it was first given. I am becoming more and more convinced that we can tell people about Jesus all day long and still not extend the gospel. Why? Because the gospel is more than simply telling people about Jesus. The gospel is more than an explanation about Jesus. It is a demonstration of Jesus. In fact, if you have to make a choice between telling someone about Jesus and showing them Jesus, you should probably do the latter. Why? Because someone may not remember what you said, but he or she will never forget what you did.
We’ve all heard the apocryphal quote oft attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, “Preach the gospel everywhere. If necessary use words.” Can we be honest? People tend to like this because they would rather avoid the awkwardness of talking about Jesus. Permit me a moment of unvarnished keeping-it-real truth-telling. The nature and character of the gospel do not tend to come through the deeds of a person who does not want to talk about Jesus. (And because I know I will be hearing from my dad about my use of the term “apocryphal,” I’ll get out in front of that by saying apocryphal means Saint Francis didn’t say it. For crying out loud, Saint Francis preached the Gospel to animals—with words!)

In summary, to share the gospel is a fully embodied act of ordinary yet supernatural love for other people. It involves our words, our deeds, our dispositions, and our overall posture and bearing toward other people. It means “I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church” (Col. 1:24b NRSV).
When we truly share the gospel, it always comes at a cost to ourselves, and yet it always makes us more than we were before. This is the why the power of the gospel is found only in the way of the cross.
J D Walt

The Problem with Faith
Elie Wiesel once said, “If I had not had faith, my life would have been much easier.” Faith in God, “faith in a faith” as it were, complicates evil because it begs for explanation in a world created, sustained, and overseen by a God who is good.
“Perhaps you are not looking for answers. You are looking for responses to your questions, to your life, for ways to live rather than ideas to espouse. Answers close things down; responses do not.”  Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom.

College admission essays
 It’s not fair for us to ask teenagers to describe their personalities. Teenagers are endearing but ridiculous people who can barely heat up a cup of ramen noodles and whose brains won’t be fully formed for two more presidential terms. Any teenager who is asked to describe themselves and doesn’t say, “I am scared and confused and my hormones have sort of turned me into a werewolf,” is lying.
Obviously, parents are writing many of these essays. Incredibly, many applications include the pointless step of making students check a box to verify that the application contains their own work, which is a verification system so ineffective that it makes the “I am 18” buttons on adult websites seem like the security at a Swiss bank.
College essays are arbitrary—exactly what’s being measured or why is unclear. They’re gameable—much like a pinewood derby car, many of the best ones are made by parents. They seem to benefit the wealthy—not every family can shell out big money to punch up an essay through a concerted program of expert tutelage and not-so-subtle negging. Say what you will about the SAT: The kid has to actually fill in the bubbles. They can’t take the test home and get help from Mom, Dad, teachers, the internet, and a gaggle of advisors that would seem excessive for a medieval child monarch.  

From 0.01% to 0.o0000.1%

You’ve come a long way baby!
Girls are now outperforming boys at nearly every level of education. They earn 60 percent of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and comprise 70 percent of high school valedictorians. Women are also dominating many workplaces. Women today hold a majority of the nation’s jobs, including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. As for men, they are dropping out at alarming rates. More prime age males are out of the labor force today than during the Great Depression.
https://www.thebulwark.com/tucker-carlson-and-the-crisis-of-masculinity/

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Becoming “a People”
Persons don’t become a “people,” through buying more books and learning more information and trying harder to be a better version of their old self. We become a people by sharing deeply in one another’s lives, learning to love one another and be loved by one another into our true selves and our real lives. This is the chosen people, the royal priesthood, the holy nation, and God’s special possession. Indeed, this Church Jesus is building is God’s special possession in all the world, for this is how God saves the world. 
J D Walt

Confirmation Bias
The most reliable cure for confirmation bias is interaction with people who don’t share your beliefs. They confront you with counterevidence and counterargument. John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that,” and he urged us to seek out conflicting views “from persons who actually believe them.” People who think differently and are willing to speak up if they disagree with you make you smarter, almost as if they are extensions of your own brain. People who try to silence or intimidate their critics make themselves stupider, almost as if they are shooting darts into their own brain.
Jonathan Haidt

apokatastasis
A number of Church Fathers during the first four centuries of Christianity believed in what’s called apokatastasis, or “universal restoration” (Acts 3:21). [1] They believed that the real meaning of Christ’s resurrection was that God’s love was so perfect and so victorious that it would finally triumph in every single person’s life. They were so sure about this that their thought partially gave rise to the idea of purgatory as a place. In the dying process or even after death, God’s infinite love can and will still get at us! They felt no soul could resist the revelation of such infinite love. 
Could God’s love really be that great and that universal? I believe it is. Love is the lesson, and God’s love is so great that God will finally teach it to all of us. We’ll finally surrender, and God will win in the end. That will be God’s “justice,” which will swallow up our lesser versions. God—Love—does not lose!
Richard Rohr

Student Loan Forgiveness
About 43 million people in the U.S. have a combined total of $1.6 trillion in federal student loans, according to government estimates. 
An analysis published by the left-leaning Brookings Institution found nearly a third of all student debt is owed by the richest 20 percent of households, compared to just 8 percent held by the poorest 20 percent of households. 
Large-scale student debt forgiveness would represent a massive cash infusion to America’s wealthiest households, and a comparative dribble for the rest.
The average federal student loan debt balance last year was about $37,000. The most burdened borrowers are already eligible to be helped by certain income-based repayment programs, which cap monthly student debt payments at 10 percent of their discretionary incomes and eventually forgives the remaining balance, typically after 20 years. Since the debts can eventually be forgiven for these high-need borrowers, the benefits of even partial debt forgiveness would still go disproportionately to high-income borrowers.
According to a DataStream analysis of Labor Department data, the cost of a college education has increased 1,200 percent since 1980, compared to overall inflation of 236 percent.
The Dispatch

Religious Experience
Among the more pernicious ideas that inhabit our contemporary world is the notion that we are all isolated, independent, and alone. Even when we gather, we think of ourselves as but one among many. Among the most glaring exceptions to this form of thought, however, are sporting events. People attend a football game and declare when it is finished, “We won!” or “We lost!” We feel genuine joy at the first and sadness at the second. We do not say, “They won” (unless we mean the opposing side). This is not actually strange. Sport has, from its earliest beginnings, been a religious experience. That said, it is an experience that we fail to consider or understand. It is also a shallow, meaningless, religion.
The mystery of sport is that we have some sense not only watching, but participating in what takes place. The team’s victory is my victory. The emptiness of this mystery is that what is being “participated” in has no substance or true being. We feel robbed when a referee blows a call and the game ends with the wrong winner. At such a moment the emptiness of the game is revealed. It had no more meaning than a mistake.

This meditation on sport is a very vacuous way to get at the notion of true participation (of which it is but the least shadow).
Fr Stephen Freeman

Gospel
While the gospel is a message, it cannot be confined to messages. While the gospel is the truth, it cannot be captured by a series of propositional truths. Before the gospel is anything else, the gospel is God. Gospel means “good news,” and the good news is God. The good news is not that God loves us. The good news is that God is love. The good news is not that Jesus saves. It is that Jesus is himself salvation.

We think we truly comprehend God and the gospel because we have some comprehension of what God has done for us. This is good, as far as it goes, but it does not go anywhere near far enough. When our understanding of the gospel is limited to what God has done for us, our understanding of sharing the gospel will be limited to telling others what God has done for them.

To be sure, the gospel is the message of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, but in a far greater sense, the gospel is who Jesus Christ is to us and in us and through us for the world. The gospel is not a body of knowledge about who God is and what God has done. The gospel is actually knowing God. Jesus prayed, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3).

We have lived through a period of world history wherein the measure of mastery consisted in knowing about a subject. The Christian faith is not meant for this paradigm. Real Christianity can never be reduced to knowing about God. We must go on to knowing God. To think one can master the subject of God is the ultimate idolatry. Real Christianity is about understanding oneself as subject to God and becoming mastered by Jesus Christ.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not God’s solution to our sin problem. The gospel is that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting [our] sins against [us]” (2 Cor. 5:19). It is a reconciled relationship through which God lives in us and we in him. The gospel is not the knowledge but the knowing. The domain of knowledge is in a body of information. The domain of knowing is in the body of Jesus Christ.  And none of this is meant to eschew or despise knowledge, but rather to say that knowledge is a penultimate understanding. Ultimate understanding means knowledge about God must give way to knowing God.
J D Walt

Artificial Intelligence
Acusensus’ technology can also be used to identify “hot spots,” helping determine where officials may need to improve enforcement, make changes to infrastructure or adopt new legislation. In recent months, the company conducted demonstrations and evaluations for a number of local law enforcement agencies and state transportation departments.
During an 18-hour assessment in August of a high-risk corridor in Missouri that was averaging three and a half crashes a day, more than 11,000 vehicles drove by. At least 60 percent of the drivers were speeding; an average of 6.5 percent were using mobile phones, more than twice the national average; and just under 5.5 percent were engaged in two concurrent risky driving behaviors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/technology/ai-road-car-safety.html?referringSource=articleShare

Cremation
So many ashes to ashes, so much dust to dust. Cremation is now America’s leading form of final “disposition,” as the funeral industry calls it — a preference that shows no sign of abating.
In 2020, 56 percent of Americans who died were cremated, more than double the figure of 27 percent two decades earlier, according to the Cremation Association of North America (CANA). By 2040, 4 out of 5 Americans are projected to chose cremation over casket burial, according to both CANA and the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA).

Tolerance
“I don’t like the word tolerate. Who am I to tolerate you? I prefer the word respect. I must respect you even if I do not agree with you. In fact, my disagreement may be an expression of my respect for you. If I truly respect you, don’t I own you my honesty?” Elie Wiesel
To understand others we have to understand the complexities and contradictions in our own selves. In learning our own complexity we form the possibility of learning from others. If we think we are always right, we have nothing to learn. The mark of learning is listening.
In discussing others we bring to the surface our bias. Wiesel thought the most inhuman person was still a human and we are called to the struggle to understand that person. It requires courage.
The “real tragedies” in society are not between right and wrong but between two rights. We cannot collapse the gap between us; in that gap is the possibility of creating a new peace and reconciliation. Differences express the gap; the gap is where the peace can take root.
Scot McKnight

STILL ON THE JOURNEY