Dirt

By David Wimbish and The Collection

Winning Ways: Dueling Leaf-Blowers and You

Did you read about the infamous leaf-blower incident in South Carolina? It’s a cautionary tale about getting along with others.

It seems that a man saw his neighbor blowing leaves onto his property one Sunday morning. In response, he got his leaf blower out of the garage and blew the leaves back into his neighbor’s yard. A duel of leaf-blowers ensued, with the two men standing at their property line blowing leaves back and forth.

Then it turned ugly: Yep, they started blowing air in each other's faces.

By the time the police intervened, one man had head-butted the other three or four times, and one man had taken a hammer to the other man’s leaf-blower.

Pride goeth before a fall, says the book of Proverbs. Apparently, it also goeth before a fit.

This Sunday, we continue our sermon series called “Getting Along.” We’re looking at eight biblical solutions to conflict. If you want to catch up with the series or review the messages, log on to www.hillcrestaustin.org/sermons.

We’ve already looked at how to tame anger and how to think “win-win.” This Sunday we’ll learn the fine art of the apology. Scripture guides us on this tough but necessary work. As the series continues we’ll learn

• how to mediate a conflict between others
• the difference between “forgiving” offenses and “forbearing” annoyances
• how to sharpen your communication skills
• how to confront appropriately
• how a greater trust in God contributes to peaceful living

True, not all of our conflicts are as comical as the leaf-blower fight. Many of our clashes involve issues far more important than leaves on our property. The good news is that God’s Word can guide us to resolve conflicts no matter how profound the issues, and no matter how much damage has already been done.

Bring your Anger Management Manual this Sunday and let’s continue the lessons on Getting Along!

Fat Fat Jehoshaphat. That’s the title of the musical that our Kid’s Music Theater will perform this Sunday night, 6:30 pm. The Preschool Praise Club will also perform songs from “The P.J. (Prayers to Jesus) Party.” This will be fun!

The Power of the “Forward” Button. Why not send this edition of “Winning Ways” to a friend with an invitation to church? Don’t ever under-estimate the power of the “Forward” button!

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Each Wednesday I post my article from "Winning Ways," an e-newsletter that goes out to 1200 subscribers. If you want to subscribe to "Winning Ways," sign up here.

Links to Your World, Tuesday April 24

According to a survey, $50K is the tipping point when it comes to satisfaction with life.

 

For those of us with thinning hair, it's a whole new bald game.

 

"Have you noticed how a lifelong devotion to physical exercise, to the exclusion of anything else, produces a certain type of mind? Just as neglect of it produces another? Excessive emphasis on athletics produces an excessively uncivilized type, while a purely literary training leaves men indecently soft" (Plato, recounting the words of Socrates, in The Republic).


 

Are Americans lonelier than ever? Yes. No.

 

The #1 way to boost brainpower? Get moving.

 

New iPad Tastes About The Same, Nation's Toddlers Report


 

The German paper, Der Spiegel, has an (English language) article about the Samaritans. You may recall that the "woman at the well" in John 4 was a Samaritan, and she wanted to argue about the very thing featured in this article: whether it was on Mount Gerizim instead of Jerusalem that worship should take place. Jesus had his own answer, and Samaritans to this day have theirs. I found the journalism very unprofessional, as the writer sides with the Samaritans on the claim that the Bible "has handed down a distorted picture of history." Despite the journalist's irresponsible advocacy of the Samaritan claims, it's still interesting to read a popular-level report on modern-day Samaritans.

 

A "Sea Change" in Our View of Conversion?

In a Christianity Today entry, Gordon T. Smith says that evangelicals are leaving "revivalism" behind for a deeper and more historic view of conversion. My take: "His observation is true," "The change is good," and "Be careful you don't lose something essential in the change."

"Revivalism" is Smith's label for the once almost-monolithic view of conversion among evangelicals. Characteristics of this view included:

* A "punctiliar experience: persons could specify with confidence and assurance the time and place of their conversion, by reference, as often as not, to the moment when they prayed what was typically called 'the sinner's prayer.'"

* "What counted was the afterlife. And if one had 'received Christ,' one could be confident of one's eternity with God."

* "Typically evangelicals approached evangelism through the use of techniques or formulas by which a person would be introduced to spiritual principles or 'laws' on the assumption that if these principles were accepted as "true," a person would offer an appropriate prayer and thus 'become' a Christian."

* "Baptism, it was insisted, was subsequent to conversion and essentially optional. For although baptism was thought to be perhaps important, true spiritual experience was considered a personal, interior, subjective experience."

* The business of the church was in "making conversions happen; its life and mission were oriented toward getting more people converted through whatever means possible. Successful congregations were characterized by numerical 'conversion growth.'"

* "The making of disciples was thought to be subsequent to conversions. Thus evangelicals would speak of 'making converts into disciples'" and "typically the approach to evangelism was distinct from the approach to spiritual formation."

Smith suggests several reasons why these "fundamental categories and assumptions of revivalism are thus being questioned as never before."


My response? Three.


"His observation is true." Whether you applaud it or lament it, there is a "sea change" in the way evangelicals view conversion.

"The change is good." Several of the assumptions of what Smith calls "revivalism" need to be corrected. Here are a few:

* Why did we ever allow baptism to become secondary to the "moment of surrender"? Baptism is the public identification with the death and resurrection of Jesus. It is not an optional accessory one may decide to add after the "essential" act of surrender has taken place. "Crusade evangelists" in the recent past often asked their audience whether they could remember a specific time they made a public profession of faith and, if not, they were urged to do so during the event so they would have a date to look back on. In Romans 6, if Paul is actually challenging someone to look back and see if they can recall a specific, pivotal date, it was the moment of their baptism that he was asking them to recall.

* It's true that as churches started seeing their "business" as conversion-making, a film of dust settled over other activities: the inherent value of worship and the Lord's Supper, for example, or the place of spiritual growth and church discipline.

* It's good that evangelicals are beginning to see that conversion is a process--and an-often complex one, at that. A man raised in central Asia who just completed my Anchor Course is a good example of this: At the start of the 9-week study he described himself in "outsider" language as an investigator of the Christian claims, but by the end of our 2 months together I noticed him using the inclusive terms of someone who considered himself a fellow believer. Somewhere along the way he had "moved in" to the Christian worldview.

* It's good that we're seeing that conversion happens as people are invited in to the life of the Christian community to spend some time just "looking over our shoulders," so to speak, as we go about the work of the Christian community: worshipping God and teaching each other and serving the world.

"Be careful you don't lose something essential in the change." That's my third thought after reading Smith's post. Smith is correct to speak favorably about how evangelicals have opened themselves to "cross-pollination" from other Christian traditions, but the value of such exchange should not be one-sided. In other words, while there is certainly something that "revivalism" can learn from other Christian traditions, there are values that "revivalism" can contribute to others as well.

* Let's not let talk of a more wholistic mission for the church morph into an embarrassment of conversion as a vital part of that whole. Of course the church is not just a "conversion-making" business, but churches who don't count it a priority to help unbelievers convert to belief will soon be out of business.

* Let's not let talk of conversion being a "process" morph into an inability (or unwillingness) to clearly define the line in that "process" that one has to cross to go from unbelief to belief.

* Let's not let the new emphasis on enriching the experience of Christian community morph into a reluctance to challenge the worldview of those who aren't yet a part of it. Christian communities need to be busy worshipping God and teaching each other and serving the world. But the unbelievers inevitably attracted to such beautiful communities should be given not just an invitation to observe us but also a clear call to join us. This includes an explanation of our beliefs, an invitation to yield to the saving Lordship of Jesus, and a challenge to declare that surrender publicly in baptism.

In short, those from what Smith calls a "revivalist" tradition have our own role to play in making sure the whole body of the Lord Jesus Christ stays healthy. We have some things to learn from other Christian traditions--and we have some things to teach them.

 

Winning Ways: Angry Birds and the Albatross

Your victories can stall you as quickly as your failures. Put it all behind you and press on.

We're inspired with the stories of those who overcame initial failures on the road to success. WD-40 got its name because the first 39 experiments failed. WD-40 literally stands for "Water Displacement--40th Attempt." Dyson's first 5,126 vacuum cleaners were a bust before his breakthrough. And Rovio nearly went bankrupt over 51 failed products before developing a little game called Angry Birds.

In a Fast Company piece last week Josh Linkner said of such stories:

In your life, you've probably had a setback or two. When you stumble, it's tempting the throw in the towel and accept defeat. There's always an attractive excuse waiting eagerly, hoping you'll take the easy way out. But the most successful people forge ahead. They realize that mistakes are simply data, providing new information to adjust your approach going forward.

We need such reminders about failures, but what about victories? We would think that early wins would propel us forward to success, but Louis Oosthuizen is a caution to that thinking.

The South African was a favorite in last week's Masters, especially after holing his second shot on a par-5. But he admitted that the thought of that spectacular play dogged him for the rest of the day. "It was tough after that double-eagle," he told reporters. "When something like that happens early in your round, you think that this is it."

By the way, in golf a double-eagle is also called an albatross. Like the Ancient Mariner's albatross around the neck, Oosthuizen's early gain plagued him the rest of his day at Augusta National. Bubba Watson got the green jacket, and gave all the glory to Jesus.

It seems that our wins as well as our losses have to be put behind us in order to succeed. This is true in following Christ's Lordship as much as in sports or business. Admitting he had not yet reached a state of consistent holiness, Paul wrote, "But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:12-14 NIV84).

This week, don't let either your defeats or your victories stall you in this beautiful pursuit! See you Sunday.

___________________________

Each Wednesday I post my article from "Winning Ways," an e-newsletter that goes out to 1200 subscribers. If you want to subscribe to "Winning Ways," sign up here.

Links to Your World, Tuesday April 17

Faking terminal cancer for wedding gifts?

 

Three-year-old finds live WW2 grenade in an Easter egg hunt.

 

Ryan Sanger in "How Big Cities Can Lead to Small Thoughts"--"For all the admiration heaped on cities as sources of creative frisson, there's nothing magic about concrete and good cappuccino that keeps us from sorting ourselves into social satrapies. Sometimes it's a trendy phone, sometimes it's a monolithic political or ideological culture. But whatever it is, "small town" thinking can crop up as easily in the megalopolis as in Palookaville. For those satisfied in their city ways, it may just take a little extra effort to Think Different."

 

The Best and Worst Jobs of 2012. Where does your job fall in the ranking?

 

Why you like books and movies with sad plots.

 

A secular explanation for why cohabitation is more likely to lead to divorce.

 

After reading this article about California, you'll have to work hard to convince me they're not really writing about Austin city planning....

 

 

 

 

Healthy Balance or Hopeless Prudishness?

If orthodoxy seems puritanical to you today, maybe it’s less because it’s inherently anti-fun and anti-feelgood than because we live in a society distinguished by such extraordinary excess—gluttonous, libidinous, avaricious—that what a different era might recognize as a healthy balance between asceticism and indulgence looks like hopeless prudishness instead.

Ross Douthat, in an exchange with William Saletan at Slate about Douthat's new book, Bad Religion.

 

The Moral Realism of the Noir Hero

David Brooks:

A noir hero [like Sam Spade in “The Maltese Falcon”] is a moral realist. He assumes that everybody is dappled with virtue and vice, especially himself. He makes no social-class distinction and only provisional moral distinctions between the private eyes like himself and the criminals he pursues. The assumption in a [Dashiell] Hammett book is that the good guy has a spotty past, does spotty things and that the private eye and the criminal are two sides to the same personality.

He (or she — the women in these stories follow the same code) adopts a layered personality. He hardens himself on the outside in order to protect whatever is left of the finer self within.

He is reticent, allergic to self-righteousness and appears unfeeling, but he is motivated by a disillusioned sense of honor. The world often rewards the wrong things, but each job comes with obligations and even if everything is decaying you should still take pride in your work. Under the cynical mask, there is still a basic sense of good order, that crime should be punished and bad behavior shouldn’t go uncorrected. He knows he’s not going to be uplifted by his work; that to tackle the hard jobs he’ll have to risk coarsening himself, but he doggedly plows ahead.

That's a great description of the genre's protagonist. Brooks says today's young idealists could use a dash of the noir hero as they engage the world.

 

Winning Ways: Note to Self--Letters to a High School Me

Imagine you could go back in time and talk to your younger self. What would you say?

As we plan for a summertime emphasis on this subject, we want you to write a quick word of advice to your high school self and turn it in.

In Dear Me, A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self, author Joseph Galliano asked a number of well-known people what they wish they could tell themselves at age sixteen.

For example, here’s Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame: “If you spent a quarter of the time thinking about others instead of the way you hate your thighs, your level of contentment and self-worth would expand exponentially. PS: Follow your dreams, not your boyfriends.”

And I agree with rock star “Alice Cooper” who told himself: “Trashy girls are exciting for just about five minutes. Keep your eye out for a really good lookin’ church girl. Then you’ll have the best of both worlds. PS: I think coffee shops might really catch on, maybe call them Star something.”

As others have taken up the challenge, the project has become a cultural phenomenon. CBS This Morning snagged Maya Angelou to read her “note to self” on their program. And London’s The Telegraph asked various staff writers to advise their younger selves. Henry Winter warned himself: “Stop being so painfully competitive. Cherish the occasion.” And Alison Pearson advised: “Remember, the girls whose names are called first when choosing teams for netball have no power to spoil your future. Life’s early winners often fall away. Your time will come.”

In his weekly newsletter, Pastor Jim White wrote his high school self. Among other good bits of advice, he urged, “Follow Jesus now as both Forgiver AND Leader. Don’t wait. Get serious about your relationship with Him. You believe, but it is all intellectual. You know about Him, but you don’t know Him.”

Now it’s your turn. Yes, this will take a little “think time.” But it will be worth it to you and to those who read your words.

You can skip the advice about buying Dell, Apple or Intel. Instead, think about what you would have done differently related to heart, vision and direction? What would you tell yourself isn’t worth the worry? What would you tell yourself is worth the attention you failed to pay to it?

We’re flexible on the length, but here’s a guide: We’d like more than 50 words and not more than 300. Email a note to Pastor Tom’s assistant, Jami (jami@hbcaustin.org). The deadline is Wednesday, May 2.

__________________________________

Each Wednesday I post my article from "Winning Ways," an e-newsletter that goes out to 1200 subscribers. If you want to subscribe to "Winning Ways," sign up here.

Links to Your World, Tuesday April 10

In China, teen trades kidney for iPhone and iPad.

 

Media personnel are having a debate over whether the label "Christian" equals "conservative."

 

Dolphins not so intelligent on land. Heh...

 

For $1.4 million you can buy District 12 from the Hunger Games. Perfect for squirrel hunting and staging a revolution....

 

My response to a NYT piece that bundles trust in divine providence with a lucky rabbit's foot as irrational but useful superstition.

 

Austin-area growth rate second in the nation. What are the implications for existing church outreach and church planting?

 

"Masters patrons "leave [their smartphones] in their car, embarking on a very strange 21st century experience of spending long hours without earth's most inescapable technology. They look at things—with their eyes. They solve questions—by asking nearby human beings. They come up with clever comments and somehow survive without offering them to the world in 140 characters." And how does one tell time without a phone? "They were accustomed to using their phones to tell time, but here, they'd come up with an ingenious solution: they simply looked for an older person. Older people, as it turned out, wear these gadgets called watches." (story)

 

Hungry Games

In a recent NYT piece, Matthew Hutson cited a study led by the psychologist Kenneth Pargament of Bowling Green State University which found that students who saw a negative event as 'part of God’s plan' showed more growth on the other side of the experience. Wrote Hutson, "They became more open to new perspectives, more intimate in their relationships and more persistent in overcoming challenges."

The findings of the study are unsurprising to Christians, but Hutson's reference to the study is disappointing. Why? Because he includes it with knocking on wood or carrying a lucky rabbit's foot as examples of "magical thinking."

He's sympathetic to these habits of mind. "Some level of belief in the supernatural — often a subtle and unconscious belief — appears to be unavoidable, even among skeptics," he writes, "One study found that a group of seemingly rational Princeton students nonetheless believed that they had influenced the Super Bowl just by watching it on TV."

Though it misrepresents reality, he says superstition "offers psychological benefits that logic and science can’t always provide: namely, a sense of control and a sense of meaning."

And, while such thinking is fundamentally an illusion, the confidence we get from this false sense of control helps us perform better. So, golfers who were given a ball and told that it had previously performed well drained 35 percent more of their putts than when using a "regular" ball.

"So," concludes Hutson, "to believe in magic — as, on some deep level, we all do — does not make you stupid, ignorant or crazy. It makes you human."

Sympathetic commentary on irrational thinking always strikes me as sad. And when the sympathetic defense includes talk of God as part of irrational thinking, it also strikes me as misguided.

For one, it's sad. Hutson is saying that the universe as it is--chaotic and random--is intolerable and that all these superstitions give us the illusion of order and and a (fake) sense of control. He is saying, "We happened to spring up in a universe unmindful of our existence, and if we can briefly ignore the psychic terror of this stark truth by chanting a mantra or rubbing a lucky talisman between our fingers, well, let's not be too hard on ourselves. It's a lie but, you understand, it's a useful lie. So, now that we, the wise, have told you this, try to continue to enjoy the confidence and improved performance you once got from your silly rituals when you believed in their potency. Carry on--if you can."

Two, it's misguided to include belief in God along with belief in a lucky rabbit's foot or a charmed golf ball as all examples of "irrational" thinking.

It would be better to say that our all-too-human superstitions reveal a hunger that should set us on a search for sustaining food. C.S. Lewis put it this way in his 1949 sermon, "The Weight of Glory"--

A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world.

Hunger means we have a real need for food. I suppose one could say that my desire for a juicy steak is fundamentally the same craving as felt by malnourished inner-city children who nibble on lead-laced paint chips. But to say that paint chips cannot satisfy that craving is no argument against my steak.

 

Go here for my commentary on a book that covers some of the same ground (John Geiger's The Third Man Factor)

 

 

Winning Ways: A Romance Story Written in Red

Do you know any good romance novels involving crucifixion?

According to Martin Hengel, there used to be.

In his famous 1973 book (well, famous among scholars), the New Testament expert surveyed the use of crucifixion as a penalty in the Graeco-Roman world. Part of the overview included reviewing the popular Roman literature in the time Christianity began. Reading these novels evokes the horror that most people felt about the threat of crucifixion.

"Crucifixion of the hero or heroine is part of their stock in trade," Hengel says of the romances. He gives some examples:

In the Babyloniaca written by the Syrian lamblichus, the hero is twice overtaken by this fearful punishment, but on both occasions he is taken down from the cross and freed.

Again:

Habrocomes, the chief figure in the romance by Xenophon of Ephesus...is first tortured almost to death and later threatened with crucifixion. Even his beloved, Anthea, is in danger of being crucified after she has killed a robber in self-defense.

However, he says, readers would have never accepted a plot where the hero actually died by crucifixion:

Heroes cannot on any account be allowed to suffer such a painful and shameful death—this can only befall evil-doers....The hero of the romance is saved at the last moment, just before he is to be nailed to the cross.

Of course, in the Bible’s love story, the hero is not saved from the cross. Instead, he suffers and dies, vindicated by resurrection 3 days later.

You do know that the crucifixion of Jesus is a love story, right? As our most famous verse puts it (John 3:16 NIV84), "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."

That's what's behind the lyrics to the 1984 Gordon Jensen song that our choir sometimes sings:

In letters of crimson, God wrote his love

On the hillside so long, long ago;

For you and for me Jesus died,

And love's greatest story was told.

 

I love you, I love you

That's what Calvary said;

I love you, I love you,

I love you, written in red

This week would be a good time to reflect on that love story. Join us at 7 p.m. on Good Friday for the Lord's Supper, and join us at 10 a.m. on Easter Sunday to celebrate our hero's triumphant victory!

________________

Winning Ways is a weekly enewsletter for our church newsletter

 

Links to Your World, Tuesday April 3

Yesterday passengers from the Titanic began tweeting. Of course, Twitter didn’t exist in 1912, but if you choose to follow @HistoryChannel #Titanic, you’ll receive periodic updates, ending with the sighting of the iceberg, the captain and crew’s responses, the initial load of passengers into the lifeboats, and… the ending. (HT: Wired)

 

If Noah had kept a blog.

 

"Acknowledging the American aversion to saving makes it all the more fascinating to consider the challenge facing the two to three billion people in the world living on $2 a day or less and forced save quite a lot of it. In poor countries without national health care or retirement programs, families have to conserve what they can to guard against the possibility that a family member will get hurt, fall ill, or no longer be able to earn a living. The typical Chinese family saves 30% of its income, according to a Credit Suisse study. The typical Indian family saves 15%. How do families in poverty save?" The Atlantic explains.

 

Ah, so now there's the "white Hispanic" category. Sigh....

 

A 49-year-old MLB pitcher? Cool. Calling Jamie Moyer a "baby boomer"? Not cool.

 

We know that people ascribe more authority to someone in a white lab coat than someone in a white painter's coat. What's interesting is that just wearing the white lab coat causes people to score higher in tests measuring attentiveness. Maybe the saying is true: Clothes make the man.

 

"Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord"

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard--

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard--

For frantic boast and foolish word,

Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord.

The last line of Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional," on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, seeing the signs of a British Empire too focused on guns instead of God. Some enterprising pastor will dust off this poem for an Independence Day sermon soon, because it applies to another "empire" of the early twenty-first century.

When Experience is the Best Teacher--And When It Isn't

Is there such a thing as "posttraumatic growth”?

This is an important question for pastors and other church workers, considering how often we deal with people in trauma--and how often we reassure people there are lessons to learn and growth to experience on the other side of trauma.

Gary Stix defines posttraumatic growth as "an arduous life experience—combat, cancer—that, once confronted, is said to engender psychological transformation that affords a more mature or positive perspective on things."

Stix also questions whether it exists--at least in the form that talk shows like to present it. He cautions against what he called "the Oprah narrative."

The Oprah mantra of strength through hardship is commonplace following a traumatic event but only materializes if the victim actually initiates some meaningful action to effect change....Simply saying “my life has changed forever” doesn’t cut it.

Citing research among those who claim that a dramatic crisis has "changed" them, Stix includes this illustration from Stevan Hobfoll of the Rush University Medical Center:

Hobfoll illustrated that point from his own experience by telling me about a friend who had provided assurances that he had “seen the light” after a heart attack that led to quintuple bypass surgery. “Another friend of mine and I take off work to go visit him when he gets out of the hospital and he’s not there when we get there, he’s late. And he comes in with the two cell phones going, one in each ear. His adult daughter is leaving in a huff because she’s been there three days to see her almost-dying father and he hasn’t given her a minute. So he gives us the one-finger sign to say he’ll just be a minute and 20 minutes later he gets back to us and says: ‘I’m a changed man.’”

So, is "the Oprah narrative" a fairy tale? Not entirely--which is why the blog post title is so curious ("Psychologial 'Growth' Through War and Disease: Sometimes Its Just a Cruel Delusion"). Defying the cynical title, Stix writes:

Growth is possible after potentially traumatic experiences, Hobfoll said, if the perception of it is coupled with specifc actions. Michael J. Fox as Parkinson’s spokesman and philanthropist has demonstrated as much. Victor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and helped pioneer the concept of psychological growth after hardship, wrote of “right action and right conduct” that, in the camps, translated into mutual aid that one prisoner would lend another at peril to himself.

As the old saying goes, "Experience isn't necessarily the best teacher: It all depends on what kind of student experience has to teach."

I also found the penultimate paragraph important:

Another way the “What doesn’t kill you…” meme can turn toxic stems from the unreasonable expectations it puts on the patient. “When people have undergone trauma, just getting to the next day may be enough,” Hobfoll said. “If clinicians and even the media start setting up that you have to grow from that experience, that really can be a burden and that can be an overwhelming burden, when you start feeling guilty that I’m just making it to work and continuing to be a parent to my kids and coaching the kids’ soccer team and they’re telling me that’s not enough and that I have to have grown and all I really want to do is get through this.”

As a pastor who has walked with numbers of people through crises--and as a man who's had a few of my own--I can tell you that this is true. Sometimes just putting one foot in front of another is success. As God promised in Isaiah 40:31

Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles;

they will run and not grow weary,

they will walk and not be faint.

Notice the order: soar...run..walk.

Some days, when you're not soaring or even running but just doing good to walk--well, that's a grace from the Lord.

Give Stix's blog post a look: Don't let the unfortunately-cynical title keep you from it.