You need to be bored (6 minutes)
A psychologist did experiments where people had to sit in a room for 15 minutes with nothing to do. They could sit there and be bored, or there was a button in the room they could push that would give them a painful shock. Bored or electrocuted. A vast majority picked the electric shock.
Why?
Because otherwise their bored brain might start thinking about things that would make many of us uncomfortable. Like, What am I even doing with my life? Or, What is the point of all of this? And rather than think on those bigger things, we will do anything to keep ourselves from being alone with our own thoughts. Most of the time the choice isn’t boredom or electrocution: it’s between boredom and our phones. So our phones have saved us from the search for meaning.
We really do need to be bored.
Paul shows us how to confront others with the Gospel
“…Many of us are not nearly confrontational enough in presenting the claims of Christ to those around us. We are far too willing to soften the message….. But Paul did not flinch from proclaiming a message that he knew would be utterly offensive to his hearers.”
We have a playbook for college. How about one for marriage?
When it comes to a good college, parents know good marks might not be enough, so they know how they can help their kids build “a compelling résumé and what to put in their application essay.” They can help plot a course. But marriage doesn’t just happen either; not like it did. So do we need to help with a playbook for that too?
As Aaron Renn writes, he didn’t prioritize marriage, but mostly because he just wasn’t thinking of the future.
“For a long time I said I didn’t want to have kids. What that might mean for me down the road as I got older didn’t really register. It wasn’t a consideration.
“I was in my early 30s when my grandfather died. I was sad, but it didn’t cause me to reflect on my own mortality. Then, when I was about 40, my grandmother got sick and was hospitalized. My mother called to ask me to come down and take shifts staying with her. Several family members did likewise, so she had someone staying with her in the hospital 24 hours a day.
“When I was with her and looked at her lying in that hospital bed, for the very first time in my life it hit me. When I’m old and lying in that hospital bed, who is going to come stay with me? The answer was, nobody. Nobody would be coming to stay with me. That was a sobering thought.”
Ignoble savage: what the Bible says about Ancient Man
The world pitches us a primitive-cave-man-advancing-to-sophisticated-modern-man narrative. But the Bible presents us with Adam, our first man, already smart enough to name all the animals. Quite the contrast…
5 myths about Deacons
I don’t know if the 4th and 5th myth are all that applicable in any of our churches, but 1 through 3 do pop up sometimes….
For more, Real Talk did a great episode about Deacons with Dr. Van Dam.
How God brought Nabeel Qureshi to his knees (3 min)
Nabeel Qureshi was a Pakistani-American Muslim who, in university, befriended a Christian fellow university student, named David Wood. And they went at it. For months. Nabeel later went on to write Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus.
