Name Five
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”
Proverbs 1:7
Happy Friday,
According to the Bible, evil is more vexing, ugly, pernicious, disruptive and insidious than we think. Consequently, we ignore it at our peril. But that’s not the big story. The Bible spends less time telling us to fear evil than it does: 1) to love and fear God; and 2) to love and serve others. Right living follows right thinking, which follows the right ordering of our loves and fears.
Name Five
Can you name five ways the world is better today than it was ten years ago?
Overheard
1) 50% of happiness is having something to look forward to.
2) We come out of the womb looking for someone looking for us, and it doesn’t really change.
3) You can be your kids’ friends when they're small, or when they're adults, but almost never both.
4) The genealogies of Matthew 1 and Luke 3 suggest that God is playing the long game.
5) The Holy Spirit often speaks through your spouse and your kids.
6) Trust in traditional institutions – science, the state, education, the church – is down. Trust in algorithms is up.
Without Comment
1) 43% of Americans are dissatisfied with both parties, according to a NYT/Siena poll, the highest in the poll’s history.
2) The US ranks 36th in literacy (with 54% of adults reading below a 6th-grade level).
3) There are 7K attacks on passwords every second, leading Microsoft to say passwords are out and passkeys are in.
4) In the US, 20-24 year old males have replaced middle aged men as those most likely to end their life.
5) Per this article and this report: the average person’s carbon footprint is 4.7 metric tons of CO2/ year; the average American’s is 16 tons; and the average celebrity’s is 2,000.
6) More than 60% of US adults take at least one pharmaceutical drug, and 27% take 4 or more according to this research.
7) The Chosen is now the most-translated television series of all-time.
8) When Clorox (the owners of Hidden Valley Ranch) posted a job opening for Ranchbassadors to travel Europe promoting “the Flavor of America,” 6,000 people applied.
Quotes
1) “I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: ‘Go down again, I dwell among the people.’” — John Henry Newman
2) “When I look at myself, I don’t see how I can be saved. When I look at Christ, I don’t see how I can be lost.” — Martin Luther
3) “Billion-dollar industries depend on us being lonely, detached consumers.” — Freya India
WOTW
Honorable mention goes to heteropessimism, which is having another moment. After initially emerging a couple years ago, it popped again recently. What is heteropessimism? It’s the growing belief, usually held among women, that romantic relationships with the opposite sex won’t end well. Full honors go to the solitude influencer, which refers to those who promote solitude by breaking into your solitude with pictures of their “mundane solo moments.” It’s understood to be a way to advertise that they are “friendless and fine with it.”
Unexpected
1) Gen Z is more skeptical of social media - and more anxious about AI - than their older siblings, their parents or their grandparents,
2) Disney spent ~$165M on the latest Star Wars installment only to trail two low-budget horror films from internet-native creators. Apparently Z-ers trust YouTube nightmares > legacy franchises.
Resources
1) Click here to hear the second message in the series on forgiveness. It’s less a call to forgive someone than it is a call to become the kind of person who is able to forgive others.
Closing Prayer
“O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation, kindle in my heart a longing for that city where you are the everlasting light,
and where your saints will hunger no more, nor thirst anymore. There shall be no night, and no need of sun or moon, for you yourself will be their light, and they will reign with you forever. O lead me, Lord, through the changes of this present world into that blessed dwelling, where I shall see you face to face, and rest in the joy of your presence. Amen.” (Augustine - 354 - 430)
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