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Did the Church fail?

This week tragedy struck our community. It is a reminder of the evilness that can exist in the heart of man. Many of us have more questions than we do answers. Our hearts are heavy. We grieve for the families involved and for the things our first responders had to endure as they responded.

My newsfeed has been filled with the heaviness we all feel, especially the wives of our first responders and what their loved ones saw that tragic evening.

You don’t just wake up, and those things go away. They stay with you. That is why we need to pray for our first responders, who run into situations that the rest of us run from. I can not imagine. Pray for them. Thank them. Encourage them when you see them. They carry things with them long after the accidents and events are no longer in our newsfeeds.

As all this swirls in my head, I began wrestling with the question, “Did the church fail in this situation?”

Let me explain …

Continue reading “Did the Church fail?”
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Expand Week 1: Top Posts I Read & Listened To The Week of July 31

In order to grow we have to keep learning. Therefore, I set five goals in 2017, two of them were to read daily and invest in self and others. 

I am currently working on a few projects and was challenged to listen to a few podcasts — a program (as of music or talk) made available in digital format for download over the Internet. I have been listening and trying to read more lately thanks to my friend who challenged me.

This post, which I hope to continue each week or every other, combines the top things that I have read and listened to this past week. They have either encouraged me, help me to grow or forced me to think and ponder their implications. They have made me use parts of my brain and heart that sometimes don’t get stretched because of the busyness of life. Especially the listening part.

I hope these help you, encourage you or make you think as well.

*Also a ‘tip of the hat’ to Brian Dodd who gave me the idea. Brian shares a weekly email about great article that he reads throughout the week. Check him at Brian Dodd On Leadership.

Top posts this past week …

  1. Tips for Emotionally Intelligent Emailing by Dr. Travis Bradberry
  2. Try something new… by Dr. Clay Smith
  3. Why our screens make us less happy by Adam Alter. I’ve included a transcript I found of the most impactful portion of his talk at the very bottom of this page. 
  4. AOL: Steve Case | How I Built This on NPR (link below)
  5. ​StoryCorps 508: No Barrier For The Love (link below)

NPR Podcasts …

 AOL: Steve Case | How I Built This
​When Steve Case started out in the tech business in the mid-80s, the idea of the internet — as we think of it today — didn’t exist. But with AOL, Case saw an opportunity to connect millions of people, through chat rooms, news updates, and the iconic greeting, “You’ve Got Mail.”
​StoryCorps 508: No Barrier For The Love
Immigrants are one of the most talked about groups of people in the country. In this episode, we let them do the talking.
Why our screens make us less happy by Adam Alter
One of the reasons we spend so much time on these apps that make us unhappy is they rob us of stopping cues. Stopping cues were everywhere in the 20th century. They were baked into everything we did. A stopping cue is basically a signal that it’s time to move on, to do something new, to do something different. And — think about newspapers; eventually you get to the end, you fold the newspaper away, you put it aside. The same with magazines, books — you get to the end of a chapter, prompts you to consider whether you want to continue. You watched a show on TV, eventually the show would end, and then you’d have a week until the next one came. There were stopping cues everywhere. But the way we consume media today is such that there are no stopping cues. The news feed just rolls on, and everything’s bottomless: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, email, text messaging, the news. And when you do check all sorts of other sources, you can just keep going on and on and on.