"It is bad luck to be superstitious." - Andrew W. Mathis

First the misplacement of bodies at Arlington National Cemetery and now the disposal of veterans' ashes in a dump. All wrong, and heads should roll. Gibbs would be furious.

I worked on my sermon today, off and on throughout the day. I feel particularly exercised about this one but I'm having a dickens of a time getting it to fit into a structure. Maybe I'll just get up there and let fly. Naw, I can't do that. I've got to have a plan, an outline. I'm very extemporaneous in my delivery but I always have a plan. I think in all but the rarest of occasions public speaking requires it.

A sermon without a structure is like a body without a skeleton, all floppy. I've walked out after listening to a message and thought, "I heard everything he said and it was all true, but I don't know what his point was." In class we'd talk about the sermon in a sentence. I'd tell them, "If I met your people as they came out of the service and asked them to give me the point of your sermon in once sentence they should have no trouble doing so, or at least coming very close." In homiletics it's called propositional preaching and in English class it's having a clear thesis statement for your paper.

So after more cogitating this evening I think I have that proposition, that sermon in a sentence, and the supporting points that will make the case.
I think.

Albert Pujols signed a contract with the Los Angeles California Anaheim Orange County Angels that has him receiving $254 million over 10 years. I can't wrap my head around that. He's 31 and unless he turns out to be a freak of nature will not be playing ten years from now, but he'll still be getting paid. They used to take these big contracts and break them down by saying, "________ will be getting $___ for every game." Then the money got so big it was "$____ for every inning." At $254 million I don't know what metric you use, but unless I'm even worse at math than I thought it works out to over $2 million a month, every month, for the next decade. What does someone do with $2 million a month? And even if you do solve that problem the first month what do you do with the next one?

Somebody lost a remote control airplane. It's at the lost and found in Tehran.
Embaaaarrassing!


Here's one of those "truth stranger than fiction" stories:
Monique van Der Vorst

Time for a cup of coffee, a brownie and the rest of the football game.