I can melt an ice cube with my mind. It just takes me a few minutes.

Some days it's just your turn.

There are different kinds of preaching. Some guys are orators, some conversationalists, some pulpit pounders and some dry as yesterday's toast. Black preaching is an identifiable genre (and if you think that's racist you're wrong.) It's narrative in structure and "call & response" in form.

When I'm in the reading/rereading/rerereading stage of studying a passage I will be preaching I begin to hear in my head a sermon coming out. Sometimes it's a didactic sermon - linear, carefully reasoned and precise. Sometimes it's relational - gentle, supportive, nurturing. And sometimes, like this week with our look at the last section of Romans chapter 8, it's Black preaching - full of energy, power, and conviction, drawing people in not just as listeners, but as participants in the proclamation of the Word.

Alas, I am excessively White. So is Pathway. That's not so much a comment about our racial makeup as our cultural heritage. So while I can hear it in my head I can't pull it off with my mouth.
Rats!

This is really good. Lots to ponder, especially for those of us in leadership. But it speaks to everyone caught up in the age of devices.
One of my favorite lines:
"I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom."


The cold I thought was going to be a minor inconvenience smacked me upside the head yesterday, and again today. But this evening I'm feeling better than I have in four so perhaps this will just be one more NDE.

I'm amused by people who drive to the gym at our rec center and clog up an aisle in the parking lot waiting for a car to vacate a spot up by the door lest they walk another 50' to get there.

There seems to be some shock and disbelief at Santorum's statement that most prenatal testing is done to identify birth defects, and that in turn increases the number of abortions.
Isn't that fairly obvious?
It makes me wonder if the abortion of babies with birth defects identifiable in the womb is an inconvenient truth for those expressing shock at his statement.

The list grows. In the last month we've been told that we eat way too much salt, sugar should probably be regulated by the FDA like a drug, and that Mars is going to discontinue all of their large size candy bars.
I'm sorry, but I want to scream, "Get outa my life!"
I'm a reasonably intelligent person, and anyone who owns a TV or reads a magazine has heard plenty about what constitutes a healthy diet and what foods are dangerous in excess. (They have yet to warn us about Brussels spouts, an egregious omission.) I don't need to be nagged. If I want a huge Three Musketeers bar or glazed donut from Marge's I understand the associated risks. Stupid is as stupid does, and though it isn't specifically mentioned in the Declaration of Independence the pursuit of stupid seems like an equally inalienable right.

Furthermore (ascending soap box) diet is only half of the problem, and probably the lesser half. I can eat that occasional candy bar or deep fat fried pastry because I exercise regularly. We were not designed, are not built for a sedentary life, but American life increasingly favors it. A hundred years ago more people farmed or ranched or worked in factories. Now we sit at desks staring at computer screens. Alas, TV segments featuring shots of fast food meals and greasy bacon strips work better than sweaty men and women at the gym.

(descending soap box)

Pam made a pan of brownies last night but because of this cold I didn't have any apetite then.
I just finished my dinner. Now I'm going to get the pan and a fork, and the food whakos will have to deal with it.