Most of us, however, are not so passionate, tending to get comfortable just living life and getting by — neither giving our current activities the energy they deserve nor dreaming of anything better than what we already have. We stop exerting ourselves and get comfortable halfway up the ladder. Or, to use a different analogy, it is as if we are sitting on a stepping-stone in the middle of a stream. We’re comfortable, yes, but we were never intended to get cozy on a stepping-stone. Our ultimate goal is to cross over to the other side.From Part Four:
Not familiar with The Rebelution? From the official book description of Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations, due out April 15, 2008:...our hope is that you would learn to throw yourselves 100% into the small things God has in front of you, but to not get so comfortable there that you miss the next thing, the bigger, better opportunities He brings your way when you keep your eyes open for them. We want you to be like someone who has been faithfully exercising, but is constantly looking for opportunities to use the strength that he or she has developed to serve others in a productive, real world situation.
One of our mother’s favorite sayings is the line, “Hustle while you wait.” She might tell us that after dinner when we are all sitting around waiting for dessert but the table hadn’t been cleared. She would get the dessert all served out but often wouldn’t bring it to the table until everything was completely cleared. ‘Hustle while you wait’ meant that something good we wanted depended on our quick and cheerful execution of a task immediately in front of us.
Go ahead. Do a dance step or two, or stand up and cheer. I understand. Really, I do. (And nothing would make me happier than to see this book become a New York Times bestseller. Heh.)The next generation stands on the brink of a "rebelution."
With over 14 million hits to their website TheRebelution.com, Alex and Brett Harris are leading the charge in a growing movement of Christian young people who are rebelling against the low expectations of their culture by choosing to "do hard things" for the glory of God.
Written when they were 18 years old, Do Hard Things is the Harris twins' revolutionary message in its purest and most compelling form, giving readers a tangible glimpse of what is possible for teens who actively resist cultural lies that limit their potential.
Combating the idea of adolescence as a vacation from responsibility, the authors weave together biblical insights, history, and modern examples to redefine the teen years as the launching pad of life and map a clear trajectory for long-term fulfillment and eternal impact.
Written by teens for teens, Do Hard Things is packed with humorous personal anecdotes, practical examples, and stories of real-life rebelutionaries in action. This rallying cry from the heart of revolution already in progress challenges the next generation to lay claim to a brighter future, starting today.
Truth to tell, I'm cheered by Barack Obama's victory over Mrs. Clinton. So are a lot of people who call themselves conservatives, and that demands some explanation, given that on social issues, on taxes, and on immigration, Mr. Obama's positions are impossible to separate from Mrs. Clinton's. What is going on here?
There once was a man on a Manhattan street corner snapping his fingers over and over again. What are you doing, someone asked. Keeping away tigers, he said. You don't think that really works, do you? It's working so far, he answered.
"Do not let us be hair splitters. Let us not ask ourselves whether the Americas should begin to defend themselves after the first attack, or the fifth attack, or the tenth attack, or the twentieth attack. The time for active defense is now."And this (and when):
"...if you treat the Americans well they will always want to treat you better."And this (and when):
"I prefer to collaborate with my allies rather than with my enemies."...pop over to Expat Yank and check out the sidebar.
Read the restAs someone who was in on the early days of abortion - and had one myself - I can say that never in our wildest dreams did we think that abortion would become a form of birth control ending up in 1.5 million deaths per year and wiping out 1/4 of the next generation. Why aren't feminists worried about the message that sends about women and children - that our lives and decisions are worth so little?
[...snip...]
What I'd really like to take to the Blogs 4 Life conference is a message of reality and hope. How are blogs affecting the way readers perceive abortion and other life-related issues? How has the Internet/how have blogs changed the way you think about abortion?
I'm asking because some of my readers have shared that they have been led by stuff they've read here to question their preconceived notions about abortion. Many were unaware of the number of babies aborted. Some had never considered the psychological implications for a generation growing up knowing that their parents had the power of life and death over them. Many are awakening to the fact that the Boomer Generation in its selfishness has created a huge societal problem as it grows to demand longer and better living - with Social Security benefits paid for by a population base shrunken - not by pestilence, famine or flood, but by their own hands.
This collection presents 163 Sunday school books published in America between 1815 and 1865, drawn from the collections of Michigan State University Libraries and the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University Libraries. They document the culture of religious instruction of youth in America during the Antebellum era. They also illustrate a number of thematic divisions that preoccupied nineteenth-century America, including sacred and secular, natural and divine, civilized and savage, rural and industrial, adult and child. Among the topics featured are history, holidays, slavery, African Americans, Native Americans, travel and missionary accounts, death and dying, poverty, temperance, immigrants, and advice.The home page for the collection at Michigan State University is here.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.... which is the end of it, but the whole Second Inaugural Address?
Read the articleHO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam (BP)--Vietnamese Baptists met at Grace Baptist Church in Ho Chi Minh City Jan. 10-11 to celebrate the church's receiving official government recognition and to organize a new national confederation. This historic development is expected to encourage future evangelism and church-planting efforts in the country.
The Vietnamese government made this possible by granting a certificate of religious practice to the church. The 400-member group met to create Grace Baptist Southern General Confederation. It adopted a constitution and elected officers for the new organization, which will organize and represent new churches across Vietnam.
[...snip...]
The church sits alongside the main airport road in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. Formerly called Saigon, the city was renamed in the 1970s at the end of the war... The church is completing an expansion of its building, prompted by a road-widening project. A new multi-story building is fronted with a dramatic spiral staircase and topped with a cross.
Grace Baptist Church is an outgrowth of Southern Baptist missionary work that began in Vietnam in the late 1950s. Missionaries left the country when the Vietnam War ended in 1975. Since then, the Vietnamese government has not allowed missionary presence.
But that foundational work continued to grow. Today, Baptists are widely acknowledged as the fastest-growing church group in Vietnam. There are now some 5,000 Baptists in 90 congregations in a dozen cities and provinces across the country. Only some of them are allied with Grace, church leaders said.
The link inside the above quote takes you to a May 2004 Cafe Hayek post, which has the quote coupled with the sentence which leads into it:I quote again the final lines of Thomas Sowell's greatest book: Knowledge and Decisions:
[Freedom] is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their "betters."
Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their “betters.”Hear! Hear!
The media never understood that most women over 50 don’t go to political rallies. But they do vote. So while the Hannah Montanas were filling Obama’s rallies and the media loved that, when push came to shove their mothers and grandmothers turned out in bigger droves to vote not for the media’s rock idol, but for the mature lady: Hillary.Friends, let's not get into commentary about how mature she is or isn't, please. Not here, at any rate. The point I think is a valid one. If you put too much stock in political rallies, you'll miss the voters who typically don't go to rallies, and that's most of us, at a guess.
Ironically, one reason America became the freest country in the world was thanks to its being founded by disunited Christians -- all those Protestant denominations had to figure out a way to live together and make a nation.American History 101 does need to be dusted off from time to time, I guess...
Meanwhile, over at Wittingshire, there's Tolkien on Soul Mates, from a letter J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his son Michael.The focus on the good brought to ourselves in the act of tithing is one that corrupts the purpose of the giving itself. C. S. Lewis provides an analogy to the proper view of marriage that fits here. Lewis said that you don’t get married to become happy, but rather to make the other person happy. Your own happiness is a by-product, a consequence, of maintaining the proper end. If, by contrast, you get married simply in order to make yourself happy, your true happiness is made that much more unlikely.
In the same way, whatever benefits we claim to receive from tithing, whether spiritual, emotional, or financial, these are not to be the reason that we give...
Sigma Phi Epsilon has taken on a new agenda, and it goes by the name of Balanced Man. The principles: leader, scholar, athlete and gentleman. There's a lot of talk about being gentlemen.
They have thrown out the defining first step of fraternity membership: pledging. That means freshmen like Chen don't have to scrape out the pumpkin seeds — or do unspeakable things with them. Chen says that if there were hazing and endless keggers, he never would have joined.
"I came to Georgetown. I'm paying $50,000 a year. I kind of want to accomplish something outside of, you know, having a good story to tell my grandkids about what not to do in college," he says.
Sigma Phi Epsilon isn't the only one trying the "classy frat guy" style. According to the North American Interfraternity Conference, half of its 350,000 undergraduates are in these "re-imagining the frat"-type programs. With names like Men of Principle and the True Brother Initiative, the programs prop up civility, scholarship and virtue.
