July 2011
The awkward moment when both players tried to do the same thing and failed
The Malaysian B-boys
“A while back a former gang member came to our church. He was heavily tattooed and rough around the edges, but he was curious to see what church was like. He had a relationship with Jesus and seemed to get fairly involved with the church. After a few months, I found out the guy was no longer coming to the church. When asked why he didn’t come anymore, he gave the following explanation: “I had the wrong idea of what church was going to be like. When I joined the church, I thought it was going to be like joining a gang. You see, in the gangs we weren’t just nice to each other once a week—we were family.” That killed me because I knew that what he expected is what the church is intended to be. It saddened me to think that a gang could paint a better picture of commitment, loyalty, and family than the local church body. The church is intended to be a beautiful place of community. A place where wealth is shared and when one suffers, everyone suffers. A place where when one rejoices, everyone rejoices. A place where everyone experiences real love and acceptance in the midst of great honesty about our brokenness. Yet most of the time this is not even close to how we would describe our churches.”
—Francis Chan (via sinfreed)
“Be flexible without being weak, be strong without being violent.”
—Imam Ali Bin Abi Talib. (via thefreenomad)
“Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”
—William Zinsser (via writingadvice)
“Predicting the future by projecting the present is like driving with no hands. It works while you are on a long stretch of straight road but even a gentle curve is trouble, and a sharp turn always ends in a flaming wreck.”
—Future Babble: Why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway - Farnam Street (via slantback)
Deadlines →
themonkeycage.org
We might think that if deadlines don’t accelerate decisions, at least they make it clearer when a decision will be made. Yet a study I co-authored with Stanford political scientist Justin Grimmer shows that sometimes the opposite can occur. Once a decision-maker misses a deadline — and many, many deadlines are not only missed, but are expected to be missed — there is usually much less incentive to continue speedy work.
Play
