Happy Friday
I have set the Lord continually before me — Because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.
The Value of Scripture Memory: The Gospels contain 1,800 verses of Jesus speaking. Ten percent are quotes from the Old Testament. In other words, ten percent of the things said by the Word of God were already the Word of God. Are ten percent of your comments quotes from the Bible? One percent? Point zero one percent? Point zero, zero one percent? BTW, when Jesus was being tempted by Satan, His responses all came from Deuteronomy.
Partyism: A 2017 Stanford study found that Americans now consider their political identity more important than race, religion, or ethnicity. In fact, 49% of Republicans and 33% of Dems say they would object to one of their children marrying someone from the other party. These percentages are up from 5% of Republicans and 4% of Dems who held similar objections back in 1960.
Rwanda: I had a chance to meet a genocide survivor this past week. During the massacre, one of her hands was cut off. Additionally, her sister (and her sister’s family) were all killed. Though unthinkable, she eventually chose to forgive. Fifteen years later she is now friends – and business partners – with those who killed her family. One of the most interesting things she said was that today, no one in Rwanda identifies as Hutu or Tutsi. “We are all just Rwandans.”
Humility: John Zahl at Mockingbird, wrote a Lent piece I am late looking at, but it’s worth quoting from: “Today it seems most voices in the Church (at least the one to which I belong) seek to advocate a message about the human self that aligns almost exactly with the shallow philosophies proffered in any issue of Cosmopolitan Magazine. Cue the preacher who interprets loving your neighbor as yourself as being about, well, loving yourself. Under the auspices of ‘Incarnational’ language, the individual is deified. The true self is equated with the divine, and this is assumed to be a profound approach, and not that of every Montessori teacher/college drop-out. God-as-self is the most basic (#Basic) and misleading path in the world. The pursuit of it is the pursuit of self-interest: spirituality without humility. The assumption seems to be: I must increase so that God might increase.”
Millennials: 22% of Millennials are Prodigals (they have left their faith behind); 30% are Nomads (they have kept their faith but walked away from the church); 38% are Habituals (who attend church but are not very active with their faith outside of church); and only 10% are Resilients. As a side note, Millennials tend to have higher levels of anxiety, but that is not true for Resilients.
Two Shifts: Alpha – the global evangelism program that comes out of Great Britain – reports two big shifts taking place. The first is a move away from proclamation to conversations. The second is people’s desire not to learn about God but to meet Him.
Stats Without Comment:
- The average American adult spends more than 11 hours a day watching, reading, listening or otherwise interacting with media.
- Sixty percent of 65 year old American men say that their wife is their best friend. 29% of 65 year old women report that their husbands are their best friend. This is partly because men tend not to build new friends after 25. In 1990, the average person had 3.2 very good friends. Today, that has dropped.
- Jesus asked others 307 questions. He was asked 183 questions. He directly answered 8 of them.
- The average duration in a job in ’72 was 26.2 years, today it is less than 4 years.
· 74% of Millennials say they are distracted
· 64% of car accidents are caused by being distracted
· The average time people spend focused on an online topic is 40 seconds.
· The average American checks their phone fifty times per day.
- Congress has a 9 percent approval rating – which some suggest is eight points too high.
Closing Prayer: Rouse us, O Lord, from the sleep of apathy and from tossing to and fro in our thoughts, that we may no longer live as in a troubled dream but as people awake and resolved to finish the work you have given them to do. By your humble birth root out of our hearts all pride and haughtiness, that humble ways may content us, if so be that we may serve the humble. By the life of compassion for those who labor and are heavy laden, teach us to be concerned one for another and to bear one another’s burdens. By your hallowed and most bitter anguish on the cross, make us to fear you, and love you, and follow you, O Christ. Amen. –Brigid of Kildare (451-525)