Happy Friday,
“We all, who with unveiled faces behold the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image from one degree of glory to another.”
Paul, 2 Corinthians 3:18
According to Paul, attention drives transformation. First, we shape our attention, and then our attention shapes us. When our eyes are fixed on Jesus, our lives fall into place. But ours is an age of attentional onslaught, barraged by interruptions. Overcoming the noise requires cultivating habits of distraction-resistance. What do you need to push to the margins so that Christ can be the center of your attention in 2024?
Brady Filling in for Bledsoe: Mike is out until January 5th, and I’m second string. My name is Glenn Wishnew. I’m the Associate Director of the Lakelight Institute, a new Christ Church-launched 501C3. We host talks, we sell (Mike’s) books, and we offer classes — more on that below.
From the Dystopian Novel A Brave New World: “But all the same,” insisted the Savage, “it is natural to believe in God when you’re alone –— quite alone, in the night, thinking about death…” “But people never are alone now,” said Mustapha Mond. “We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them to have it.” For those of you who didn’t read in high school (me), Aldous Huxley wrote that in 1933.
Numbers (With Comment): 1) 8% — the percentage of Americans who report that they have no close friends. 2) 2.9013 — the ratio of positive to negative interactions that make a corporate team successful. It takes three positive interactions to outweigh a negative one. 3) 0.6% — the probability that the Chicago Bears will make the playoffs. 4) 0% — the probability that the Church loses out to the gates of hell.
IS2M (It Seems to Me): 1) The style of jeans you wear reveals the generation you belong to. 2) Understanding technology as “merely a tool we can use for good or for ill” was a society-wide mistake of the past 40 years, and we are suffering for it. Notice it was assumed by both Right and Left. 3) The number of parents prioritizing their child’s short-term comfort over their long-term character is increasing, and that’s not good. 4) The number of parents who would sacrifice their lives for their child hasn’t decreased at all, and that’s good — very good.
“I Am Not Going to Let You Fail.”: Marva Collins founded Westside Preparatory School, a private elementary school in the impoverished Garfield Park neighborhood of Chicago, in 1975. This is what she had to say to Freddie, a second grader, on the first day of school: “Come on, peach. We have work to do… I promise, you are going to do and you are going to produce. I am not going to let you fail.” Formerly called “learning disabled” by his first-grade teacher, Freddie was reading Shakespeare by May. Marva Collins believed in Freddie, and his life was never the same. Who was a Marva Collins in your life? And who can you be a Marva Collins to?
Quotes Worth Requoting: 1) “Your religion is what you do with your solitude.” — William Temple 2) “I wish to have as my epitaph: ‘Here lies a man who was wise enough to bring into his service men who knew more than he.’” — Andrew Carnegie 3) “Anger is never without a reason but seldom a good one.” — Benjamin Franklin
Quote For Your Critics: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I [insert top career accomplishments]… Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?’” — Elon Musk, also Mike, when he reads your emails.
WOTY, Written by Mike Himself: Honorable mention for the 2023 Word of the Year goes to reality-challenged (today, many are rich enough to temporarily suspend reality) and fan service (the business plan of a number of today’s newspapers). Full honors go to social acceleration, a term I ran across while reading Carl Trueman’s 2023 Erasmus Lecture entitled, “The Desecration of Man.” Readers of The Update are aware that I have been whining about making note of the increasing “volume and velocity of modern culture.” Social acceleration — which Trueman picked up from Hartmut Rosa, a German sociologist — is just the word I have been looking for. BTW, speaking of the future, my guess is that pre-war will be a contender for 2024 WOTY. I am hearing that the world has moved past the post-Cold War era into a pre-war one. Ugh. (I’m praying that 2024 will be marked by social deceleration instead.)
Resources: You can listen to Mike’s Isaiah 53 sermon here. Full disclosure: he told me to put this in here. But he’s also my boss’s boss — so I guess it was a good sermon.
C.S. Lewis: Early next year, Mike will be teaching a Lakelight class on C.S. Lewis. You will hear more as the first day of class approaches. For now, block off Tuesdays starting on January 30 and running through March 5.
Thanks for Considering: As a Lakelight employee, I would be remiss if I did not invite you to make a year-end gift to this new venture. We have had a very good inaugural year, but there is so much more to do as we promote timeless wisdom for the challenges and opportunities of modern life. Note: as a way of saying thanks, we will send you an advance copy of Mike’s new book, How Do You Know? Which will be released in early 2024. It’s not bad, I guess. (Did I mention he was my boss’s boss?)
Closing Prayer:
“God, we thank you for the inspiration of Jesus. Grant that we will love you with all our hearts, souls, and minds, and love our neighbors as we love ourselves, even our enemy neighbors. And we ask you, God, in these days of emotional tension, when the problems of the world are gigantic in extent and chaotic in detail, to be with us in our going out and our coming in, in our rising up and in our lying down, in our moments of joy and in our moments of sorrow, until the day when there shall be no sunset and no dawn. Amen.” (Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., 1929-1968)