What do you want? 🧘🏻‍♂️

If Spotify “DJ” interrupts my listening one more time, I will switch to Apple Music.

If you start to be able to pay for a service, you start to become worse at performing that service yourself. If a whole society starts to be able to pay for a service, then everyone becomes worse at performing that service except the professionals. This is why professional counselors seems like a societal hazard to me: We’re all going to become worse at active, sympathetic listening and at helping our friends and family through tough times.

This reflection prompted by the shyness I heard in someone’s voice last night to talk with anyone other than a therapist about figuring out some strategies to make his life better.

Why does my heart resist listening to music alone? For the same reason it resists watching audiovisual entertainment and reading books alone: It’s alone. It’s one thing when I’m by myself anyway, but if people are around, what the heck!?

I must participate in all school meetings for my kids from now on.

Resolved: One creative goal at a time. Current goal: Legalize backyard hens in College Township.

It worked! My unapologetic half-hour walk yesterday at 4:30 PM delayed my circadian clock such that I woke up today at 6:11 AM instead of 5:30 AM. Some of that would’ve been sleep deficit, and some of it going to bed a little later on purpose. But still: A forty-minute shift!

Give before you ask or take. I have in mind here my interactions with Sullivan.

Step one in any anti-racist agenda: Refuse to speak in terms of race. Skin color? Pigment? Melanin? Yes. But “‘[r]ace’ itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem” (Ta-Nehisi Coates).

I want to listen to more music. I want to make more music. Would one album a day be too much? Would one half-hour practice or jam session be too much?

Sexual ethics is not about consent. It’s about love, of which consent is just one, small, basic constituent.

No new system or alarms. Just a simple journal entry: It is usually the case that once 8 o’clock rolls around, I just don’t have the heart for computer-mediated communication or computery work.

Why did the Messiah have to suffer and die? I don’t know. ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Authenticity. Being true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character.

You gotta break words out of the synonym circles of their dictionary definitions. Otherwise, their meanings slip out of our grasp. They become mere trope, void of significance.

Remember the Milk is an aide-memoire, not a governor./

Air: the original social medium.

“Communication is love,” as I just wrote a few weeks ago, is a problem for relating with those people for whom communication is not the only thing they want to do.

The universe is singing! “Come Together,” indeed! (Éa and Sullivan will be sharing a two-instrument-and-vocal cover of it this week at school.) The word of last year was “with.” The word of this year is, “Finally, all of you be of the same mind, feeling with one another…” (1 Peter 3:8, my translation). Same mind, same feelings (sympathy). That latter part is what I’m working on with Dr. Wes Scala. If you want to understand behavior, you have to understand someone’s feelings, which in turn requires that you understand their thoughts, says Shawn Ishler of Bartell & Bartell at Leadership Flight School. Push toward understanding—and thinking and feeling!—the thoughts and feelings of Carla, of Sullivan, of Éa.

My friend pounces on perceived human psychological vulnerability like I pounce on perceived error. Both are good when deployed in love; both can be unwelcome and even harmful when deployed out of mere habit.

friend

[after I had “warned” someone against saying “God is always speaking”]:

I hope you didn’t walk away tonight feeling discouraged or unheard in any way tonight. Would love to pickup on connecting with God when we’re together next. Love you.

me:

Good morning! Nope, so probably no need. If you came away from last night thinking, “Ooh, Scott is ticklish about hearing God’s voice because he thinks he doesn’t hear from God,” you came away with the wrong impression.

I am ticklish about something, but it’s not my connecting with God. It’s my hearing abiblical maxims about God making their way unchecked around the church, running the risk of spiritual harm. The potential spiritual harm of “God is always speaking” is at least twofold: First, it can facilitate people spouting things they think are from God but which are not, and second, it can lead other people to suspect they are spiritually deaf, as I said last night.

What to say to my friend about why I’m on edge about his emphasis on vulnerability? Basically, I think he worships at its altar. Not everybody has problems all the time. My friend is like a problem-seeker: Dig up a problem in a person, get them to talk about it, apply the salve of God’s love. Right? That’s great, right? But the problem is that being vulnerable with someone leads them to have some measure of power in your life.

This Brené Brown quote seems adjacent: “Trust isn’t a grand gesture—it’s a growing marble collection.”

“And let me be blunt about this: Whenever Christians decide that they need a strategy, they’re writing a recipe for disobedience to the Lord Jesus.”

— Richard Beck

The sun’s up!
The sun’s up!
Tell everyone the sun’s up! ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Professing Christianity is what Renn calls a “status-enhancer” when and only when the Christianity one professes is in step with what your society already and without reference to Christian teaching describes as “being an upstanding citizen.”

— Alan Jacobs