When you have no future, it’s tempting to live in the past. I have to keep reminding myself that my future is better than it seems.

The American Dream is too competitive to be Christian.

I wonder how the audience reacted to the very first performance of Rhapsody in Blue.

Is anyone else tired of articles about coronavirus, pictures of people wearing masks, and people complaining about how hard 2020 is, or is it just me?

As best I can tell, the virus was cooked up in a North Carolina lab by Bigfoot and Barack Obama to keep pastors from preaching live–and/or getting their nails done. (I am immune. I swallowed disinfectant and an infrared lightbulb.)
— Read on joshuamcnall.com/2020/04/24/why-we-love-conspiracy-theories/

So, trying to stay weird, because people filled with Spirit sometimes do weird things, is a dead end. Battling over the Truth, because God makes people seek the Truth with all their heart, is a dead end. Avoiding petty sins and paying your dues, because people truly motivated to serve God hate sin and seek to be good stewards, is a dead end. None of these things is revival itself, though revival can sometimes include any or all of them. Revival comes to those who are desperate for God, who desire only him, who lay aside their preconceptions in order to lay hold of him when revival comes.
— Read on aefenglommung.livejournal.com/1657778.html

My Mac Book Pro, only about three and a half years old, is pretty well dead because of the way I have abused it. I’ve treated it like a powerful desktop, hanging all kinds of displays and drives off it, leaving it plugged in for months with the lid closed. The battery is swollen and the touch pad does not work well because of the swelling. The other day I tried to add one more thing. Ppfztt.

I’m relaxing it with a Mac Mini. Should be just fine.

In the meantime I’ve been using my 2010 Mac Pro to run Logos for my Bible study. In 2010 it was state of the art. Now it’s a server. It is a few OSes behind and thus can’t run the latest Logos. But it’s working fine for the purpose.

When I ask myself the main reason for so many people having left the Church during the past decades in France, Germany, Holland, and also in Canada and America, the word “power” easily comes to mind. One of the greatest ironies of the history of Christianity is that its leaders constantly gave into the temptation of power—political power, military power, economic power, or moral and spiritual power—even though they continued to speak in the name of Jesus, who did not cling to his divine power but emptied himself and became as we are.… Every time we see a major crisis in the history of the Church, such as the Great Schism of the eleventh century, the Reformation of the sixteenth century, or the immense secularization of the twentieth century, we always see that a major cause of rupture is the power exercised by those who claim to be followers of the poor and powerless Jesus.

Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 58–59.

Might apply to less grandiose situations as well.