I'm all for prepping. I've taken plenty of steps over the years to be reasonably prepared for the kinds of crises that could occur, and I think you should too. That said, much of what I'm seeing on my timeline looks like over-the-top fearmongering and doomerism. It's reminiscent of all those dire predictions during the early pandemic about diesel fuel disappearing, egg shortages, and societal collapse that never materialized. So, yeah, be prepared. But don't let these people (maybe they are people) whip you into a frenzy.

We’ve not only allowed news, which is largely propaganda, to distract or demoralize us. We’ve allowed it to displace and delocate us. We’ve allowed the “space” we dwell in to become irrelevant. Neil Postman traces this back to the telegraph. He writes: “For telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make “one neighborhood of the whole country.” It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse. Among the few who understood this consequence was Henry David Thoreau,”who remarked in Walden that “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” Postman argues that the the telegraph redefined discourse by introducing “large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence...” He continues: “These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity.” And: “Within months of Morse’s first public demonstration, the local and the timeless had lost their central position in newspapers, eclipsed by the dazzle of distance and speed. In fact, the first known use of the telegraph by a newspaper occurred one day after Morse gave his historic demonstration of telegraphy’s workability. Using the “same Washington-to-Baltimore line Morse had constructed, the Baltimore Patriot gave its readers information about action taken by the House of Representatives on the Oregon issue. The paper concluded its report by noting: ‘… we are thus enabled to give our readers information from Washington up to two o’clock. This is indeed the annihilation of space.’” Our thoughts are everywhere but nowhere in particular. Our knowledge is abundant but irrelevant to our day-to-day existence. Instead of action, we have an unending awareness campaign where, whether in person or online, we share practically pointless news. Space, and place with it, have been annihilated. Hence, Postman observed that “most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.” One good filter or rule of thumb for news is to ask: “Does this information require or demand that I take some action today, this month, or this year?” If the answer is no, ignore it. Invest your “mental energy” elsewhere. If the answer is yes, then prioritize the action according to the immediacy of the need. Spend your “mental energy” wisely. Be where God has placed you.

I’ve been seeing this build for years…

Ohio Valley Mission: Make Missions Local Again Inaugural Meeting Recap & Presentation "We’ve recently launched a new regional fellowship of Reformed churches called Ohio Valley Mission, serving Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. The idea is fairly simple: healthy churches need healthy leadership, meaningful fellowship, and accountability. We want to help existing churches remain healthy, restore struggling churches to health, and plant new churches. Here’s why we’re doing it and how we intend to make it work..." open.substack.com/pub/wemade…

Pastors, it's time for us to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Don't hold back.

The current situation…

Well, I saw Nathan Fielder's documentary You Can See Everything last night, and it's really a pretty stunning movie. One that's particularly timely for some of my own personal ponderings. First, let me give you the premise. Nathan Fielder is a deadpan comic who likes to set up these absurd situations and has had a couple of popular television shows. A couple of years ago, he was contacted by a guy named Billy, who, if I have this straight, is actually married to Elizabeth Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes, or Liz as they call her in the film, was one of the founders of Theranos, a company that claimed to have developed a device that could run all these health tests with just one drop of blood. The company grew to be worth billions of dollars. Holmes became a superstar because she was a young woman with a strangely deep voice who modeled herself on Steve Jobs. Problem was, the device couldn't do what they said it could do. Eventually, she and her business partner and lover, Sunny, were brought up on fraud charges, among other things. After a lengthy court battle, both were found guilty. Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Billy popped into Holmes' life just as this news was breaking, roughly seven years before the start of the film. They quickly fell in love. They have two kids. And they are working on some new business venture together. The film picks up 34 days before she goes to prison. Billy's offer to Nathan Fielder and the film company A24 is that he can, with his crew, actually stay with them and film the last 34 days of Elizabeth's freedom. The goal, so they claim, is to show Elizabeth for who she really is, help humanize her, and basically rehabilitate her public image. Believe it or not, it's hard to say too much about this film without spoiling several wild twists and turns. But I do think I can say it's basically a game of cat and mouse. The question being asked is: Is Elizabeth Holmes a full-on liar? For example, she repeatedly claims that she's not motivated by money and that her device did what she claimed it did. Fielder repeatedly confronts her on this claim, which then makes you ask the question: Is there something innocent or naively broken about Holmes, and has she just been used as a pawn by her lovers, perhaps again? Is there something broken in her form of communication and her ability to understand how she comes across? That leads to a fascinating scene where Fielder has her watch Abbott and Costello's famous Who's on First? bit and asks her, "Why is it funny?" To which she gives a pretty mystifying answer. And as the story unfolds, the question isn't just whether it's a cat-and-mouse game, or who's the cat and who's the mouse, but whether these are two cats, and the mouse being played with is Fielder himself. The reason this film really hit me, besides just being filmed beautifully and having a wild premise, is that it touches on the issue of people being deluded and perhaps lacking self-awareness. My career, both ministerially and vocationally, has ended up being about dealing with situations that aren't what they seem to be on the surface. My background includes my early years working in collections and fraud, and dealing with complicated HR issues. As a pastor, I've found myself involved in some pretty horrendous abuse cases, three of which eventually involved me working with the police to varying degrees. In many of these situations, I was dealing with people who had been accused of something that they swore up and down wasn't true. And my job was, to the best of my ability, to get to the bottom of it and make a decision on how to move forward. These cases could be disorienting. The number of sweet, innocent-looking people who lie about crazy things in convincing ways and make you feel crazy for questioning the inconsistencies in their stories is legion. I've dealt with people pretending to be dead loved ones for years to take out loans and credit cards in their names. People who falsely accuse others of abuse only to later admit that they did so. A lot of the people I've worked with, I've seen grow cynical. And the best way to avoid that, if you work in these fields, is to always remind yourself that you're kind of like an emergency room doctor dealing with the most intense cases. It's usually not like this. However, that brings me to why I've been thinking about deluded, lying people. Maybe I'm just getting older and more experienced, but it seems like the number of people who believe crazy things about themselves, things that are at odds with reality in almost every way, is increasing. And I've been pondering: Is this a matter of mental health, where there's just something wrong with people's brains? Or is this willful deception? It's had me thinking about things like where Paul warns about impostors deceiving and being deceived, and God giving people over to delusions. And one of my big takeaways is pretty simple: If you engage in lies for long enough, or are allowed to believe lies for long enough, you start to think of them as if they are true, as if they are reality. Which is why one of the greatest ministries of a parent, a pastor, or someone in some form of leadership is doing the hard work of confronting someone and helping them see the truth about themselves. Parents who aren't willing to call out their children are sentencing them to a life of unreality, which will eventually bring them heartache. This actually comes up later in the movie. There is a fairly understated scene with Elizabeth Holmes' parents where you can tell that they love their daughter but believe some claims she's made that they shouldn't. And now she's ended up with a man who is a deluded, crazy person, perhaps for the second time. Anyhow, it's a really good movie... save one scene. There is a totally unnecessary three- to four-second scene where one of the characters is showering naked and you see everything. It's not the woman, and it's not sexual. And if I had to guess, I would say that scene is left in there to show you the sort of hypocrisy or contradiction of what's happening in the documentary. In one way, they will let you see everything, even themselves fully nude. But in reality, they're trying to hide the truth from you, and nothing is as it seems. It's not a bad metaphor for our age.

What's my plan? Same plan as always:

Years ago, I learned that not all gins are created equal. Tonight, thanks to a jar of Dollar General pickles, I learned the same is true of pickles.

Before you make a man a leader, whether it’s a sales manager or an elder in the church, there are a couple of simple questions you should ask yourself. First, is his leadership sought out? There are a lot of people who like to talk and insert themselves into the lives of others. Sometimes that can be mistaken for leadership ability. But they could actually just be busybodies who like to talk about doing things more than actually doing them. This is the opposite of leadership ability. They’re avoiding real work under the guise of being helpful. That’s why it’s important to ask whether their leadership is sought out. Is this someone people naturally go to when they have a complex situation they’re trying to figure out? Do people seek out his judgment, advice, and direction? Both promotions and ordinations are essentially confirmations of something that already exists. A simple metaphor would be that there has to be a fire burning. Making someone a leader doesn’t start the fire. It should only throw gas on it. Second, what is the quality of the people seeking out his leadership? This question isn’t all that different from the first. Is it just low performers? Is it just entry-level people? Is it just people starting out in life? Or is it high performers, peers, and people who have been around the block a few times? What you’re trying to determine is whether this man possesses an ability and capacity that distinguishes him from others. Young people and entry-level employees can easily mistake seniority in life for actual ability and capacity. One of the greatest challenges of leadership is leading people who are very much your equals, or even above you in certain ways. That requires something more than simply being older, more experienced, or more outspoken. If no one is seeking out a man’s leadership, or if the only people seeking it out are those on the very bottom rung, chances are he isn’t a leader. Not yet, anyhow. There are certainly many other questions to ask before putting a man in leadership, but in my assessment, these are two of the most revealing

Hop off the train of disobedience...

You matter to people who will still care and think about you long after you are irrelevant to most everyone else. Set priorities accordingly.

100%. It’s just as bad or worst in reformed/confessional homes. We focus a lot on how the world actually is AND how it could be…

I only play two games: Fight Night (2011) and Civ 5. I’ve been waiting for a new Fight Night for 15 years. I am excited its coming, but I fear it’s going to be terrible.