You can become more holy by becoming more merciful
Fr. Matt Tebbe is one of my favorite writers at the moment. A former evangelical turned Episcopal priest, Matt has a keen eye for the systems at work in our world and a voice for calling them out clearly. The other day he turned his thoughts to God’s mercy:
You can approach God’s holiness in your sin because God’s holiness moves towards you first. Any suggestion that God can’t look upon you or is far from you or doesn’t want to be with you in your sin: what do we see in Christ?
In him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And Christ moves toward- not away- from sinners.
You can become more holy by becoming more merciful: with yourself and others.
In my previous evangelical life, it was always the other direction that was emphasized: God, in his (always his) holiness, is offended by you and your miserable, sinful, inept little self. When Jesus touched a sick person, they said, that sick person must’ve been miraculously healed an instant before Jesus hand actually reached them, because Jesus could never have broken the law by touching a sick person. (Such mental gymnastics!) Then I read Richard Beck say that Jesus was so full of life and health that of course he touched the sick person because Jesus' life and health overwhelmed and pushed that sickness right out of them.
What a blessing to finally see God’s love and mercy and goodness in a restorative and healing way! And thanks Matt for reminding us of it.
My HS sophomore got the job shadow hookup that she wanted, which means that in a couple weeks she’s going to spend a morning shadowing at the local FBI Field Office. 🤨
Bryce Harper: Mentoring at 1B
Here’s a really lovely story on The Athletic about Phillies 1B Bryce Harper and his gentle efforts to mentor younger players, even those from opposing teams.
This is why Harper started talking more to opposing players.
“It’s being able to see the human element, as well,” Harper said. “You know how intense I am on the baseball field. I’m a very intense person. But talking to them gets you away from being so intense where it’s just overbearing.”
Over time, he’s become more accessible to his younger teammates. He has frequent talks with Alec Bohm about the mental side of hitting. He wants to be regarded as one of the best ever — and someone who cares.
“Obviously, I don’t want to help them when we’re playing against them,” Harper said. “So I think it’s that give and take. But, also, I’m not scared of other players having success. I don’t want them to have success against us. I don’t. But I never want them to not be confident in their ability.
“I want every single guy when they get to the big leagues to really have success and enjoy what they do. Enjoy each moment. Find gratitude in the moment. Find gratitude in the struggle. Find gratitude in the moment of having success. Enjoy the success. Enjoy the struggle, too.”
I’ve always been kind of ambivalent on Harper but I love this. One of the things that gives me hope for the future is seeing increased awareness and empathy across the younger generation. As they say, the kids are alright.
Flu and COVID shot clinic at work today. Couple of sore shoulders is far preferable to a bout with a virus!
As a necessity of my job I am signed up for FAA email notifications when they update certain guidance documents. Something in the system broke, and I have received 100+ email notifications for the same Advisory Circular in the past 20 minutes. Make it stop!
So, if MLB had a promotion/relegation scheme like English football does, the White Sox and Marlins would move down to AAA for next year and the Sugar Land Space Cowboys and Omaha Stormchasers would move up to MLB. That would be kinda awesome.
I have played the piano and sung with it for most of my life. I’ve rarely ever sung in a choir, though. This weekend I’m going to audition to sing with the Orchestra Iowa Chorus. They’re doing Mozart’s Requiem in the spring. That could be really fun. 🤞
In Which Chris & Becky Visit Yale
When I was probably 15 years old, a nerdy homeschooled kid living in Texas, I was one day browsing a clothing rack at some cheap retailer - probably K-Mart or whatever the 1990’s equivalent of TJMaxx is today - and finding a royal blue t-shirt with the Yale Bulldogs logo on it. I knew Yale was a prestigious school but not much more than that. My nerdy self sort of liked the shirt, so I bought it and wore it regularly. Occasionally I would get questions on it. “Are you going to Yale?” No, I would reply, I just liked the shirt. In these pre-Internet (at least for us!) days, what I knew about Yale was basically what my folks had said: super-expensive, super-liberal. We were super-conservative and super-poor, so that was basically that. (I eventually attended a less-expensive, but still private, Christian university that was a lot closer to home.)
It was only much later in my life that I realized that the catalog price published for university tuition is like the “room rate” you see posted on the inside of hotel room doors - a huge number that frequently doesn’t reflect the reality of what you’ll have to put out of pocket. In retrospect, my story had all the hallmarks of a good case for a big Ivy League scholarship. A unique educational background. Fantastic test scores and grades. Superb writing skills. Reasonable extracurriculars. In reality’s timeline, I took the highest scholarship that LeTourneau gave for academics (only 20% of my yearly cost!), coupled it with a bunch of grants, and still paid off college loans for a decade afterward. I got a reasonably good education at LeTourneau, met my wife there, got a job, moved to Iowa, hadn’t thought about Yale in a long time.
Earlier this year my work team won a big corporate award, and earlier this week we got to travel to one of our big corporate headquarters sites in Connecticut to be honored at an awards banquet. We all got to bring a +1, so we had several spouses in attendance too. Becky came along and we lightly stretched the travel to make a mini-vacation of it. (As much as a 3-day, 2-night trip can be a vacation, I guess.)
One of those days while we were out sightseeing we drove out to New Haven and spent a couple hours walking around the Yale campus, visiting its museums, sticking our heads into the old buildings, and generally taking in the scene. We’ve walked around a few college campuses the past few years with the kids doing college tours themselves. Campuses have a unique energy, and at an elite school this is amplified. On one hand, I observed, it’s Yale - everybody there is special. That’s sort of table stakes for admission. On the other hand, it’s clear that all these “special” students are still really just 18-to-20-something college kids.
I wondered, as we walked down the shady streets and past the old stone buildings, how would 18-year-old Chris have handled Yale? It would’ve been a move halfway across the country, a country boy plopped down in an East coast city, a sheltered conservative religious kid at a secular institution. Would I have been the stubborn fundamentalist arguing with all my professors? The church kid who went to college and gave up his faith? Or could the sudden emergence from my evangelical bubble have accelerated my movement toward the more tolerant, liberal faith that I have finally come to in my 40s?
What-if’s like this are to a great extent pointless. There are no do-overs. I’m happy and content with where my path has taken me. I was probably better suited for engineering than humanities or law, anyway. But for one fall afternoon, it was fun to walk down the streets of New Haven and idly imagine other pasts.
2024 Reads: Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde 📚
It’s rare that I read a novel that feels like nothing I’ve read before. This combination of clever humor and dystopian adventure was a real winner.
What we need more of in popular music today: powerful and appealing ballads with ukulele accompaniment.
If Moses really signed this I think they should be asking more than $75.
Finding it remarkably hard to decline an automatic upgrade on American Airlines. I just wanna keep my economy seat next to my wife!
Eric Collins has play-by-play for the Iowa-Troy game on FS1 today and sounds like Gus Johnson on coke. Yelling to the point his voice breaks for a fumble in the 4th quarter of a 10-point game. Bro, take it down a notch. Maybe two.
Pretty sure this is the first time I’ve preordered a new iPhone on release day. 16 Pro 256 GB in natural titanium. 👍
Made it to YOW plenty early for my flight home… turns out US Border Patrol doesn’t open until 0500. At least I’ll be within the first dozen in line once they do…
I knew that the WNBA audience has grown substantially this year. I was still surprised to turn on TSN here at my Canadian hotel and see the Aces-Fever game on. (I’ll forgive them for the crap video quality, which might be the hotel’s fault and not TSN’s.)
Summer has been for family trips and fun; fall is apparently now for work travel. 5 of the next 9 weeks I will be out for at least part of the week for meetings or conferences. Today: CID -> ORD -> YOW. 🇨🇦
2024 Reads: An Autobiography by Mohandas K. Gandhi 📚
If one of the Desert Fathers had training as a lawyer and wrote a Substack, you would get something like this book. Gandhi: super-weird.
Look I know we’re only 6 quarters into the season, but this Nebraska football team looks WAY better than they did last year. This is fun to watch.
Sitting out on the drive with a fire going and the football game on. The kid is there in person. #GBR #football
