We love to study the Scriptures and discuss the glorious truth of the gospel with one another, and we enjoy spending time with fellow believers. Yet we’re often fearful and uneasy about what will happen if we invite people who do not believe as we do into these environments. What will happen to our intimacy? What will happen to our deep community?

[….] 

When Jesus Blew Up the Small Group Model

While most small groups aim to develop and maintain Christian community, Christ himself built a community around him that reflected a different goal. The group aimed to exalt God among believers and non-believers alike. They sought to spread worship and enjoyment of God above all things.

[….]

How Does This Work Out?

Practically, this shift does not require the community to sacrifice their conversation, confession, or prayer together, but it may realign the context and focus. Often we seek to cram Bible study, discussion, confession, and prayer into a two-hour block on a weeknight, which usually means one of them gets sacrificed (often prayer because we this time will lead to drawn-out requests).

Instead, we may develop gender-specific, Christ-centered accountability groups outside our regularly scheduled small group meeting. This may seem like an additional burden, but it’s part of approaching your regular life with more intentionality. I’ve often heard it said that you don’t have to do different things, but do things differently. Jeff Vanderstelt of Soma Communities describes this as living ordinary life with gospel intentionality.

Many small groups have only a façade of intimacy because they do not help members reach friends and neighbors they want to know Christ. A small group that reflects the focus of the Acts community to love God, one another, and others becomes a community on mission with depth of intimacy.

Best Friend - Jason Chen (Official Music Video) (by miniachilles)

We know because of our culture’s negative attitude toward nerds, our kids are discouraged from being bookish from an early age. 

Really…? I never knew that…. Haha, I think Asian culture glorifies those nerds.   

At times, my son gets concerned that his bookish qualities may interfere with his social life. I just remind him that in the heart of hard economic times, 33 of 50 states increased the amount spent on prisons while decreasing dollars spent on K-12 and higher education. So while he’s worrying about being cool, the job market is getting smaller and more competitive and our government is preparing to send more people to jail.

Haha, I can’t imagine saying that to my kid. But then again my parents did somehow ingrain in me that if I didn’t study I’d never get a good job.

We also don’t believe in the value of education, culturally — we just like to say we do because as citizens of an industrialized nation, we’re supposed to. But we can tell our children that school is important until we’re blue in the face, they’re not stupid.

They see the loudest applause is for the kids on the field. They know teachers are paid poorly and don’t drive fancy cars. They know people plan Super Bowl parties but mock the National Spelling Bee.

In other words, they see the hypocrisy, and we can’t expect society to correct itself.

If we want to have any lasting influence on the way our kids approach education — the way future generations approach education — then we have to grab our pom-poms and paint our faces and celebrate intellectual curiosity with the same vigor we do their athletic achievements.

Not really controversial to me; always planned to raise my future kids with an emphasis on their education. But this was definitely a good reminder that American culture doesn’t value education as much as it should. 

Somewhere Over the Rainbow/Simple Gifts (Piano/Cello Cover) ThePianoGuys (by ThePianoGuys)

Done and home! Let the play time commence :)

This encompasses how I feel right now haha

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we’ve found are most effective for our clients:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to build rituals — specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Put simply, in the face of an unknown future, entrepreneurs act. They deal with uncertainty not by trying to analyze it, or planning for every contingency, or predicting what the outcomes will be. Instead, they act, learn from what they find, and act again. More specifically the process looks like this.

1. Start with desire. You find/think of something you want. You don’t need a lot of passion, you only need sufficient desire to get started. (“I really want to start a restaurant, but I haven’t a clue if I will ever be able to open one.”)

2. Take a smart step as quickly as you can toward your goal. What’s a smart step? It’s one where you act quickly with the means at hand. What you know, who you know, and anything else that’s available. (“I know a great chef, and if I beg all my family and friends to back me, I might have enough money to open a place.”) You make sure that step is never going to cost more than it would be acceptable to you to lose should things not work out. And you bring others along to acquire more resources, spread the risk and confirm the quality of your idea.

3. Reflect and build on what you have learned from taking that step. You need to do that because every time you act, reality changes. Sometimes the step you take gets you nearer to what you want (“I should be able to afford something just outside of downtown”); sometimes what you want changes (“It looks likes there are an awful lot of Italian restaurants nearby. We are going to have to rethink our menu.”) If you pay attention, you always learn something. So after you act, ask: Did those actions get you closer to your goal? (“Yes. It looks like I will be able to open a restaurant.”) Do you need additional resources to draw even closer? (“Yes. I’ll need to find another chef. The one I know can only do Italian.”) Do you still want to obtain your objective? (“Yes.”)

4. Repeat.

Act. Learn. Build. Repeat. This is how successful serial entrepreneurs conquer uncertainty. What works for them will work for all of us.

(Source: mystandards)

Jefferson Bethke, the Christian and spoken word poet whose YouTube videos, such as “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus,” have garnered millions of hits, recently proposed to the woman he has been dating for two years. The couple, who both attend Mars Hill Church at Federal Way in St. Auburn, Wash., shared with The Christian Post their views on marriage, faith and love.