“Jesus is a Conservative,” so they say. Or, perhaps he’s a Liberal, all depending on whom you ask. But, no one would say Her Majesty the Queen is a Whig.

If the “Social Justice Warrior” trend is to say that Jesus doesn’t fit our worldview boxes, why doesn’t it occur to the SJWs that Jesus doesn’t fit into their ever-changing boxes either?

Jesus is neither a Conservative nor a Liberal. He precluded politics. Jesus is a monarch, the only one worthy.

Maybe the cause of social justice itself is an attempt to get justice without the truly worthy king’s help.  · · · →

Patience heals. Space and dead air breed working space. Understanding welcomes tenderness.

Foresight tops them all. Love and prayer empower foresight.

Foresight empowers love because we expend less energy on ourselves when we are not surprised by what we could have seen, but somehow didn’t.

Having seen yesterday what happened this morning empowers the foreseer to speak, inform, explain, unpack… Foresight is the tool to help others evaluate and interpret the times.  · · · →

Exhausting one’s case is, unfortunately, something only lawyers understand. That’s one reason so many of them are good at pushing the limits.

Not every idea, not every argument, not every method of persuasion needs to be made. Once we get a clear enough picture to remove doubt that is “reasonable”, it’s time to end arguments and begin deliberation. Losers try to keep argument going as long as they can because they are unhappy if everyone doesn’t agree with them.

Proof, evidence, and especially self-evidence, don’t need long explanations. Once things are seen for what they are, it’s time to choose.  · · · →

Halloween originated in the 9th century when Rome couldn’t force the pagans of the British Isles to stop acting like pagans. If you can’t defeat your enemy, join him as the Catholic Church has done since Constantine joined the Church and took it over via government blessing.

All that ancestor worship, spiritualising food during the harvest season, and calling on ghosts to help survive the coming winter—many Taiwanese Christians don’t want to let that go even today.

Seven centuries later, Europe had enough of “pagan Christendom”. On Halloween, Marin Luther nailed 95 theses to a church door and revival began.  · · · →

Justice isn’t easy. We have all asked for it. We have all complained about injustice. We all know justice when we see it. But, giving justice seems to be a skill attained by a reserved few.

There are so many details that need to be considered in matters of justice. Matters of justice span from parenting to teaching to leading business. Government courts see the fewest actual situations of justice—only the ones which have gotten out of control.

Courts are the last resort for justice, but they are the first thought on most people’s minds. Give your own justice.  · · · →

Preachers who do not walk and live and breath every moment in God’s voice can’t preach God’s voice. They will pack their sermons full of contingency plan after contingency plan for how to survive without God’s moment by moment directions. So, Bible teachers prepare their audiences to attempt the impossible: to survive when God doesn’t show up.

But, God isn’t going anywhere and He hasn’t gone anywhere.

When we can’t hear God’s voice, we don’t need contingency plans; we need to connect with Him so we can hear Him. Studying contingency plans, rather than studying His voice, won’t achieve that.  · · · →

Everyone has problems. Everyone has goals and things we want to do. When things conflict, we choose what to do and what to reject. This is called “choice”.

There seems to be some kind of disconnect in many people’s thinking. When we make a choice, we have our excuses. Somehow, we think that having an excuse will relieve us of the negative backlash from our choice that we excuse.

But, negative backlash isn’t stopped by our excuses.

Consequences, good and bad, come from actions, not from our excuses for them. But, not to worry. At lease we have our excuses.  · · · →

It’s easy to hate the bad guys so much that we forget to love the good guys. This usually drives mid-managers and second lieutenants to become tyrants, even though they want to achieve something good.

Never hate evil so much that you forget to love goodness. In fact, it’s probably best to just love what is good and forget about evil, lest evil open its back door to infiltrate your heart.

This applies to mentoring as much as leading. Many brilliant consultants get fired. Frankly, it’s everyone’s fault when the consultant and the client forgot to love goodness the most.  · · · →

The known and the unknown… Are they?

One reason police investigations can take time is evasion and elusion. Villains deceive. That’s what they do. If every crime was as simple as it is made to seem then there would be no need for any police, courts, laws—in fact, if every first guess was right, we wouldn’t even need schools, books, or even language for that matter.

We wouldn’t even need protests, if all things were as they appear.

So, whomever you think the enemy is, just might be your friend. Whoever helps you fight him is probably your puppetmaster.

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Problems are rarely as they may seem. The term “blessing in disguise” doesn’t do justice most of the time. The better the disguise, the bigger the blessing.

Shell-shocked wartime veterans never fully get past the hidden enemies of the past. Maybe it’s time history not repeat itself. Anyone can be new.

Memories of enemies are always bigger than enemies themselves. Headlines of “war” always sell better than headlines of “peace”. Those little “set-backs” we run into along the way are often times shortcuts to the very victories we seek. With everyone being in such a hurry, don’t hate the shortcuts.  · · · →

Movers and shakers always have a list of things they wish they could get done today, but just can’t. A thousand other projects keep their plans in limbo.

It would seem that God might feel the same way, which is why many good things haven’t happened yet. But, God is not “slow” as some count slowness.

So, perhaps those plans we have for today really aren’t for today.

Everything has it’s place and time. The things that can be for today and tomorrow will be. If tomorrow is the only day a thing can happen, it will probably be best.  · · · →

All the little, petty reasons why people win or fail—whether business, administration, love, or war—aren’t the actual reasons. Those are the excuses. We actually win and lose according to the foresight of greater players: high-rollers in power, visionaries, good and bad angels, and the God of everyone’s molecules.

“Big picture painters” rarely target those who see them, even their enemies. Call it a “professional courtesy”, but people who see a thing before it makes smoke on the horizon, who recognize the lowering sea before the tsunami breaks the horizon… their prize is the same as their price: survival.

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If this life is focused on a God-given test of our ability to love, then it is a teaching test that trains us through what we miss.

All the things we seek turn out to be the very things we failed to grab when opportunity presented itself. Visions are birthed in pain. Foresight is our anecdote to our past blindness.

This is true of everyone.

What makes us different is learning foresight earlier or later. The timing is a symphony of circumstance, people in our lives to lovingly make us miss out while explaining why, and our willingness to care.  · · · →

The reason we need experience is for experience. It’s not just for experience itself, but to improve tomorrow’s experience.

Grandma always said, “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes.” Too often, when friend or enemy says, “Try it,” we think they will just sell us snakeoil.

The invitation to try something before judging seems like a gimmick. “They want to get us,” we tell ourselves.

But, the real reason for trying is to know the truth: better or worse, what is the real reason it’s good or bad? We can’t know real reasons from inexperience.  · · · →