Wisdom for Your Weekend is your regular installment of what we’ve been reading (and watching) around the web. Presented to you by Chris Pappalardo, with guidance from Pastor J.D., this is our attempt to reflect Proverbs 9:9: “Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning.” While we do not always agree with everything these authors post, we share these resources because we find them challenging and enriching. As we often say around the Summit, when it comes to reading, “Eat the fish and spit out the bones.”
Articles of the Week
The Best List of Best Books of 2018, Tim Challies. Everyone and their brother has been posting the best books of the past year. And just around the time we started thinking, “My, wouldn’t it be nice if someone consolidated all those lists into one mega-list?” Tim Challies came through.
Far as the Curse Is Found, Nancy Guthrie. “Perhaps it seems a bit grim to be thinking about and even preparing for death during the Christmas season. But it seems to me that Christmas is exactly the right time to think about death. Tim Keller has said that we have to ‘rub hope into the reality of death.’ And is there any time we sing more about hope than at Christmas?”
How to Listen Like a Counselor, Brad Hambrick. Not just a helpful post for those in the counseling field. In fact, this is probably most useful for those of us who are horrid listeners. No cheat sheet can replace the main skill in listening—wanting to be a good listener—but if you need more tangible steps, Pastor Brad is here for you.
Shame Storm, Helen Andrews. “The solution, then, is not to try to make shame storms well targeted, but to make it so they happen as infrequently as possible. Editors should refuse to run stories that have no value except humiliation, and readers should refuse to click on them. It is, after all, the moral equivalent of contributing your rock to a public stoning. We should all develop a robust sense of what is and is not any of our business. Shame can be useful—and even necessary—but it is toxic unless a relationship exists between two people first. A Twitter mob is no more a basis for salutary shaming than an actual mob is for reasoned discussion.”
Don’t Reap to the Edge of Your Field, Michael Kelley. “To use the language of Leviticus, we tend to reap to the edge of our fields. We use all of everything we have – all our money. All our time. All our energy. All our everything – and sometimes more. As a result, we don’t have anything left ‘just in case.’ We don’t have time for a conversation in the middle of the day because our schedule is already too packed. We don’t have time to get to know our neighbors because our evenings are swarming with activities. We don’t have any money to contribute to the mission trip because every dollar is accounted for.”
On the Lighter Side
Bad Jokes (Christmas Edition), Dude Perfect. You can expect to hear a lot of these around DPAC in the next few days. (Sorry, not sorry.)
