For sports enthusiasts: New York Giants assistant coach Mike Pope (age 60) takes young Jeremy Shockey (age 21) to the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. They walk through the corridors, "men of different generations, nearly opposite temperaments, locked together by the whims of their sport."

"We took a look at all the busts and all the pictures," Pope recalled, "and I said to him, 'I'm going to do with you or to you or for you whatever I have to and hopefully get you in this line of statues, because you have the talent to be here. You can get mad at me; I don't care. I'm going to make you the type of player who gets in here.'"

I hear Paul talking to Timothy in this way. This is the mindset of the writer of Hebrews 11–12. It's the language of the discipler, the leader-builder, of the first century and the twenty-first.

And this one about Brett Favre's amazing Monday night game just after he learned that his father died: On Monday night, Favre's effort kept a lot of people awake, including ...