Assumptions

Bad days. We’ve all had them, and for many of us, it doesn’t take much to send a day spiraling into chaos before breakfast is even over.

According to a new survey, the average American knows their day is going to be bad by 8:36 a.m. Additionally, it’s not just a rare occurrence—four times a month, people expect the worst, adding up to an average of 48 bad days every year.

Mornings, it seems, are critical in setting the tone for the day. The survey highlights that common morning mishaps—such as waking up feeling sick (35%), suffering from poor sleep (31%), or starting the day with a headache (29%)—are among the top indicators of a bad day. Even seemingly minor inconveniences, like misplacing keys (26%) or leaving a phone at home (25%), can derail the entire day.

The impact of these morning disruptions is significant. Nearly half of those surveyed (48%) reported canceling plans or calling in sick after a challenging start to the day, opting to return to bed in hopes of salvaging what remains.

Possible Preaching Angle:
We have all been there, but a Christian doesn’t have to let pessimism or emotions rule their day. Beginning this new year, resolve instead, by faith, to put your day into God’s hands – “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psa. 118:24)

A pastor and his family on an early morning flight had been delayed for hours and were feeling sleep-deprived and anxious. As the plane landed, another family behind them attempted to exit quickly, with the teenager rushing ahead. The pastor shares:

I stuck my arm into the aisle to block the rest of the family from passing, like I was Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. “None shall pass.” “We’re all trying to get off this plane,” I said to the family, “Let’s wait our turn!”

They had words with me that I cannot share here and pushed past my arm. I was fuming.

As the passenger disembarked, a flight attendant approached, explaining that the teenage girl had been experiencing a panic attack and needed assistance. The family had been trying to help her. The family was not rude; they were desperate.

How did I, a former chaplain trained to notice physiological signs of stress, miss that this young lady needed help? How did I let my core value of courtesy block my capacity to see what was really going on?

I was operating out of assumption and unable to see reality. Rather than see that this young lady needed help getting off the plane, all I could see was a family rudely skipping the line, and I must intervene.

Whether we move toward self-righteousness or self-protection, the common denominator is self. This is what every follower of God has in common: We get caught up in ourselves, we get triggered, we forget others, and we forget the Lord.

The Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) program is a federally funded law enforcement initiative that trains officers to recognize symptoms of drivers under the influence of illegal substances. It’s like a field sobriety test, but for harder drugs instead of alcohol. Proponents of the program argue that it's the best available tool to detect drugged drivers.

But various industry experts are criticizing the program for its questionable scientific basis and lack of consistent testing protocols. They are calling it a process that can be easily manipulated by officers seeking to make drug-related arrests.

Haley Butler-Moore, a nurse, experienced the controversial nature of DRE firsthand when she was pulled over in Colorado for speeding. Despite denying any recreational drug use, the officer insisted her eyes suggested otherwise. At the officer’s suggestion, Butler-Moore agreed to undergo a DRE evaluation, unaware of its implications.

After observing her behavior and vital signs, the DRE officer concluded she was impaired by a double dose of her prescribed depressants. Butler-Moore insisted on her sobriety, which was later confirmed by a blood test revealing no traces of drugs or alcohol. She said, “I just felt like I was another test subject for them, and that felt really unfair.” The attorney representing her in a suit against the arresting officers said, “It's such utter nonsense. A cop can use it to manufacture whatever conclusion of impairment they want.”

In 2012, a group of Maryland defense attorneys sued creators of the DRE program, presenting to the judge a group of cases that they felt was police misconduct under the guise of DRE. They called a number of expert witnesses. Judge Micheal Galloway ultimately ruled in their favor, saying that “the DRE protocol fails to produce an accurate and reliable determination of whether a suspect is impaired by drugs and by what specific drug he is impaired.”

Despite this ruling, the DRE program has continued to expand, training more than a thousand new officers every year.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God cares about justice for people; leaders who abuse their position dishonor the authority they have been given.

The word "manifest" has been named Cambridge Dictionary's word of the year for 2024, after celebrities such as pop star Dua Lipa and gymnast Simone Biles spoke of “manifesting” their success.

The term, which has gained traction on TikTok, was looked up almost 130,000 times on the Cambridge Dictionary website this year. Its use widened greatly across all types of media due to events in 2024, and it shows how the meanings of a word can change over time.

Formerly, “manifest” was used very differently. For example, Chaucer used the oldest sense of the verb manifest: "to show something clearly, through signs or actions." The verb is still used frequently in this way. For example, people can manifest their dissatisfaction, or symptoms of an illness can manifest themselves.

However, in 2024 the term "to manifest" has evolved to be used in the sense of "to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen."

Dr. Sander van der Linden at Cambridge University, cautioned that the idea of manifesting success has no scientific validity.

Manifesting is what psychologists call “magical thinking” or the general illusion that specific mental rituals can change the world around us.

Manifesting gained tremendous popularity during the pandemic on TikTok with billions of views, including the popular 3-6-9 method which calls for writing down your wishes three times in the morning, six times in the afternoon and nine times before bed. This procedure promotes obsessive and compulsive behavior with no discernible benefits.

But can we really blame people for trying it, when prominent celebrities have been openly “manifesting” their success?

Manifesting wealth, love, and power can lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment. Think of the dangerous idea that you can cure serious diseases simply by wishing them away.

However, it is crucial to understand the difference between the power of positive thinking involving effort and goal setting contrasted with moving reality with your mind. The former is healthy, whereas the latter is pseudoscience.

Possible Preaching Angle:

While wishing for something may be a natural human response, the Bible encourages a more proactive approach that combines faith, hope, and action. It emphasizes the importance of aligning our desires with God's will and taking steps to bring about positive change.

What did Jesus really look like? Western art has frequently stumbled over the contradiction between the ascetic figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the iconography of Christ inspired by the heroic, Hellenistic ideal: Christ as beautiful, tall, and broad-shouldered, God's wide receiver; blue-eyed, fair-haired, a straight aquiline nose, Christ as European prince.

Rembrandt van Rijn, in a career rich with artistic innovation, begged to differ. An exhibition at Paris's Louvre Museum showed in dozens of oils, charcoal sketches, and oak-panel studies how the 17th-century Dutch painter virtually reinvented the depiction of Jesus and arrived at a more realistic portrait.

Before Rembrandt painters tended to reiterate the conventional imagery of Christ. Where artists did rely on life models, they were uniquely beautiful specimens, such as in Michelangelo's Pietà. Rembrandt, working in the relatively open and tolerant society of Golden Age Holland, turned to life models for Jesus to give an "earthly reality" to the face of Christ. He often relied on one model, a young Dutch Jew, whose face appears in the seven oak panels. The result was a more realistic, culturally-appropriate, and biblical portrayal of Jesus.

The poor and ascetic Jesus likely was small and thin and almost certainly olive-skinned, with black hair and brown eyes, and so Rembrandt painted him. In this he anticipated much more recent studies of what the historical Jesus was like. The savior of Rembrandt's faith was a young man with a sweet, homely face, heavy-lidded, stoop-shouldered, and wan.

Viewing the pictures in order of their creation shows how Rembrandt's own features gradually infiltrated the images of Christ. It feels like the most spiritually edifying aspect of these works: When Rembrandt looked into the face of his Savior, he saw his own.

Suzanne Gaskins is a psychologist with a background working with indigenous children in Mexico. She wanted to test their capacity for delayed gratification, so she administered what’s called The Marshmallow Test. She offered each child the choice of eating one marshmallow immediately, or waiting while she left the room for the promise of two marshmallows.

Because she’s been studying the children in this community for years and knows them generally to be proficient and high functioning, she expected many of them to be waiting when she came back. But of the six children she tested, four of them simply left the room.

Puzzled by those results, Gaskins administered a host of sixteen different tests designed to measure executive function. Even though children in this community are self-motivated and can often dress, bathe themselves, and help with chores by three years of age, about half of them failed these tests.

This led Gaskins to examine the cultural bias embedded in those traditional tests and to rethink their efficacy. When she followed up with the children who took the marshmallow test, she found that many of them simply left the room because they had other things to do than sit around waiting for a marshmallow.

“I was very surprised at my own lack of insight,” Gaskins said. “I did not recognize the bias built into the test until I sat in the room with the kids and it became obvious what was wrong.”

Lucía Alcalá assisted Gaskins in administering these tests. She said, “Just because children in different communities perform differently in our tasks, doesn’t mean there’s something wrong and we need to fix it. As U.S. scholars we feel we have to fix everyone. … People don’t need us to save them and fix them.”

One of the lasting byproducts of the worldwide pandemic is the fact that many face-to-face institutional interactions of modern life have been conveniently relegated to virtual meetings. Among those institutions affected are our beleaguered court systems.

So, in late May, when social media feeds across America featured a clip of a man attending court via Zoom, the novelty was not in the platform itself, but about what the man was doing. Corey Harris appeared before the Honorable Judge J. Cedric Simpson on Zoom, while driving.

Harris told the judge, "Actually, I'm pulling into my doctor's office actually, so just give me one second, I'm parking right now.”

The judge said to the Harris’ public defender, Natalie Pate, "Maybe I'm not understanding something. This is the driving-while-license suspended (case)? ... And he was just driving and he didn't have a license?"

“Those are the charges, your honor, yes,” said Pate.

At this point in the video, Judge Simpson becomes quite incensed, and orders Harris to turn himself in or face arrest. People online got a good laugh at the man who appeared to be so flagrantly disobeying the law, virtually appearing in court driving while his license was suspended. Harris eventually spent two nights in jail over the offense.

There was only one problem: Harris’ license had actually been reinstated back in 2022, but because of a clerical error, the judge was not aware of the reinstatement. Harris was driving because he assumed that they knew his licensed had already been reinstated, and was surprised by the judge’s harsh reaction.

According to USA Today, the charges against Mr. Harris have been settled. As a result, many of the people who poked fun at him now owe Harris an apology for jumping to conclusions. Among them is Nate Burleson, co-host of CBS This Morning, who took a whole segment on the show to explain the situation for viewers.

“We’re sorry,” said Burleson, with co-host Gayle King nodding in light penitence. “You were right all along.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

We can show the love of Jesus to people by extending grace to them and not always assuming the worst about their actions or intentions.

I’ve noticed along the way of life that some people are much better at seeing people than others are. In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators.

Diminishers … make others feel insignificant. They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.

Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people. They have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times—so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.

Illuminators are a joy to be around. A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him [gave you] a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.

NFL lineman Jim Marshall was part of the revered “Purple People Eater” Minnesota Viking defensive line. For twenty seasons he never missed a game, earning a reputation for toughness and reliability. On October 25, 1964, playing against the San Francisco 49ers, Marshall recovered a fumble in the fourth quarter and ran untouched for sixty-six yards to the end zone.

After crossing the goal line, he tossed the ball away and began celebrating. Imagine his surprise when an opposing player trotted up, patted him on the back, and thanked him. Marshall suddenly realized that he was standing in the wrong end zone. He had just scored a safety, giving two points to the 49ers. The Vikings still won that day, thanks to eight total turnovers from the 49ers.

On the return flight to Minnesota, teammates ribbed Marshall, who said he simply got confused. “They kept telling me to get up in the cockpit and fly the plane. That way we'd end up in Hawaii instead of Minnesota.”

In football, as in much of life, it doesn’t matter that you’re doing something earnestly if you aren’t doing the right thing.

Beauty has its privileges. Studies reliably show that the most physically attractive among us tend to get more attention from parents, better grades in school, more money at work, and more satisfaction from life. A study published in the Journal of Economics and Business found that good-looking banking CEOs take in over $1 million more in total compensation, on average, than their lesser-looking peers. “Good looks pay off,” the authors write.

New research from Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance similarly finds that comely managers of mutual funds lure more investments and enjoy more promotions than their counterparts, even though their funds don’t perform as well. The researchers suggest this performance gap may be because handsome managers approach risk with arrogant levels of confidence.

Scientists attribute the human tendency to give attractive people better treatment to something called the halo effect. Basically, we tend to assume that good looks are a sign of intelligence, trustworthiness, and good character and that ugliness is similarly more than skin deep. This may help explain why attractive people are less likely to be arrested or convicted, even after controlling for criminal involvement, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Psychiatry, Psychology and Law.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The gospel works by grace not by beauty—God saves us in Christ not because we are beautiful and worthy. He saves us despite our lack of spiritual and moral beauty. But he saves us to make us truly beautiful in him.

In a YouTube video, political commentor Konstantin Kisin reported:

They did an experiment with a group of women and they put scars on their faces. They told these women that they were going into a job interview and that the purpose of the experiment is to find out whether people with facial disfigurements encounter discrimination. They showed the women the scars in the mirror and the women saw themselves with the scars.

Then as they led them out of the room, they said, “We are just going to touch it up a little bit.” As they touched it up, they removed the scarring completely. So, the women went into the job interview thinking that they are scarred, but actually were their normal selves.

The result of the experiment is that those women came back reporting a massively increased level of discrimination. Indeed, many of them came back with comments that the interviewer had made that they felt were referencing their facial disfigurement.

This is why this ideology of victimhood is so dangerous. Because if you preach to people constantly that we’re all oppressed, then that primes people to look for that.

You can view this 60 second video here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Bible does recognize the reality of innocent victims, but it stops short of affirming a victim mentality. While the Bible promises that we will experience innocent suffering for the cause of Christ, it nowhere speaks of our being “victims” in the contemporary sense of the word. Rather, the Bible speaks of us as “victors.” You can overcome victim mentality through a relationship with Christ and the Word of God. Christ (1 Pet. 2:22-23), Paul (Phil. 1:12-14), and Joseph (Gen 50:19-21) all show us an example of someone who was victimized but overcame a victim mentality.

A clip from a Pursuit of Wonder video illustrates how man's ideas of what is true often turns out to be completely false.

In Peru in the middle of the 1400s, there was what is believed to be the largest known child sacrifice in the world, with about 140 children and more than 200 animals killed. The reason: attempting to appease the gods in response to unusually bad weather.

In Europe in the 17th century, just a few hundred years ago, it was widely believed that the earth was the center of the universe and everything else revolved around it. When the now famous astronomer Galileo Galilei published a work that showed that the sun was the center of the universe, and the earth revolved around the sun, the Roman inquisition banned his work and found Galileo guilty of heresy.

In the late 19th century, little more than a hundred years ago, doctors used what are now Schedule 1 drugs to treat common cold symptoms in children. Also, around this time, doctors believed it was foolish to wash their hands before delivering babies or during other medical procedures. Only eighty years ago, it was believed that cigarettes posed no health dangers.

And the list goes on. This Earth is not merely a cemetery of people that once were, but also a cemetery of ideas and beliefs once held to be true but are no longer.

You can watch the video here (2 mins 15 sec - 3 min 57 sec).

On December 11, 1998, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter. It was a highly advanced piece of technology that cost $327 million. The data it gathered would open new doors for planetary science. But instead, the orbiter exploded. It launched successfully, but as soon as it arrived in Martian orbit, radio contact was lost—permanently

NASA scientists eventually realized what had gone wrong. The Orbiter had been a sophisticated piece of technology, programmed with software in triplicate to avoid any chances of miscalculation or error. All of its components coordinated perfectly, except one. NASA had purchased a certain piece of software from a US aerospace company. This would not have been a problem except that NASA used the metric system for all its instruments and software, but this firm’s technology did not.

Measures of acceleration that NASA’s instruments were reading as newtons (metric) had been provided instead as pound force-seconds. The ensuing miscalculation forced the Orbiter to fly much closer to Mars than it should have. This miracle of space engineering ended up meeting its untimely demise in the planet’s upper atmosphere. The great loss was caused by a very human error: a wrong assumption. The scientists at NASA designed the Orbiter to be based on the metric system and they assumed that all subcomponents would be as well.

Possible Preaching Angles:

Attributes of God; False beliefs; God, nature of; Human Nature – Spiritually speaking, we can also get drastically off course and even self-destruct when we believe false assumptions about the character of God or the abilities of our own human nature.

Author Cathy O'Neal's The Shame Machine, delves into the numerous ways that corporations, governments, and much of the media have weaponized and turned into big business the shaming of individuals or groups. One example is the Kardashian empire:

Kim Kardashian's body is central to both her brand and her commercial empire. Her very profitable company sells makeup, lipstick, and other cosmetics. By early 2020 Kardashian's fortune was creeping toward billionaire status and in April 2021 it was achieved. The founding assumption of her business is that looks are not God-given. It's a never-ending job. And it's expensive. One branch of her branded enterprise involves pitching shelves of products designed to help lesser mortals achieve the perfection of the Kardashian body. For a single Instagram post, she rakes in an estimated half-million dollars. She pops up on millions of feeds, promoting appetite-suppressing lollipops, a fourteen-day detox program, and many more offerings.

She sells fantasy. And the marketing is based on shame: having anything less than a dream body is a choice. If you don't like what you were born with, you can fix it. It's up to you. This is a powerful message, especially for young women. Their anxiety regarding these issues is unrelenting, and it begins early.

These fears fuel endless business for sex-goddesses like Kim Kardashian. To inch closer to their ideal, millions of women strive, worry, work out, diet, buy all kinds of branded garbage, and yet never achieve their goal of looking like her. Many of them feel like wrecks. Beauty has long been the perfect scam, an inexhaustible shame machine.

Author Todd Rose makes the point that our tendency to make false assumptions, or fall into collective illusions, can result in mistrust, discouragement, and error. He writes,

If I asked how you personally define a successful life, which of these answers would you choose?

A. A person is successful if they have followed their own interests and talents to become the best they can be at what they care about most.

B. A person is successful if they are rich, have a high-profile career, or are well-known.

Now which one do you think most people would choose? If you chose option A for yourself but thought that most people would choose option B, you are living under a collective illusion. This question came from a 2019 study of more than fifty-two hundred people conducted on the ways the American public defines success.

The result was that 97 percent chose A for themselves, but 92 percent thought that most others would choose B.

Rose concluded, “We learned that a large majority of people felt that the most important attributes for success in their own lives were qualities such as character, good relationships, and education. But those same people believed that most others prioritized comparative attributes such as wealth, status, and power.”

49-year-old German brewery worker Erwin Kreuz blew his life savings on a once-in-a-lifetime birthday trip to San Francisco. He’d seen it on TV, and he wanted to visit the Wild West. As the flight from Frankfurt stopped to refuel in Bangor, Maine, before continuing on to California, an air stewardess who had finished her shift told Kreuz to “have a nice time in San Francisco.” Her choice of words would change Kreuz’s life.

Kreuz, who typically enjoyed drinking 17 beers a day, was a little groggy, and on hearing this, got off the plane, jumped in a cab and asked the driver to take him to the city. The cab dropped Kreuz at a hotel in downtown Bangor and he found a tavern to quench his almighty thirst. He wandered Bangor for three days enjoying the sights and sounds that Maine had to offer. Unfortunately, Kreuz still thought he was in San Francisco.

Kreuz was certain he was in San Francisco, and he didn’t stop believing that for three very strange days. At one point Kreuz was reassured by the sight of two Chinese restaurants in the town, something he knew was in San Francisco from the movies. After much wandering, Kreuz decided he must be in a Bay Area suburb, so he hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to downtown San Francisco. The driver sped away as though Kreuz was crazy.

Kreuz returned to the tavern and tried to get some help from a waitress. The language barrier was too great, so she put him in contact with Gertrude Romine who spoke German. Romine and her family took Kreuz into their home, and word spread of the lost tourist, first to the Bangor Daily News, then nationally, then the world.

Hearing of his story, The San Francisco Examiner paid for Kreuz to fly out to his initial destination. When there, he was treated like a visiting dignitary. Kreuz was welcomed by the mayor, who presented him with a proclamation declaring that San Francisco does, in fact, exist.

Kreuz was soon due back at work at the brewery and, after four days in San Francisco, boarded a flight back home holding a “Please let me off in Frankfurt” sign.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Confusion; Eternity; Heaven; Lostness – This humorous story also has a sobering application for all who go through life assuming that at the end of life’s journey they will find themselves in heaven, only to discover that they are greatly mistaken. “There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Prov. 14:12; 16:25).

Actor and director Justine Bateman has never gone under the knife and never will. The 55-year-old Family Ties actress is so perplexed by society’s acceptance of plastic surgery that she has penned a new book, Face: One Square Foot of Skin, in which she explores the idea of getting some work done. She says,

Why is the idea that women’s older faces are undesirable, what is the root of all that? How did we get to this point in our current society where cutting your face up, or injecting it, or inserting plastic or whatever, is spoken about so matter-of-factly?

We went from, “Wow someone getting a face lift is quite unusual!” to, “It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.” To me it’s really, it’s like, psychopathic. It’s lunacy, and I don’t like that we’re going along with it without pausing to think about it.

The reporter said, “What struck me in reading Bateman’s book was how much time we spend fretting about whether we should do something about our faces or hold out. And I don’t just mean older women. I have friends in their 20s who also fall into a vortex of products that promise to reverse aging that isn’t even visible yet. The Instagram generation hasn’t been spared, in fact, they may have accumulated more time examining their faces than any before them.”

Patrol Lieutenant Eric Fields of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office is pretty popular these days, often fielding questions and posing for selfies with the coworkers and residents he interacts with on the job. His popularity is less about his winning personality, however, than it is a distinct resemblance to Hollywood megastar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Still, the lieutenant tries to take it all in stride.

Fields said, “I’ve been called The Rock and Vin Diesel’s love child. I go along with it. It’s humorous. It’s flattering. It could be worse, I guess.”

Recently, the Sheriff’s office posted a picture to a social media account of Fields posing with a fan at a Walmart. One of Fields’ coworkers had been bragging to the young man he worked with someone who looked like a famous celebrity. After the coworker found out the young man was a huge fan of The Rock, an appearance was arranged. And according to this young fan, Fields was the real deal. Fields said,

The blessing was really for me because The Rock had a spirit that was just such a great person to meet. He’s the real celebrity. Everybody knew him and loved him. It was a blessing to me. I go trying to bless someone else, and I come out with the blessing of meeting him. I wish the actual Rock could meet this kid. He’s the hometown hero.

Corny or not, Fields views these kinds of interactions as essential parts of the job. “We really love to get involved with the community, cut up and be neighbors -- not just enforcement. I’m just glad I could be part of someone’s happiness and laughter.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Don't be satisfied with simply appearing to live as a Christian, but rather, engage in the spiritual disciplines that will make you more like Jesus, from the inside outward.

In the spring of 2018, Charles Battle II had no idea that he would become the focal point of his local community’s struggle to reform the way police interact with its citizens. But now he’s as engaged in the struggle as he’s ever been.

Police detained Battle as a suspect for a robbery he had not committed, all because an eyewitness identified him as having been involved minutes prior. However, Battle was not wearing any apparel that matched witness testimony, and the witness at the time was not wearing her glasses. The only thing Battle had in common with the suspect description is that he was young and Black. Nevertheless, he was arrested and kept in police custody. It wasn’t until six months later that the Denver District Attorney’s Office dropped the charges for lack of evidence. His mother said, “He’s been traumatized. He says, ‘Mom, any day I leave I could not come home.’”

The police technique used to identify Charles is informally known as a “showup.” Unlike the traditional technique of having witnesses pick the suspect out of a lineup of several potential suspects (or to pick from a photo array, which uses the same principle), police bring witnesses in person to the area of the crime to identify a potential suspect without being shown any other alternatives.

As a result of her son’s arrest, Sharon Battle collaborated with Together Colorado, a multifaith advocacy group, who spent years advocating for changes in the way law enforcement conducts witness identifications. The resulting bill has gotten bipartisan support in the Colorado legislature, and it prohibits the use of showups except in situations where lineups and photo arrays are not possible, but the potential suspect is detained “within minutes of the commission of the crime and near the location of the crime.”

Rep. Jennifer Bacon, the bill’s sponsor said, “Everyone deserves to have the right person be held accountable for these actions. You shouldn’t just be Black on the street and be thrown into the system because we can’t identify people properly.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

All of us, and especially those of us in positions of leadership, have a responsibility to behave as honorably as possible to promote justice. If our behavior injures or offends others, we have a responsibility to correct those behaviors and make things right with those who were wronged.