Discipleship

A New York Times article was titled, “The Meaning of the Boston Marathon Finish Line, Then and Now.” This was the opening line: “For many runners, the marathon finish line feels holy, and reaching it divine.” Then it said, “The Boston Marathon is arguably the most elusive finish line of all, and not just anyone can cross it.”

We are in a race like that! And the finish line is everything to us! Paul wrote, "I have finished the race."

It might be the most precarious race in sports. To win the 60-meter hurdles, a runner has to start strong, clear five barriers taller than a kitchen counter and then outsprint everyone else—all in less than eight seconds.

It’s the sort of unforgiving endeavor where even the smallest mistake or tiniest hesitation can prove fatal. Unless you’re Grant Holloway.

He’s won it 75 times in a row.

What makes Holloway so good? For starters, he’s tall—standing at 6-foot-2 and with long legs. But he also embraces routine, stays humble, and keeps improving. Holloway lives two doors down from his coach. Even with his pile of titles, he is working on tiny improvements to his form, like lifting his trailing knee higher over the hurdle and keeping his foot tucked closer to his body.

“He doesn’t take anything for granted,” said his coach, Mike Holloway—no relation. “He challenges me to challenge him daily.”

Most tithing Protestants still prefer a physical collection plate to a digital one. A Lifeway Research survey of 1,002 American Protestants found that since the pandemic, more people are giving online—but still not most. Today, only 7 percent of those who tithe use a church smartphone app. Only 8 percent have set up automated bank payments.

Preferred Mode of Tithing:

62% Only cash or check

36% At least one form of electronic giving

02% Don’t know

It feels like kids’ slang is evolving so quickly that adults now need to learn a new language just to keep up. The latest viral phrase? “Six seven.” But what does it actually mean, and should parents be concerned?

The “six seven” trend started with the song "Doot Doot (6 7)" by rapper Skrilla, where “6-7” refers to 67th Street in Chicago. The meme went viral on TikTok, especially in edits featuring NBA player LaMelo Ball, who is 6' 7" tall. These videos often splice together clips of Ball with the Skrilla song, and soon, tweens everywhere were making their own “six seven” content and repeating the phrase endlessly.

But the meaning behind “six seven” is intentionally vague. Some kids use it to mean “so-so,” often with a hand gesture, while others see it as a reference to height or basketball. Ultimately, the phrase is mostly nonsense-which is part of its appeal. As one TikTok commenter put it, “I think the point is that it makes no sense,” while another added, “but it’s provocative.”

Teachers have already voiced frustration about the trend disrupting classrooms, with some banning the phrase outright due to constant interruptions. On Reddit and TikTok, both educators and students have shared stories of “six seven” derailing lessons and becoming a classroom in-joke.

Should parents worry? Probably not, but context matters. Kids have always latched onto silly, context-free phrases for fun. Remember “YEET?” Still, it’s worth knowing that “six seven” comes from a rap song with explicit lyrics, which is inappropriate. If your child is using the phrase, ask where they heard it and what they think it means. It’s a good opportunity to talk about media literacy and responsible language online.

For most kids, though, “six seven” is just another catchy, meaningless meme-one that’s more amusing because adults don’t get it.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The “six seven” meme is an example of how quickly children’s culture can shift and how bewildering it can feel for parents. Scripture encourages parents to stay engaged, teach discernment, lead with humility, and model Christlike love. Rather than fearing or fighting every trend, use them as opportunities to build trust, teach wisdom, and shepherd your child’s heart toward God.

A 2025 report from the American Bible Society suggests that Bible use is rising—especially among young adults who, until recently, were among the least likely to open a Bible at all.

According to State of the Bible: USA 2025, the percentage of U.S. adults who read the Bible outside of church at least three times a year increased from 38% to 41% in the last year. That’s roughly 10 million more adults engaging with Scripture—marking the first increase in Bible use since 2021.

The sharpest rise appears among millennials, where reported Bible use jumped by 29% in a single year. Gen Z also showed noticeable movement. It’s a striking turnaround, especially considering that both groups have typically lagged behind older generations in religious activity. But the numbers may not be as clear-cut as they seem.

The study also found that Scripture engagement—a metric that factors in not just Bible reading, but how much Scripture influences someone’s choices, relationships, and worldview—rose from 11% to 15% among Gen Z, and from 12% to 17% among millennials.

The study defines Scripture engagement broadly, factoring in a range of self-reported behaviors and attitudes. It also relies on a survey sample of just 2,656 adults—a relatively small group to draw sweeping generational conclusions from, especially when measuring a spike as large as 29%.

Still, even if the numbers are more hopeful than definitive, they point to a growing spiritual curiosity among younger Americans. You can read the full report here.

Che Guevara is known internationally as a Marxist revolutionary. As he recruited for his guerilla operations in Cuba, the Congo, and Bolivia he often encountered the half-heartedness of his volunteers.

Author John Lee Anderson quotes Che’s sarcastic evaluation of the freshly trained recruits who had just arrived to fight in the Congo:

In a ludicrous sideshow, the captain had also brought over forty new Congolese rebel ‘graduates,’ fresh from a training course in the Soviet Union. Like their Bulgarian and Chinese-trained predecessors, they immediately requested two weeks of vacation, while also complaining that they had nowhere to put their luggage. Che wrote, ‘It would be a little comic if it weren’t so sad, to see the disposition of these boys in whom the revolution had deposited its faith.’

Possible Preaching Angle:

The church also faces the same issue with those who are called to follow our Savior. We are not called to be part-time disciples looking for a life of leisure. Jesus calls for us to “take your cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). He also promises to give us immense rewards stored up in heaven for the sacrifices we make for his cause (Matt. 19:29).

From boyhood, Davy Lloyd dreamed of nothing else but dedicating his life to the orphanage his parents had operated in Haiti since 2000.

He had grown up in Haiti, spoke Creole before English and had helped his parents run their mission, which had grown into a bustling operation that educated 450 children, with 50 living on the compound in Lizon just north of Port-au-Prince.

“He had said from the time he was little that someday he was going to be a missionary in Haiti,” his father, David Lloyd Jr., recounted in a phone interview from Oklahoma. “He just knew that that’s where he was supposed to be his whole life, trying to make a difference in some people’s lives who needed a lot of help.”

So, when Davy and Natalie Lloyd, then Natalie Baker, married in June 2022, they decided to make a life together in Haiti—even as the country of 11 million was descending further into political dysfunction and gang violence. … That notion was shattered in May of 2024, when two gangs breached the compound in succession, killing the young couple, along with the Haitian director of the group, Jude Montis.

Davy Lloyd’s father said, “We felt that in our hearts that’s where we were supposed to be and what we were supposed to be doing with our lives. I just kind of felt that with us being there it gave the community some hope because we hadn’t cut and run.”

In a curious tale of technology meeting theology, a Catholic advocacy group introduced an AI chatbot posing as a priest, offering to hear confessions and dispense advice on matters of faith.

The organization created an AI chatbot named “Father Justin” to answer the multitude of questions they receive about the Catholic faith. Father Justin used an avatar that looked like a middle-aged man wearing a clerical collar sitting in front of an Italian nature scene. But the clerical bot got a little too ambitious when it claimed to live in Assisi, Italy and to be a real member of the clergy, even offering to take confession.

While most of the answers provided by Father Justin were in line with traditional Catholic teaching, the chat bot began to offer unconventional responses. These included suggesting that babies could be baptized with Gatorade and endorsing a marriage between siblings.

After a number of complaints, the organization decided to rethink Father Justin. They are relaunching the chatbot as just Justin, wearing a regular layman’s outfit. The website says they have plans to continue the chatbot but without the ministerial garb.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Society may advance technologically in many areas, but we will never be able to advance beyond our need to be in community with actual people in order to have true spiritual guidance and accountability as God intended.

Mary Jones was about eight-years-old when she became a Christian. Having learned to read, she wanted to own a Bible in her native Welsh language. But in 1800, Bibles were expensive and hard to come by in Wales. A Bible owned by a relative of Mary's, who lived several miles from her home, was her only access.

So, she saved for six years until she had enough money to buy one of her own. When she sought out the Bible, she was told that a Mr. Charles was her best hope. The only problem was that he lived some 20 miles from Mary's home.

Undeterred, she walked the entire way, barefoot, to find Mr. Charles and fulfill her dream of owning her own Bible. Mary’s story lives on today at a visitor center in Wales dedicated to her memory.

The story of Mary Jones's Bible does not end with her. In 1802, at a meeting with church leaders in London, Mr. Charles recounted her dedication to owning her own Bible. He was there to urge a solution to the lack of affordable Bibles in Wales.

A pastor there named Joseph Hughes asked if a new society could be formed. But he went further, asking, “If for Wales, why not for the United Kingdom? And if for the Kingdom, why not for the world?”

That question was eventually answered, with the help of William Wilberforce and other members of the famous Clapham sect, by the formation of the British Foreign Bible Society. Today, it works with an international network of other Bible societies to produce and distribute millions of Bibles in hundreds of languages around the world. All of this stems from one girl's determination to own her own Bible.

These are dark days for military recruiting.

The Army, Navy, and Air Force have tried almost everything in their power to bring in new people. They’ve relaxed enlistment standards, set up remedial schools for recruits who can’t pass entry tests, and offered signing bonuses worth up to $75,000. Still, in 2023 the three services together fell short by more than 25,000 recruits.

Military leaders say there are so few Americans who are willing and able to serve, and so many civilian employers competing for them, that getting enough people into uniform is nearly impossible.

Tell that to the Marines. The Marine Corps ended the recruiting year on September 30th having met 100 percent of its goal, with hundreds of contracts already signed for the next year. The corps did it while keeping enlistment standards tight and offering next to no perks.

When asked earlier this year about whether the Marines would offer extra money to attract recruits, the commandant of the Marine Corps replied: “Your bonus is that you get to call yourself a Marine. That’s your bonus.”

In a nutshell, that is the Marine Corps’ marketing strategy: Dismiss financial incentives as chump change compared with the honor of joining the Corps. Brush off the idea of military service as a steppingstone to civilian career opportunities. Instead, dangle the promise of the chance to be part of something intangible, timeless, and elite.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Christians aren’t called to elitism, but we are called to a life of adventure and challenge.

In his newsletter, blogger Aaron Renn reflects on the crucial role of mentors:

One of the core functions of mentors is to [tell you the things] people are already thinking and saying about you behind your back - and helping you overcome them. A Financial Times profile of American Express CEO Steve Squeri shows how a mentor did this for him.

Squeri is the grandson of Italian and Irish immigrants and the son of an accountant who worked nights and weekends at Bloomingdale’s department store to make ends meet. During his studies at Manhattan College, Squeri lived at home. He had never been on an aircraft until he joined a training program at what is now the consulting group Accenture.

Four years later he moved to Amex. There, his Queens accent and cheap suits stuck out so badly that an executive took him aside. He said, “You have a really sharp mind, but the rest of you needs a lot of work. [Senior managers] tend to use all the letters of the alphabet when they talk.”

The mentor took Squeri shopping, arranged for [speaking] lessons and even organized sessions with a cultural anthropologist so the younger manager would feel comfortable when he was sent to the group’s overseas offices. Squeri says, “I’m an example of how anybody can get to the top with a lot of hard work and having people that run the company that … are looking at individuals broadly and not judging books by their cover.”

Renn comments: “This mentor saw a diamond in the rough guy and made it his business to polish him up. This sort of thing is worth its weight in gold. [But notice how] good mentorship gets uncomfortable.”

When researchers for the American Bible Society’s annual State of the Bible report saw 2022’s survey statistics, they found it hard to believe the results. The data said roughly 26 million people had mostly or completely stopped reading the Bible in the last year.

“We reviewed our calculations. We double-checked our math and ran the numbers again … and again,” John Plake, lead researcher for the American Bible Society, wrote in the 2022 report. “What we discovered was startling, disheartening, and disruptive.”

In 2021, about 50 percent of Americans said they read the Bible on their own at least three or four times per year. That percentage had stayed more or less steady since 2011.

But in 2022, it dropped 11 points. Now only 39 percent say they read the Bible multiple times per year or more. It is the steepest, sharpest decline on record.

According to the 12th annual State of the Bible report, it wasn’t just the occasional Scripture readers who didn’t pick up their Bibles as much in 2022 either. More than 13 million of the most engaged Bible readers—measured by frequency, feelings of connection to God, and impact on day-to-day decisions—said they read God’s Word less.

Currently, only 10 percent of Americans report daily Bible reading.

As a young adult, writer Andrew Leland was diagnosed with a rare disorder that caused him to become blind. In a New Yorker article, he notes that throughout history people have either bullied or coddled visually impaired people. But he gives an example of one school that empowers the blind by challenging them to achieve new heights of independence. Leland writes:

In 2020, I heard about a residential training school called the Colorado Center for the Blind, in Littleton. The C.C.B. is part of the National Federation of the Blind and is staffed almost entirely by blind people. Students live there for several months, wearing eye-covering shades and learning to navigate the world without sight. The N.F.B. takes a radical approach to cultivating blind independence. Students use power saws in a woodshop, take white-water-rafting trips, and go skiing. To graduate, they have to produce professional documents and cook a meal for sixty people.

The most notorious test is the “independent drop”: a student is driven in circles, and then dropped off at a mystery location in Denver, without a smartphone. (Sometimes, advanced students are left in the middle of a park, or the upper level of a parking garage.) Then the student has to find her way back to the Colorado Center, and she is allowed to ask one person one question along the way. A member of an R.P. support group told me, “People come back from those programs loaded for bear”—ready to hunt the big game of blindness. Katie Carmack, a social worker with R.P., told me, of her time there, “It was an epiphany.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, our heavenly Father will stretch us by “dropping” us into challenging situations.

Add-on fees are driving consumers crazy. From restaurants and hotels to concerts and food delivery, we are increasingly shown a low price online, only to click through and find a range of fees that yield a much higher price at checkout.

The term drip pricing was popularized by a 2012 Federal Trade Commission conference. Its spread is associated with the proliferation of airline fees after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Yet an example of the phenomenon that long predates 2001 is stores’ practice of listing goods without the sales tax, which gets added at checkout.

Why not include the sales tax with the sticker price? One study from 2019 showed consumers punish that sort of transparency. A grocery store let the authors tag some products with the familiar pretax price and some with the total price including tax. For example, a hair brush’s price tag showed $5.79 before tax, and beneath that $6.22 with the tax. Sales volume dropped for products with price tags that included the tax than a control group without the tax.

This isn’t because shoppers didn’t know the tax rate or which items were taxable. In fact, 75% of shoppers surveyed knew the sales tax within 0.5 percentage point, and most knew what goods were taxable. So, the tax-inclusive price tag didn’t give them new information; it was just that transparent reminders turned some people off.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus never practiced “drip pricing.” He never hid the total costs for following him. It may turn some people off, but he always put the full cost upfront.

In August 2019, Marnus Labuschagne was drafted into the Australian Cricket Team unexpectedly as the first-ever concussion substitute in the history of international test cricket, replacing the injured Steve Smith. Labuschagne soon showed that he was no stop-gap sportsman as he quickly established his batting skills in international cricket. To date, he has scored 3767 test runs from 42 matches at the exceptional average of 54.59, placing him at number 20 on the all-time test average rankings. At present, he is the number five batsman in test cricket.

In spite of the unprecedented success, Labuschagne has earned a reputation for being a man who takes faith in Christ and prayer seriously. He has a sticker of an eagle on his bat, to highlight his favorite Bible verse, Isaiah 40:31.

In an interview for Season 2 of the documentary “The Test,” Marnus said, "Everyone knows cricket is a major part of my life, but the value of me as a person isn't in cricket - it's in my faith. I grew up with Christianity going back to when I was a kid, laying in my bed, praying every night."

He is also quoted as saying, "When I pray, I don't pray to win, just that I could perform at my best, and that all the glory will go to God, for whatever happens … win or lose." He further adds, "In the big scheme of things, what you're worth ... isn't out there on the pitch; It's internal and in Christ … Cricket is always going to be up and down. If you have (Jesus Christ as) a constant in your life, it makes life a lot easier."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Testimony; Witness - Marnus Labuschagne has clearly built his life and career on the words of Jesus - "But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well (Matt. 6:33).