Partiality

A Colorado football fan has filed an explosive $100 million lawsuit against the National Football League, claiming league owners conspired to sabotage Shedeur Sanders' draft position after the star quarterback shockingly fell to the fifth round of the NFL draft. The federal lawsuit alleges the once consensus top-5 pick became victim of "collusive practices" that caused the fan "severe emotional distress."

"It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion," the plaintiff, filing as "John Doe," told The Independent. "Every time they passed on Shedeur for some second-rate player, I felt physically sick. This wasn't football - this was personal." The 22-page complaint details how Sanders' draft freefall allegedly violated The Sherman Antitrust Act, with owners collectively suppressing his value. Legal analysts immediately dismissed the case as frivolous, but acknowledge it taps into growing fan skepticism about draft transparency. "They think they're untouchable," the fan said of NFL owners. "Well, not this time."

League sources point to Sanders' reportedly poor combined interviews and off-field concerns as the real reason for his slide. But the lawsuit has ignited fiery debates across sports media about fairness in the draft process. With legal experts giving the case less than a 1% chance of success, the fan's nine-figure demand appears more about making a statement than expecting a payout, potentially opening the floodgates for lawsuits over similar grievances.

The NFL has yet to formally respond, but the case has already accomplished one thing: turning Sanders' disappointing draft night into one of the most talked-about football stories of the year.

Possible Preaching Angle:

While this story may not have much legal basis for a case, it does illustrate the need for believers and churches to be open and transparent in all decisions and business matters. We must be “above reproach” and “blameless” (2 Cor. 4:2; Phil. 2:15; 1 Tim. 5:7; Titus 1:7).

Two days after the attempted assassination of former President Trump, The Wall Street Journal ran an article with the following title:

“‘I’m Tired. I’m Done.’ Nation Faces Exhaustion and Division After Trump Assassination Attempt, Americans express dismay about the state of the country: ‘The world has gone to Hades in a handbasket.’”

They spoke to four dozen Americans across the country and gave the following summary:

Nearly to a person, they expressed a sense of dread, saying there seems to be no good news on the horizon. Their list of concerns is endless: The lingering effects of a socially isolating pandemic; violent protests over disagreements about war; three election cycles of increasing polarization; and decades of escalating gun violence. That is not to mention economic turmoil and inflation. And unlike other times of crisis, after 9/11 or Sandy Hook or George Floyd, this event left few Americans hopeful that any good might come out of tragedy.

Towards the end of the article, they quoted Clement Villaseñor a 32-year-old electrical maintenance, who said, “There’s a hole in the country, and this is a part of that. We’re not sticking together,” he said. “There’s so much separation, it makes me feel far apart from people.”

Jana Monroe had a distinguished 22-year career in the FBI, including in the FBI Behavioral Science Unit. She knows in depth the disturbing depths of human depravity that FBI agents must cope with. In her book, "Hearts of Darkness,” Monroe covers a variety of topics and issues, including her dismay over the often-light sentences given to guilty lawyers, judges, and cops.

For a brief period of her time, Monroe was placed in charge of the FBI’s Financial Institution Fraud department in San Diego. They had received reliable information that there was blatant public corruption in the local courts. After two years, the tireless work of FBI agents and federal prosecutors resulted in the indictments of two local Superior Court judges and a prominent local attorney.

However, Monroe was deeply disappointed by the lenient punishments. One judge and the lawyer received 41 months in prison, and the second judge received 33 months. Monroe writes:

When those sentences were handed down, I immediately thought of all the people doing hard time in serious prisons for being stupid enough or otherwise desperate enough to rob at gunpoint a convenience store where a good haul might be a hundred bucks.

No matter how the money gets stolen - at the point of a gun or by cooking the books - there are repercussions that the law is too ready to ignore when the crook works in a paneled corner office and belongs to all the right clubs.

I strongly believe in ethics. Those to whom law enforcement and justice have been entrusted - police officers, FBI agents, district attorneys, especially judges - are obligated (serve) with integrity and honesty. When they don't, they deserve no better treatment than a guy who tries to knock over a 7-Eleven.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Monroe is right. Lawyers, judges, and law enforcement officers represent government, law and order, righteousness, and indirectly God (Rom. 13:1-7), and must therefore be held to high standards when they blatantly disobey laws and are guilty of crimes.

Bonnie Crawford was in danger of missing a connecting flight for a board meeting last week when a United Airlines customer-service rep saved the day. She got rebooked on a pricey nonstop flight in business class. For free.

You’re probably thinking, “No airline ever does that for me.” Crawford isn’t just any frequent flier. She has United’s invitation-only Global Services status.

It’s a semi-secret, status-on-steroids level that big spenders strive for every year. American and Delta have souped-up statuses, too, with similarly haughty names: ConciergeKey and Delta 360°. The airlines don’t like to talk about what it takes to snag an invite, how many people have such status, or even the perks. Even the high rollers themselves don’t know for sure.

Get into these exclusive clubs and you get customer service on speed dial, flight rebooking before you even know there’s trouble, lounge access, and priority for upgrades. Not to mention bragging rights and swag. People even post unboxing videos of their invites on YouTube.

Anyone with this super status needn’t fret about the value of airline loyalty or the devaluation of frequent-flier points.

Crawford was invited to Global Services for 2017 and was hooked. “It was the first taste of this magic, elusive, absolutely incredible status,’’ she says. She wasn’t invited again until this year and fears she won’t be invited back next year due to fewer costly international flights in her new job.

Possible Preaching Angles:

You can approach this illustration from two angles: 1) Boasting; Pride – This shows the negative side of human nature that loves to boast about their favored position and humble-brag about their status. This status is gained by merit. 2) Advocate; Grace; Invitation; Rights - The positive angle is that we have an Advocate who gifted us a special relationship with the Father (Eph. 3:12; Heb. 4:14-16). This status is all due to God’s grace.

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.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” That opening line from Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes has resonated with generations of African Americans over many decades because of the legacy of racism in America, and its soul-crushing propensity to dangle the specter of opportunity while keeping it perpetually out of reach.

Ed Dwight knew this reality firsthand. In 1962, Dwight was the first black man to be selected for an American astronaut training program. He spent years preparing, training, and running experiments at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Nevertheless, because of internal resistance to his inclusion into the program, Dwight was never selected for a NASA mission.

“Just like every other Black kid, you don’t get something, and you convince yourself it wasn’t that important anyway,” said Charles Bolden Jr., one of Dwight’s friends and a former NASA administrator.

After his military career concluded, Dwight eventually put it all behind him. He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Denver and eventually became an accomplished artist, with 129 memorial sculptures and over 18,000 pieces in gallery exhibits across the United States.

So, when he was invited to participate in a commercial space flight earlier this year, Dwight initially demurred. “I’m a really busy guy,” said Dwight. “It didn’t make a lot of difference to me at the time.”

But a group of current and former black astronauts intervened, and reminded him of the years he spent training to fill a role he was never allowed to consummate. Because of them, Dwight changed his mind.

And by the time Dwight achieved spaceflight on the Blue Origin vessel, he broke another historic barrier. At 90 years old, Ed Dwight became the oldest person to fly in space, surpassing the previous record holder, former Star Trek star William Shatner.

One of the men who convinced Dwight to take the flight was Victor Glover, Jr. “While he was off the planet, I was weeping. It was tears of joy and resolution,” said Glover. He’d met Dwight in 2007, after receiving one of Dwight’s sculptures at an award presentation. Only later did Glover learn Dwight’s own personal history of unfulfilled longing within NASA.

“I was in the presence of greatness and didn’t even know it,” Glover said. “Sixty years he sat with this and navigated it with dignity and grace and class, and that is impactful to me.”

Blue Origin honored Dwight by naming his seat on the mission after his NASA call sign: Justice.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God does not forget about the sacrifices that his servants make in the process of living faithfully. Do not lose heart, for God is in the business of making wrong things right again.

In the spring of 2000, a unique library was established in Copenhagen, Denmark. It's called the Menneskebiblioteket, which is Danish for, “The Human Library."

The library is, in the true sense of the word, a library of people. Readers can borrow human beings serving as open books and have conversations they would not normally have access to. Every human book from their bookshelf, represents a group in society that is often subjected to prejudice, stigmatization, or discrimination because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status, ethnic origin, and so on.

Instead of checking out a book, you can have a conversation with someone who will share their story of being deaf, blind, autistic, houseless, sexually abused, or bipolar. The mission of the Human Library? To break down stereotypes and prejudices by fostering dialogue. Yes, you can ask these human books questions!

Their motto: "Unjudge someone."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Isn't that what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount? "Do not judge, or you too will be judged." Instead of focusing on the speck of sawdust in someone else's eye, Jesus told us to “take the plank out of our own eye” (Matt. 7:1-5).

For years, Jalon Hall was touted as a bright spot for Google’s reputation for diversity. Hall is an African American deaf woman, and had been highlighted on the company’s official social media channels. On LinkedIn, Google praised Hall and said she was “helping expand opportunities for black deaf professionals,” and on Instagram she was hailed as “making life at Google more inclusive.”

But for Hall, those platitudes were only words, and were not backed up with actions. Hall recently filed a lawsuit against Google for failing to provide the accommodations they promised her, and for creating a hostile work environment by characterizing her complaints according to racialized stereotypes.

In an interview Hall said, “Google is using me to make them look inclusive for the deaf community and the overall disability community. In reality, they need to do better. I’m standing in the gap for those often pushed aside.”

Hall says when she was hired as a content moderator in 2020, the company promised to provide interpreters to help her review content as part of YouTube’s child safety regulations, but the company refused. And a manager in another division called her an “aggressive black deaf woman” and advised her to “keep her mouth shut and take a sales role.”

Hall says she filed three HR complaints before she sued, and wants to remain at Google to help promote a better work environment for others.

According Deadspin’s sports columnist, Stephen Knox, NBA legend LeBron James may have achieved athletic feats that ordinary men can only dream of, but in one important way he’s just like many other men his age: he’s still an overprotective dad.

LeBron is the father of LeBron “Bronny” James, Jr. A point guard for the University of Southern California Trojans, Bronny has been widely considered a highly touted college basketball prospect for most of his collegiate athletic career. But it’s been unclear how much his visibility is due to hard work, talent due to genetic advantages, or simple nepotism.

This is why James caught some heat online after he responded defensively to the news that the prognosticators of the 2024 ESPN Mock NBA Draft left Bronny off their list, implying that he might need one more year of college basketball before his skill level will make him NBA-ready.

“Can y’all just let a kid be a kid and enjoy college basketball,” LeBron wrote on a recent social media post. “The work and results will ultimately do the talking no matter what he decides to do.”

Critics and skeptics piled on by rightly pointing out that LeBron helped to create the hype that he is now decrying by publicly stating a desire to play with his son in the NBA. Nevertheless, it seems as though Knox is willing to give LeBron the benefit of the doubt regarding his motivations. Knox concluded, “Even an American sports icon can get carried away with parental pride.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Our Heavenly Father loves us fully and unconditionally; no matter the pressure others put on us or we put on ourselves, God requires us only to faithfully live our calling and trust the outcome into his care.

The Supreme Court recently outlawed most racial preferences in college admissions. However, a new study from Ivy League researchers indicates another form of affirmative action that tends to dominate exclusive institutions of higher learning: preference for wealth.

The Harvard study involved the eight Ivy League schools, plus four other highly-selective schools. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, the data show that children from families in the top one percent of income ranking were 34 percent more likely to be admitted into these schools than the average applicant. Those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to be accepted.

Study researchers said, “The conclusion from this study is the Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students. ... Are these highly selective private colleges in America taking kids from very high-income, influential families and basically channeling them to remain at the top in the next generation?”

The study indicates that legacy admissions, or students given preferences because of alumni parents, is a large driver of outcomes that prioritize the wealthy over other similarly deserving students. So, too, are admission slots for certain sports like rowing, fencing, lacrosse, or equestrian, that tend to be populated by the wealthy because of high participation costs and upper-class cultural values.

The one notable exception is M.I.T., which is known for not offering admissions preferences to either legacy applicants or athletes. Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions at M.I.T. said, “I think the most important thing here is talent is distributed equally but opportunity is not. Our admissions process is designed to account for the different opportunities students have based on their income. It’s really incumbent upon our process to tease out the difference between talent and privilege.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

If God doesn't treat the rich or poor or different racial groups favorably, then we shouldn't either.

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.

In April 2023, a delegation of Black legislators echoed calls from the local NAACP chapter for the resignation of Martin D. Brown over remarks he made at a training session.

Brown, an African American Republican, was appointed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin as the state’s chief diversity officer. At a mandatory training on April 21st, he proclaimed that “DEI is dead,” referring to the common abbreviation for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Pursuing equity, according to Brown, means “you’re not pursuing merit or excellence or achievement.”

Virginia Senator Lamont Bagby (D-Richmond) called the remarks “appalling,” and said that all 19 members of Virginia Legislative Black Caucus are calling for him to step down from his position as director of the state’s office of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lawmakers say the remarks were especially infuriating because they were made at the Virginia Military Institute, the nation’s oldest military college. In 2021, a state-mandated investigation revealed “a racist and sexist culture” at the institution, and in early June, the college’s first chief diversity officer Jamaica Love resigned from her post.

The National Football League has been embroiled in lawsuits for nearly a decade from former players alleging that the league knew that its sport resulted in brain damage but failed to take appropriate action. In response, the NFL has pledged nearly one billion dollars as part of a class-action settlement for former players who’ve experienced brain damage playing pro football.

But there’s a wrinkle in the way individual brain injury claims have been adjudicated, and many former players and/or their families are claiming it results in unfair racial bias. When assessing players’ current capacity for cognitive function, doctors tend to apply a process that neuro­psychologists refer to as “African-American normative corrections.” This is more broadly known as “race-norming.” When these corrections are enacted, many players’ claims are denied on the basis that their lack of cognitive functioning is closer to the baseline readings of African-American players without brain damage. The unstated conclusion is that African-Americans are not as smart as White people.

In June of 2021, the NFL pledged to do away with race-norming as part of its settlement methodology, but plenty of former players and their families say they were unfairly cheated out of settlement money they deserved. Lawyers for those families claim that race-norming is “discriminatory on its face” and that it makes “it harder for Blacks to qualify for the settlement than whites.”

Chris Seeger, the lead attorney for the class of approximately 20,000 former players eligible for money under the settlement, apologized for not picking up on the practice sooner. He said:

I am sorry for the pain this has caused Black former players and their families. While we had fought back against the NFL’s efforts to mandate the use of “race norms,” we failed to appreciate the frequency in which some neuropsychologists were inappropriately applying these adjustments. Ultimately, this settlement only works if former players believe in it, and my goal is to regain their trust and ensure the NFL is fully held to account.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Every human being is made in God's image and deserves dignity and respect. When we fail to offer that, we are liable to succumb to the soft bigotry of low expectations.

For most homeowners in a hot housing market, the value of their property tends to rise dramatically. But not for Carlette Duffy. Her home seemed not to rise in value much at all, and Duffy couldn’t find a satisfactory explanation--that is, until the answer was too obvious to ignore.

Duffy was looking to borrow against its equity when she got an appraisal for her home. She was surprised when the appraised amount was $125,000, which seemed low compared to the findings she’d seen anecdotally from other friends and family. So, she had another appraisal done, and the second came out at just $110,000, just ten thousand more than when she’d bought the place four years prior.

Nagged by her suspicions that the lowball offers were because she was African-American, Duffy again got a third appraisal. But this time, she took pains not to reveal her racial identity, by corresponding via email, and asking a friend’s white husband to stand in during the appraiser’s visit to the home. That appraisal came back at $259,000--more than double the original amount.

The rep who conducted the second appraisal claimed that his work was driven by relevant data. But according to Andre Perry, a researcher who studies housing discrimination, that explanation fails to account for the history of institutional racism in real estate.

Perry said, "It's almost when people see Black neighborhoods, they see twice as much crime than there actually is. They see worse education than there actually is. I think this is what's happening when appraisers, lenders, real estate agents see Blackness. They devalue the asset. They devalue the property."

Duffy has since teamed up with the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana to file a complaint with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We dishonor the image of God when we are unwilling to treat people of other racial groups equally. We are all God's creative masterpieces, and we should be treated as such.

Back in 1912, Willa and Charles Bruce were one of the first African-American landowners in Los Angeles County after purchasing a plot of oceanside property and opening one of the only non-racially-segregated resorts in the area.

Despite the grateful patronage of Black visitors, “Bruce’s Beach” eventually became a target of racist attacks from a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Family historian Duane Shephard said, “They started harassing my family around 1920. They burned a cross. They threw burning mattresses under the porch of one of the buildings.”

By 1924, the city used the process of eminent domain as a pretext to seize the property from the Bruce family and turn it into a public park. L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn said, “These people were terrorized and kicked out of a community where they were trying to live peacefully. Here were some Black lives, and they didn't matter 100 years ago. But I think they matter now.” Hahn made those comments in a news conference announcing the decision from the local city council to return that land to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce.

Local resident Malissia Clinton wonders what her community would look like had that injustice not taken place: “This community might be teeming with Black folks if we had not destroyed that family. It changed the trajectory, not only of their lives and their offspring but of this community.”

The county plans to give the property back to the Bruce family descendants, then lease the property from them, in order to keep it accessible to the community while providing income for the family. It also authorized $350,000 to spend on public art commemorating the family.

When asked what the original couple would’ve thought of this gesture, Shepard was emphatic. "Oh, they would have loved it. I'm sure they're proud of us right now for fighting to get that back.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even as the righteous pursue justice, let them not lose hope that injustices can be made right again, for with God all things are possible.

Sarah Friedmann writes in “Trailblazers”:

In 1957, my parents moved into Levittown, Pennsylvania. It was a brand-new suburban community and these homes were finally at a price that Army veterans could afford. That August, another family moved into Levittown. The father, Bill Myers, had served in the US Army. The mom, Daisy Myers had a bachelor’s degree. And the Myers family, like my family, was growing: they had three young children, and we had two.

When my family moved in, we were greeted by a smiling member of the local Welcome Wagon. When the Myers family moved in, they got a different greeting.

The local newspaper reported: … Small groups of agitated Levittowners are already gathering in front of the Myers home. By midnight, more than 200 shouting men, women and children cluster on the Myers’ front lawn. A group of teens throw rocks through the Myers’ front picture window, and 15 police officers are dispatched to the scene. … Now, with the violence increasing, the sheriff wires the Pennsylvania State Police asking for immediate assistance. His request states, “... the citizens of Levittown are out of control.”

What do we learn from this tale of two families? We learn there are two kinds of racism. The first kind is “personal racism,” like we see in the 200 people who mobbed the Myers’ front lawn. But there is also a second kind of racism, “structural racism.” The kind of legal and financial structures that make sure whites like the Millers get a loan and a home and make sure blacks like the Myers, don’t.

The Levitt Organization had already sold over 15,000 homes in Levittown: and every single one went to a white family. Bill and Daisy Myers bought their home directly from an existing owner, so they were not screened out by the Levitt Organization. But they also had to get around the structural practices of our federal government. The FHA and VA “only subsidized post-war housing, like Levittowns, on the condition that the homes weren’t sold to African Americans.”

It's bizarre that I was raised in a planned community that was carefully designed from its beginning to be all-white, to keep out persons of color. But here’s what’s even more bizarre: We ALL live in Levittown. Every single one of us who lives in America is living in a culture that from its beginning was created for the benefit of white people and for the exclusion of non-white people.

A high-powered New York attorney went viral, but for all the wrong reasons.

Handheld cell-phone video of Aaron Schlossberg spread like wildfire on Facebook after an encounter he had with a cashier at a Fresh Kitchen eatery in Manhattan. Schlossberg was angry at the cashier for speaking to coworkers—and other restaurant patrons—in Spanish.

In the footage, Schlossberg can be seen loudly and angrily berating several employees who appear to be of Hispanic descent, implying they are undocumented workers receiving public assistance, which he resents contributing toward as a taxpayer. Toward the video's end, he threatens them with deportation by calling Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE).

Schlossberg was recorded by a fellow patron in the store who felt his behavior was rude and uncalled for, and within hours he had been identified online and his business pages on Yelp and other review sites had been deluged with negative reviews.

To make things worse, savvy internet sleuths pointed out an important tidbit from his business website—it advertises consultations in Hebrew, French, Chinese … and yes, Spanish.

Potential Preaching Angles: When we attack others for trivial things, we reveal our own depravity first. Kindness is an easy way to generate goodwill, and hypocrisy is an easy way to squander it.

A blog on The Henry Ford website remembers the brave decision made by Rosa Parks in 1955:

It's one of the most famous moments in modern American civil rights history: On a chilly December evening in 1955, on a busy street in the capital of Alabama, a 42-year-old seamstress boarded a segregated city bus to return home after a long day of work, taking a seat near the middle, just behind the front "white" section. At the next stop, more passengers got on. When every seat in the white section was taken, the bus driver ordered the black passengers in the middle row to stand so a white man could sit. The seamstress refused.

But theologian Michael Horton notes that this extraordinary act flowed from Rosa Parks' ordinary life of obeying and following Jesus. Horton writes:

Rosa Parks didn't wake up one day and decide to become the "first Lady of Civil Rights." She just boarded a bus as she did every day for work and decided that this day she wasn't going to sit in the back as a proper black person was expected to do in the 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama. She knew who she was and what she wanted. She knew the cost, and she made the decision to pursue what they believed in enough to sacrifice her own security. At that point, she wasn't even joining a movement. She was just the right person at the right place and time. What made her the right person were countless influences, relationships, and experiences—most of them seemingly insignificant and forgotten. God had already shaped her into the sort of person who would do such a thing. For her at least, it was an ordinary thing to refuse to sit in the back of the bus on this particular trip. But for history it had radical repercussions.

In his book, Chase the Lion Mark Batterson shares that:

Shortly after being installed as the twentieth pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon in November of 1954 titled "Transformed Nonconformist." "The Christian is called upon not to be like a thermometer conforming to the temperature of his society," said King, "but he must be like a thermostat serving to transform the temperature of his society..

"I have seen many white people who sincerely oppose segregation and [discrimination]," said King. "But they never took a [real] stand against it because of fear of standing alone." Are you willing not just to stand but to stand alone?

On December 1, 1955, a transformed nonconformist boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus just five blocks from the pulpit where King delivered that sermon. When the white section filled up with passengers, the bus driver ordered Rosa Parks to give up her seat in the colored section. Rosa politely refused. She took a moral stand by remaining seated.

"Our mistreatment was not right," Rosa said. "I was just tired of it." It wasn't a physical tiredness; it was a moral tiredness. "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in." Rosa Park's stand against racial segregation started a ripple effect. It led to a court battle, which led to a citywide boycott, which led to the Supreme Court ruling segregation unconstitutional.

Until the pain of staying the same becomes more acute than the pain of change, nothing happens. We simply maintain the status quo. And we convince ourselves that playing it safe is safe. But the greatest risk is taking no risks at all.