Practice

A pub has been reusing the same 77-year-old Christmas decorations in its public bar for more than 60 years. Landlord David Short, 84, first put up the crepe paper streamers and paper lanterns in the Queen's Head, Newton, Cambridgeshire, in 1962.

His son Rob Short, who took over the pub 10 years ago, said his father made the ribbons when he was about seven. He said, "It's amazing they survived as the pub has had some quite raucous evenings over the years. But the thing about them is you can mend them quite easily and put them back up again."

Short, 50, is the third generation of his family to run the Queen's Head. "At Christmas, we're known for our festivities and the decorations are a big part of that. I think people like them because they're traditional and I'm sure they wouldn't fit into a lot of places, but because the pub is very traditional, it fits into the whole ethos of the place."

Mr. Short's father puts the yellow, red and green ribbons up each year because he "is the only one to know how to put them up, it's a bit of a technique - I have been learning a little.” While it can take his regulars "a while to notice they're up, it's almost part of the pub," visitors do notice them because "you just don't get to see decorations like that anymore".

The streamers are carefully rolled up and stored away in a cupboard every year. Mr. Short said: "It's going back to the make-do-and-mend generation, I suppose, and that's what we should all be doing, reusing things - so it's quite relevant to these days as well."

You can see pictures of the decorations here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Church - Leaders have discovered that their church congregations appreciate the “old” traditions of hymns, Nativity plays, candle ceremonies, the four-week observance of Advent, and others. 2) Family, Traditions - This is also true in the family home where celebrating Christmas with nostalgic tree ornaments, reading the Christmas story, and door-to-door caroling bring back warm family memories.

In a review of Timothy Keller’s book, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, Jen Michel writes:

One summer, my husband and I wanted to teach one of our youngest sons, age 6, to ride his bike. His twin brother, Colin, had already mastered the skill and was nearly keeping up with his older brother. But despite our cajoling—“It’s fun to ride a bike!” Andrew could not see the merit of potentially skinning his knees, and our attempts ended in his vain tears.

Then suddenly, in early August our little boy outgrew his fears. Nearly instantaneously, the mechanics of balancing, steering, and simultaneously pedaling became almost easy. The fears and tears dissolved, and Andrew forgot that riding a bike had ever been hard.

When it comes to prayer, most of us feel clumsy. We don’t recall someone running alongside us, shouting instructions as we learned. Instead, most of us found our balance by a hodge-podge of imitation and experimentation. Once we’ve learned to ride a bike, we can be sure we’re doing it right. Can anything remotely similar be said about prayer?

In his book, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, Timothy Keller invites readers to systematically learn to pray. Keller asserts that prayer depends on both grace and effort. He gently reminds us, there are no perfect prayers or perfect pray-ers. He says, “All prayer is impure, corrupted by our ignorance and willful sin.” We should try and yet can fail at prayer—an encouraging piece of news, when we remember that grace is there to sustain us.

As Keller concedes, “[Sometimes] you won’t feel that you’re making any progress at all, [and fellowship with God] maybe episodic.” But when your prayers are lifted toward a God of grace, at just the unexpected moment, you find that you know how to pedal, and that you are headed toward home.

It's easy to envy the success of others while ignoring the sacrifices that made it possible. The more effortless something looks, the more effort went into it. Great musicians make hard look easy! Same with athletes. Pick a sport, any sport.

When Phil Mickelson was a young golfer, he struggled with his short game. A coach challenged him to make one hundred three-foot putts in a row. After many attempts, Phil sunk ninety-nine in a row before missing his one hundredth attempt. Most of us would have rounded up! Not Phil Mickelson. He went right back at it until he accomplished the 100 Putt Challenge. That's how you win forty-four PGA events and five majors!

The workers on Japan’s rail system repeatedly call out to no one and point to seemingly nothing. A train driver checking his speed, for example, does not simply glance at the dial. The driver points at it and shouts out, “Speed check, 80.” When staff check whether the platform is clear, they sweep their arms along their view of the platform, their eyes following their hands, before shouting an all-clear signal. The idea is that associating key tasks with physical movements and vocalizations prevents errors by “raising the consciousness levels of workers.”

The gestures are not an inherent part of the task. But the physical reinforcement helps ensure each step is complete and accurate. It works. Crazy as this may seem, these apparently pointless gestures have helped to make it one of the safest railway networks in the world. This pointing-and-calling safety method … reduces workplace errors by up to 85 percent, according to one study. A similar system has been adapted for use on New York’s MTA subway system. As a result, the number of incorrectly berthed trains has been halved.

Mark Schlereth played in the NFL for 12 seasons and is a football analyst for Fox Sports. During a panel discussion on Fox's "First Things First", the host asked him: "How remarkable is Tom Brady's run?"

It's incredible … [Brady is not] sated by success, I think that's the most impressive thing to me. To continue to … prepare, to continue to grind. [Brady's] quote is: "If you want to beat me you better be ready to lose your life because I've already given up mine."

[Brady's former backup quarterback] said the thing I learned most from Tom Brady is playing quarterback is not a job; it's a lifestyle. And you gotta be willing to commit your life to it. And to be able to commit your life, to playing the game the way he has played it, and to have that much passion for it, without ever been sated by it.

He wakes up, and it's all about what am I going to do today to be the best quarterback I can be for this organization. That means diet. That means exercise. That means hydration… And Sundays aren't the problem… Monday through Saturday that's the problem. You get to a point somewhere in your career: "I don't want to prepare anymore. If I could just show up on Sundays that would be great. But I don't want to go through the grind, the grind of preparing to get to Sunday." He still eats that grind for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's one of the most amazing things I've ever witnessed."

In his book, Worry Less, Live More, Robert Morgan shares the beneficial effects that habits can have in our lives:

The word practice implies we must go to work developing certain skills until they become habitual or proficient, like an athlete or musician. These are the Bible's perpetual habits for a gradual and glorious experience with the God of peace. In her book Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits, Gretchen Rubin called habits "the invisible architecture of daily life. We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future."

Rubin went on to explain that habits reduce the need for self-control, saying, "With habits, we conserve our self-control. Because we're in the habit of putting a dirty coffee cup in the office dishwasher, we don't need self-control to perform that action; we do it without thinking." She also added, "Our habits are our destiny. And changing our habits allows us to alter that destiny."

Any skill, art, or good habit requires more than knowledge. It also requires hours of training and practice. For instance, when Alec Baldwin asked NFL quarterback Andrew Luck what he thinks about when he drops back to pass, Luck said, "You don't want to think about it." Luck went on to describe how passing mechanics have to be so deeply ingrained into the body that they are on autopilot during a game. The body "knows" how to throw, but knows how to read the entire football field.

Being an NFL quarterback is mindboggling. There are eleven men on each team, each one moving simultaneously. And there are a bunch of 300-pound opponents who want to crush you into the ground. It's as if an entire life-sized and live chess match is being played in the blink of an eye. The quarterback has about three seconds to survey the entire field, assessing all the patterns, finding the most open teammate, and throwing a perfect strike to a man who is on a full-out sprint.

With any skill or performance, information alone is not enough; it must be translated into know-how in the body. It's true for athletes, musicians, actors, plumbers, woodworkers, engineers, computer programmers, doctors, nurses, auto mechanics, and hedge fund managers. The skills required for these positions become so ingrained that after years of practice, one can do them almost automatically.

Possible Preaching Angles: Spiritual disciplines, worship, and Christian character/virtue are all the same way—they require hours and years of practice and participation until they become almost automatic.

In his book Deep Work, author Cal Newport provides an example of excellence—a blacksmith from Wisconsin named Ric Furrer. Furrer specializes in ancient and medieval metalworking practices, which he painstakingly re-creates in his shop, Door County Forgeworks. A PBS documentary shows Furrer trying to re-create a Viking-era sword. He begins by using a fifteen-hundred-year-old technique to smelt crucible steel. The result is an ingot, which must then be shaped and polished into a long and elegant sword blade. "This part, the initial breakdown, is terrible," Furrer says as he methodically heats the ingot, hits it with a hammer, turns it, hits it, then puts it back in the flames to start over. It takes eight hours of this hammering to complete the shaping.

It's clear that he's not drearily whacking at the metal like a miner with a pickaxe: Every hit, though forceful, is carefully controlled. He peers intently at the metal, turning it just so for each impact. "You have to be very gentle with it or you will crack it," he explains. "You have to nudge it; slowly it breaks down; then you start to enjoy it." At one point, he lifts the sword, red with heat, as he strides swiftly toward a pipe filled with oil and plunges in the blade to cool it. After a moment of relief that the blade did not crack into pieces—a common occurrence at this step—Furrer pulls it from the oil. Furrer holds the burning sword up above his head with a single powerful arm and stares at it a moment before blowing out the fire. He says, "To do it right, it is the most complicated thing I know how to make. And it's that challenge that drives me. I don't need a sword. But I have to make them."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Excellence; Commitment; Work; Labor—doing our work as unto the Lord. (2) Sanctification; Spiritual Growth; Spiritual disciplines—putting time and effort into our spiritual growth, which is never a short and easy process.

For her role in Black Swan, Natalie Portman trained with New York City Ballet dancer Mary Helen Bowers for eight hours a day, six days a week for the 12 months before the film started shooting.

For his role in My Left Foot, Daniel Day-Lewis interacted with disabled patients at the Sanymount School Clinic in Dublin, Ireland. Between takes during filming, he remained in his wheelchair and was spoon-fed and carried around by the crew.

For his role in The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio plunged in and out of icy rivers, ate raw buffalo meat, and slept in a simulated horse carcass.

For his role in the film Fury, Shia LeBeouf trained with the U.S. National Guard and was a chaplain's assistant in the 41st Infantry. During the filming, he didn't bathe for 4 months.

To better imitate Ray Charles, Jamie Foxx wore prosthetic eyelids, leaving him blind for most of each day. Occasionally, he was inadvertently left alone on a set, the crew forgetting he was blind. He also learned all the piano parts and lost 30 pounds in one week for the role.

For her role as Fantine in Les Misérables, Anne Hathaway shaved her head, lost 25 pounds and subsisted on a daily diet of two thin squares of dried oatmeal paste.

To play a drug addict in Jungle Fever, Halle Berry visited a real crack den and got to know the addicts. During filming, she abstained from bathing for ten days.

In his role for The Pianist, Adrien Brody familiarized himself with despair and hunger. He moved to Europe, bringing only two suitcases of personal belongings and living a meager lifestyle. He lost 30 pounds and took piano and dialect lessons. Brody said: "There is an emptiness that comes with really starving that I hadn't experienced. I couldn't have acted that without knowing it. I've experienced loss, I've experienced sadness in my life, but I didn't know the desperation that comes with hunger."

In 1815, Germany's General Music Journal published a letter in which allegedly Mozart described his creative process:

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer; say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal … it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself … and the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. When I proceed to write down my ideas the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished …

In other words, Mozart's greatest works came to him complete when he was alone and in a good mood. He needed no tools to compose them. Once he had finished imagining his masterpieces, all he had to do was write them down.

Numerous authors have used this letter to explain the process of creativity. But there is a problem. Mozart did not write this letter. It is a forgery. Mozart's real letters reveal his true creative process. He was exceptionally talented, but he did not write by magic. He sketched his compositions, revised them, and sometimes got stuck. He would set work aside and return to it later. He considered theory and craft while writing, and he thought a lot about rhythm, melody, and harmony. Even though his talent and a lifetime of practice made him fast and fluent, his work was exactly that: work.

Possible Preaching Angles: So many areas of our lives—relationships, friendships, marriage, and spiritual growth, to name a few—do not improve by some magical process. Growth and depth require discipline and effort.

Six-time Oscar nominated film Captain Phillips received widespread acclaim, but surprisingly the film's powerful final scene was improvised on set and (other than lead man Tom Hanks) without professional actors. In this high stakes thriller, Hanks plays Captain Richard Phillips, a real-life Merchant Marine taken hostage during a 2009 Somali pirate hijacking of his cargo ship. After a dramatic rescue operation by Navy SEALs, in the film Hanks (Phillips) is brought safely aboard the real USS Truxtun missile destroyer, where he's taken down to the ship's infirmary and checked out by the ship's real hospital medic—Navy Hospital Corpsman Danielle Albert.

Hanks described how they decided to run the unscripted final scene in the ship's infirmary:

It wasn't in the schedule. It hadn't been scouted. It wasn't lit. But we went down [to the ship's actual infirmary]—and we had the actual crew of the ship that we were shooting on—and said, "What would you do to someone that came in here?" And they said, "Well, we'd lay them down here, and we'd do this and this and this." So [we] said, "'Well, shall we give a try?"

We had, literally, the crew of the infirmary. They didn't know they were going to be in a movie that day. They thought they might be dress extras walking around in the background, and here they are—boom—with cameras that are going to be on them.

The first take I remember completely falling apart because these people had never been in a movie before, and they could not get past the horrible self-consciousness of everything that was going on around them. But we just stopped, and Paul said, "Don't worry about it … If it doesn't work, we won't use it. So let's just try it again and see what happens." At that point, those people were really quite amazing. The freedom in order to give it a shot was so liberating. And everybody was up for it. So it really made itself.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Faith; Risk; Adventure; Easter; Resurrection of Christ—Like many of us, the producers of this film had a script for how things should go. But like Abraham, Moses, Ruth, the disciples (think of Christ's resurrection), sometimes we're forced to go "off script" in life so we can follow Christ. (2) Discipline; Practice; Spiritual Disciplines—Although the scene was "unplanned," both Tom Hanks and the medic, Danielle Albert, were doing what they had been trained to do. Their practice and discipline made this final scene feel utterly natural and real.

Up to his neck in debt, directionless, feeling lost, Tom Toro moved back into his parents' place and slipped into a dark depression. But things started to change when Toro went to a used book sale in his hometown. He opened a cardboard box and found an old stack of The New Yorker magazines. He said, "For some reason, I was drawn toward them and I started riffling through them. Something just clicked. And I started drawing again."

Toro decided to submit some of his cartoons to the magazine. Shortly after that, he received a reply. It was his first rejection note, of the many still to come. Toro said, "The New Yorker found the way to most courteously and most briefly reject people. It's just beautiful. You feel so honored to receive it and yet it's a brushoff."

A year and a half later, Toro had a pile of rejection letters. This continued until Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor at The New Yorker, gave Toro some honest and specific feedback. Mankoff said he didn't see any joy in Toro's cartoons. So Toro threw everything that he had done previously out the door, sat down with a blank sheet of paper. Recalling Mankoff's advice, he tried to draw from the heart. He was still receiving rejection letters in the mail, but his cartoons were getting better. Toro was finding his style. And then, one day, he wandered into his office to check his email. He said, "I went in there, logged in, and there sitting at the top of my inbox was an email. The subject line read, 'Cartoon Sold.'" It was the 610th drawing Toro had submitted to The New Yorker.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Perseverance; Tenacity; Discouragement; (2) Rebuke; Honesty; Correction—Toro needed the honest feedback and correction from Mankoff before he could improve; (3) Spiritual disciplines—How often do we "fail" at spiritual disciplines—fasting, meditation, and so forth—before we finally get it right.

Since their invention a century ago, autopilots have helped to make air travel safer and more efficient. That trend continued with the introduction of computerized "fly-by-wire" jets in the 1970s. But now, aviation experts worry that we've gone too far. We have shifted so many cockpit tasks from humans to computers that pilots are losing their edge. Without actual flight experience or practice, pilots develop what aviation experts call "skill fade" or "skills decay."

Computers now handle most flight operations between takeoff and touchdown—so "frequent practice" is exactly what pilots are not getting. Even a slight decay in manual flying ability can risk tragedy. A rusty pilot is more likely to make a mistake in an emergency. Automation-related pilot errors have been implicated in several recent air disasters, including the Boeing 737 MAX crash in 2023.

As a result of these tragic accidents, a report from a Federal Aviation Administration concluded that pilots have become "accustomed to watching things happen, and reacting, instead of being proactive." The FAA is now urging airlines to get pilots to spend more time flying by hand.

Possible Preaching Angles: We can also experience a "skill fade" in our spiritual lives. When we leave prayer to the experts we can experience a "prayer fade." We can also experience an "evangelism fade,""service fade," or a "Bible reading fade," when we just watch things happen or rely on the experts rather than engage in the activity.

Around the globe, people love superhero films. Batman, Iron Man, Thor, Superman, Spider-Man, Captain America … the list goes on. Almost all of these films have the same formulaic plot. At the beginning of the film our not-yet-a-hero is just an ordinary person, probably getting beat up. Then some accident happens in a lab, or the heroes discover they've been mutants since birth, and with that accident or discovery comes that they're now a superhero with superpowers. And then they fight somebody or something and win, and then the movie is over.

But there's also a crucial part of the standard superhero movie that usually gets covered in just a few scenes: the training. Usually superhero training is handled in what is known as a montage. You know what this is: some cool song plays on the soundtrack while we see our newly minted hero trying out this or that superpower. Peter Parker covers his room with spider webs. Bruce Wayne pummels things in the mountains of Nepal. Tony Stark fires up a blacksmithing bellows in prison and hammers stuff. The movie is telling us, "So, the hero is learning things, and we know it's boring so we're going to give you the idea that this is happening then quickly skip to the interesting part. Just hang with us and we'll get back to the explosions and punching soon."

I agree. The training is boring. But also, the training is everything. Nothing happens without the training. Without the training our hero is just a person with a bunch of cool powers he doesn't know how to harness. Without the training the world isn't saved and the bad guys aren't thwarted. Without the training we don't have a story—instead, we have a hero who gets squashed with hardly a thought on the villain's way to total victory.

According to theologian Steven R. Guthrie, John Coltrane is one of a handful of musicians (including other greats like Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis) who defined jazz music. But Coltrane's musical creativity and excellence didn't just happen; he became an outstanding musician only by submitting himself to a long process of practice and apprenticeship. In Guthrie's words:

From the time he was a young teenager Coltrane maintained an intense practice regime, playing for hours each day and, when neighbors complained, silently fingering the keys of his saxophone late into the night. His first wife, Naima, referred to Coltrane as "ninety-percent saxophone" …. Coltrane took classes at various music institutes and conservatories and pored over practice books such as Slominsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Patterns.

Guthrie also notes that, although Coltrane was one of the most original voices in jazz,

For decades [he] dedicated himself to learning and internalizing the styles of older and established jazz musicians. For nine years, from 1946 to 1955, Coltrane was "an anonymous journeyman," working as a supporting musician in the bands of more established musicians. An older generation of sax players [such as Thelonious Monk] served as instructors. In an interview Coltrane described how his time in Monk's band became an opportunity for one-on-one tutorials:

"I'd get my horn and start trying to find what he was playing … he'd tend to play it over and over and over … he would stop and show me some parts that were pretty difficult, and if I had a lot of trouble, well, he'd get out his portfolio and show me the music … when I almost had the tune down, then he would leave me to practice it."

Steven Guthrie comments:

Coltrane developed his voice by surrendering to another. Before he could speak on his own, he first gave himself to repeating again and again the things Monk had said …. The paradox of artistry is that the loss of self is the prerequisite for self-expression. And, conversely, the object of mastering another's voice is finding one's own.