Progress

At the 34-year mark of his marriage, Tim Keller shared the following insight about his marriage:

Neither my wife nor I are particularly gender-stereotyped. Yet you get into marriage, and you find you see the world differently, and you see each other differently. She sees things in me I would never see. But she sees because she’s a different gender and she’s in close, and I see things in her, and I see things in the world.

After 34 years of conflict, of arguing, of head-butting, now every single day when I get out into the world and things happen to me, I have a split second to react. What am I going to say? What am I going to do? What am I going to think? For years, even halfway through my marriage, I only thought like a man, but now, after years and years of head-butting, here’s what happens.

Something happens, and for a split second, I not only know what I would do, what I would think, how I would respond, but I know how Kathy would think, and I know what Kathy would do. For a split second, because it’s so instilled in me, I have a choice. Which of these approaches would probably work better? You see, my wisdom portfolio has been permanently diversified. I’m a different person, and yet I’m me. I haven’t become more feminine. In fact, probably in many ways I’ve become more masculine as time has gone on.

What’s going on? She came into my life, and now I know who I am. I’ve become who I’m supposed to be only through the head-butting, only through having a person who’s like me, not me, opposite to me, in close.

Every year Mount Everest gets a little taller. The peak is already the highest in the world, at roughly 29,029 feet above sea level. But over millennia, it has risen another 50 to 165 feet—and its elevation continues to grow.

New research suggests that in Everest’s region of the Himalayas, the Earth’s crust is rebounding. This is a phenomenon that occurs when a huge weight that has been pressing down on the surface is removed. The relaxing of the crust in this area started thousands of years ago. With a lightened load, the crust bobbed upward, as a boat might after unloading cargo. The rebound adds about 0.2 to 0.5 millimeter to Everest’s height above sea level each year.

Of course, that doesn’t seem like much. But as one of the co-authors of the study, a geologist, said, “[The growth] seems so insignificant, but then you pile it up over [the years] and you get amazing things happening.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the same way, our spiritual growth may seem slow and tiny, but over the years, as the geologist put it, “you get amazing things happening.”

At one point in time, you couldn’t walk 30 feet on a New York City block without encountering a pay phone. In the early 2000s, there were around 30,000 public street pay phones registered with the city. But in May of 2022, a curious crowd gathered in Times Square as a power saw cut through the base of a pay phone on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 50th Street. That was the final New York City public pay telephone.

In the age of the smartphone, it may be hard to recall the importance of pay phones in the daily life of New Yorkers. New York is a dense, pedestrian city. It wasn’t until the 1940s that even half of Americans had a phone. If you need to make a call on the go, the pay phone was really necessary.

“I hate to use the word nostalgia,” said Mark Thomas, who has been documenting pay phones in New York City. “But I think people miss a period of time when a call meant something. When you planned it and you thought about it, and you took a deep breath and you put your quarter in.”

New York City’s chief technology officer explained the need for the change: “Just like we transitioned from the horse and buggy to the automobile, and from the automobile to the airplane to the digital evolution has progressed from pay phones to high-speed Wi-Fi kiosks to meet the demands of our rapidly changing daily communications needs.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

(1) Communication—No matter how much the forms of communication change, human beings (friends, spouses, parents, church members) will always have a need to communicate. And God will always have a way to communicate with us. (2) Change—Shows that not all change is bad. Some changes are inevitable, even when they come with losses.

How do trees grow the strongest? Surprisingly, too much sunlight and too much easy, fast growth does not produce healthy trees. Most young tree saplings spend their early decades under the shade of their mother’s canopy. Limited sunlight means they grow slowly. Slow growth leads to dense, hard wood.

In contrast, something interesting happens if you plant a tree in an open field: Free from the shade of bigger trees, the sapling gorges on sunlight and grows too fast and too easily. Fast, easy growth leads to soft, airy wood that didn’t have time to densify. And soft, airy wood is a breeding ground for fungus, disease, and ultimately a short life.

As the acclaimed nature writer Peter Wohlleben (author of The Hidden Life of Trees) writes, “A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old.”

In the year 1900, a German chocolate company released 12 postcards predicting what life would be like 100 years in the future. So how close were they to predicting our life today? Well, you decide based on these descriptions of the postcards from 1900:

• Personal airships (a picture of couples flying around in their personal hot air balloons).
• Watching a live drama performance while not in the theater. (You mean, kind of like television?)
• An X-ray machine for police officers. (To detect crimes in progress within buildings).
• A roofed city. (Like a football stadium under a dome).
• Underwater ships for tourists. (Like taking a Carnival or Norwegian cruise vacation in a submarine.)
• Easy excursions to the North Pole. (Hey, honey, let’s spend the weekend at the North Pole.)
• A machine for creating good weather.

Possible Preaching Angles:

The future is uncertain. Humans will always get some predictions right and some very wrong. But Jesus said he knows the future and he holds the future already.

It is a mistake to be always turning back to recover the past. The law for Christian living is not backward, but forward; not for experiences that lie behind, but for doing the will of God, which is always ahead and beckoning us to follow. Leave the things that are behind, and reach forward to those that are before, for on each new height to which we attain, there are the appropriate joys that befit the new experience. Don't fret because life's joys are fled. There are more in front. Look up, press forward, the best is yet to be!

It is a mistake to be always turning back to recover the past. The law for Christian living is not backward, but forward; not for experiences that lie behind, but for doing the will of God, which is always ahead and beckoning us to follow. Leave the things that are behind, and reach forward to those that are before, for on each new height to which we attain, there are the appropriate joys that befit the new experience. Don't fret because life's joys are fled. There are more in front. Look up, press forward, the best is yet to be!

Follow with me a 90-year-old man bent with the weight of his years; slow of step, with stooped and rounded shoulders. It is early morning, and he's in his home. We note that he sits down and picks up a cello. The man and the instrument merge. He plays for four or five hours.

When he plays, the years seem to fall off this special man who's 90 years old and still practicing. Why on earth would Pablo Casals, at age 90, continue to practice? Somebody asked him, and he said, "I practice because I have the impression I'm making a little progress."

Years ago a thunderstorm came through southern Kentucky at the farm where my Claypool forebears have lived for six generations. In the orchard, the wind blew over an old pear tree that had been there as long as anybody could remember. The story is that my grandfather was really grieved to lose the tree where he had climbed as a boy and whose fruit he had eaten all his life.

A neighbor came by and said, "Doc, I'm really sorry to see your pear tree blown down."

My grandfather said, "I'm sorry too, it was a real part of my past."

The neighbor said, "What are you going to do?"

My grandfather paused for a long moment and then said, "I'm going to pick the fruit and burn what's left."

That's such a wise way of working with the past. We do need to pick its fruit. We do need to learn its lessons. Amnesia is a sickness and not an asset. But having learned what the past can teach us, we need to pick the fruit, burn what's left, and go on.

You've seen a bumper sticker that says, "I'm a Pearl Harbor survivor." The unique thing about this bumper sticker was I saw it on the back of a Toyota truck. You're going to remember, but you reach a point and decide to put it behind you. It's not that big of a deal.

Principles Comenius Observed in Nature Applicable to Education:

1. Nature observes a suitable time.

2. Nature prepares the material, before she begins to give it form.

3. Nature chooses a fit subject to act upon, or first submits one to a suitable treatment in order to make it fit.

4. Nature is not confused in its operations, but in its forward progress advances distinctly from one point to another.

5. In all the operations of nature, development is from within.

6. Nature, in its formative processes, begins with the universal and ends with the particular.

7. Nature makes no leaps, but proceeds step by step.

8. If nature commences anything, it does not leave off until the operation is completed.

9. Nature carefully avoids obstacles and things likely to cause hurt.

We live in a small house, so even little messes seem big. Recently, I looked at my sewing projects and thought, If my child left this mess, I'd be mad. Then I realized I wasn't angry at myself because, in my eyes, I could see the finished product--to me it wasn't a mess at all! I'm thankful God looks at me the same way. He sees in me the righteousness of Jesus--and I can be confident that "He who began a good work in [me] will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Philippians 1:6).

The past is a dead issue and we can't gain any momentum moving toward tomorrow if were dragging the past behind us.

We are told that when Jacob set out to journey from Beersheba to Haran, he stopped at a certain place for the night and had a dream. What did he dream? A stairway was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it. Some were going from the earth to the heaven, others from the heaven to the earth.

The great Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudlikov once said that this comes to teach us the following. A man does not always remain at the same stage. He is always ascending or descending. When he reaches the top, he must concern himself with the probability that he will fall. When he reaches the bottom, he must strive once again to climb to the top. That is the nature of man. When the soul of a man is in its darkest night, he must strive constantly for new light. When one thinks there is only an end, that is when one must struggle for the new beginning.

All the experiences that we've had are a rich storehouse of memories. We learned from the difficult times, and we learned from the times of laughter as well. I'm not one to look back and say I wish I would have done this or that differently. I'm more of an optimist who says, "Let's learn from what we've done in the past and let's look forward to today and tomorrow."

The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. "Knife" and "pain" are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient. To this compulsory combination we shall have to adjust ourselves.

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.

The population of the earth decreases every day, and, if this continues, in another ten centuries the earth will be nothing but a desert.

I have never heard of anything, and I cannot conceive of anything more ridiculous, more absurd, and more affrontive to all sober judgment than the cry that we are profiting by the acquisition of New Mexico and California. I hold that they are not worth a dollar!