Ecclesiastes 12:10

  There is a quote I ran across a couple of years ago that still sticks in my brain. "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all" At times in my life there has never been a truer statement.  Works I immersed myself into that were not worthwhile.  Projects I broke my neck to do that had no real payoff.  Tasks I was assigned and dedicated to that were pointless. The jobs that are nothing more than the “busy work” of life.  I look back at the time and energy and effort I put into them and wonder what was I thinking.   But that is the point, I wasn’t. When you get busy on the task, your mind has a way of drowning out the why question for the buzz of activity. You think only about how you are going to do it, and the what comes next, rather than if it needs to be done in the first place.   It is similar to the effect known as Inattentional blindness.  Inattentional blindness is the failure ...

  On July 25, 1911, Bobby Leach became the first man to go over the Niagara Falls in a barrel. Using an 8-foot-long steel barrel, he floated along the Niagara River. It took 18 minutes for Bobby to reach the Falls and another 22 minutes for someone to recover him once he plummeted to the base, where the barrel got stuck in the rocks. Bobby Leach survived but broke his jaw and both kneecaps. He spent the next six months in the hospital. Bobby eventually left the hospital and toured the world with his barrel. But as irony would have it, when he was six months into that tour he slipped on an orange peel and fractured his leg. His leg became infected had to be amputated. Two months later, Bobby Leach died of complications. He survived the Falls but not a fall.   You never know what will happen. Just because we think we understand how life will go doesn't mean it will turn out that way. Ecclesiastes 9:11-12 “ I again saw under the sun that the...

    What would you cause more pressure, a shot to win or a shot to not lose? A great example of this is when soccer players take penalty kicks to settle a tie.  The odds of making a penalty kick are at 85%, for professional soccer players. So there is a high expectation that the kick should be made.       Imagine taking the last penalty shot for a professional team.  Which situation would you prefer? 1- Your team is down by one, and you have to make it to tie; if you miss, your team will lose. 2- Your team is tied, and you do not have to make it, but if you do make it, you will win.      According to the researc h of Geir Jordet and Ester Hartman , when missing the kick will cause the kicker’s team to lose, professional kickers make on those shots only 62% of the time. But when making the goal will result in a win, they find the net 92% of the time.  It is the same kick, the same twelve yards ever...

   In 1997, Reed Hastings returned a rented copy of the movie Apollo 13 to Blockbuster Video.  He was dismayed when he was told he owed a $40 late fee, more than double the cost to buy the movie. The next year he founded Netflix as an alternative to the movie rental change.  By 2010 Blockbuster was bankrupt and out of business and Netflix was worth 20 billion dollars. While Netflix didn't shut down blockbuster, it did steal the market that Blockbuster needed to move into. Abusing one customer destroyed them in the end.    We may not think much of the slights we give to others. The rude comment to the waitress, the person we cut off in traffic, the people we cut in front of in the checkout line, the man we shortchange in business; but we always need to be careful because we never know when those small slights may cause big damage.  I hate to think of the examples of people that refuse to come to worship services because that is where “so & s...